Free Comic Book Day: Green Lantern review

There's nothing that needs saying about the 24pp Green Lantern strip in this issue - it's a reprint from the Secret Origin storyline of a couple of years back. What's puzzling is that rather than re-present the beginning of the series-within-a-series, DC are giving us the second part, from 2008's GL #30. It's well-scripted by Geoff Johns and beautifully illustrated by Ivan Reis. I'm sure anyone coming to it for the first time will get a kick out of it. I hope lots of readers are people who don't frequent comic shops, as we could use a bigger customer base.

More interesting to existing DC fans in this giveaway is the 6pp preview of the Flashpoint mini-series' first issue. We've been teased about it for months, it hits stores in a few days - May 11 - and here's our first glimpse. After an appropriately quick recap of Barry Allen's life as the Flash he wakes up at the Central City crime lab to hear he's meant to be finding evidence linking 'greatest hero' Citizen Cold to the murder of one Miss Alchemy. That mindboggling news sends Barry off to get help, and the preview closes with him pleading: 'I need your help, Batman. You and I have to fix the world.' And it's Batman who, surprisingly, turns out to be narrating the story.

It's a pacey grabber of an opening by that man Johns again, as he builds on the revelation in recent Flash monthly stories that arch-enemy Professor Zoom changed Barry's past, murdering his mother and framing his father. Now it looks like he's changed the entire world - certainly the Batman he meets looks different from the one he knows.

Delineating the difference is penciller Andy Kubert, with some of the best artwork I've seen from him in years, inked by the talented Sandra Hope. The six pages include a fine spread of the World's Greatest Heroes, the intense final page montage with Batman and a splash of the Flash running towards the reader that's my single favourite piece of super-speed art since Barry returned from the dead.

On this form, it looks as if Flashpoint #1 will be an event comic worth your money. Check back here on Wednesday for a look at the rest of the issue.