Green Lantern Super Spectacular #1 - DC

Aug. 2011 - Beware his power!

I was pretty shocked to see this on the stands a few days ago--a magazine-sized collection of Green Lantern stories from DC, the one company that hardly ever ventured into the magazine format.

Like Marvel's current magazine releases, this book collects various Green Lantern comics stories, four in all. Here are a couple of pages from them:

There's also a brief feature at the end devoted to (of course) the upcoming Green Lantern movie, which was obviously the impetus for creating this "super spectacular" in the first place:

Its a solid collection, coming in at over 100 pages for $9.99. The addition of the Darwyn Cooke piece to me gives the book a nice balance of dark and light, out-of-this-world space adventure and character-driven drama.

What's more exciting to me is this is the first time DC has ever put out something like this: there weren't magazine-sized collections for Superman or Batman to commemorate those films, so I think this is a great step forward. Marvel and Archie have been putting out magazines for a few years now, so I think its great DC has stepped up. With the literally mountains of material available to them for reprint, they could put together some really great magazines, if they wanted to.

Let's hope there are more magazine-format releases in DC's future!