Green Lantern: New Guardians #13 - A Review

With this issue, Tony Bedard has exhausted my patience as well as what little credit I was able to extend to him.  Bedard's writing has missed with me more than it has hit but I was willing to give the man his due since his Green Lantern writing was largely good up until The New 52 relaunch.  Plus, he was the only writer working with Green Arrow (albeit it briefly, through Birds of Prey) who acknowledged that Oliver Queen was a rape victum that he had never cheated on Dinah Lance until after his return from the grave..

So why now?  Why has New Guardians #13 accomplished what an entire year of completely pointless meandering didn't and made me drop this title?    Because this issue, released over a year since we should have received a full backstory for Kyle Rayner, reveals that the only part of Kyle's backstory that has remained constant is the one part that honestly could have - no, should have been changed.  I speak, of course, of the incident that coined the phrase "Women in Refrigerators" - the death of Kyle's girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt.


I've written before about Alex as a character and the ramifications of her death, so I won't repeat those arguments here.  I will say that given that most of Kyle's previous love life is now impossible since three of his four ex-girlfriends never existed in the New 52 universe (Donna Troy, Jenny-Lynn Hayden-Scott and Soranik Natu, for those keeping track), it really adds nothing to Kyle's character to have Alex exist in this new reality only for her to die horribly again.  It's particularly vexing here since Major Force - the villain responsible for the death in the original universe - no longer exists in the New 52 universe and the flashback we see here just has Kyle refer to non-specific enemies that came with his job being responsible for Alex dying.

It may be unfair of me to blame Bedard for the decision to bring Alex back only to have her die again.  The decision may have been handed down by DC Editorial.  But I can blame Bedard for the poor execution of this story.  Say what you will about Ron Marz but while he freely admitted to creating Alex only so that she could be killed off, at least he spent a few issues building her as a character so that you cared when she was taken away. 

Bedard fails to do that and fails to make this issue, which apparently follows after the most recent issue of Red Lanterns, stand on its' own merits as a story on any level.  What is meant to be the first hard lesson Kyle learned as a hero and his defining tragedy is reduced to a footnote, revealed in the middle of a training montage as Acrocitus of the Red Lanterns tries to teach Kyle how to harness the power of Rage without a Red Lantern ring. 


You wouldn't think the artwork could possibly make this mess of a story any worse.  Somehow, Andrei Bressan and Amilcar Pinna manage it.  In reviewing the last issue, I compared Bressan's artwork to that of Frank Quietly, noting the similar detail-oriented styles while also noting that Bressarn was a poor visual storyteller.  Those problems continue throughout this issue, as well with the pages I think were drawn by Amilcar Pinna, which  resemble nothing less than a poor parody of Rob Liefeld, with tiny eyes and consantly gritted teeth. 

Do not buy this book.  Do not even read it in the shop.  Go spend your money on Green Lanterns Corps and leave this one to die.

Friday Comic Con News Round Up - Part One

All news from the DC Comics Justice League & Green Lantern panel.


* Justice League #12 will bring big changes to the team. New people will join. Old people will quit. Tony Daniel will take over writing after Issue #12.

# The relationship between Billy Batson and the wizard Shazam will be antagonistic once they finally meet. According to Geoff Johns, "Shazam is weirded out that a kid is visiting him, whereas Billy doesn't like Shazam telling him what to do. Johns says that Billy will be joining the Justice League." An empowered Billy Batson will be part of the new Justice League.

* Again, the Green Lantern on the cover of Green Lantern #0 is an original character, who carries a gun as a back-up weapon in case his ring runs out of power at a bad moment.

* Again, the upcoming "Third Army" the Guardians create will come about because of their conclusion that emotion and fear aren't the cause of the universe's problems - it's free will.

* Johns also made reference to "The Fall Of Guy Gardner" in the coming months.

* By Issue #12, we will learn how and why a ring from each Corps wound up going to Kyle Rayner. More, Kyle will wind up with one of each ring again and apparently have to learn how to use and master each color of the spectrum heading into "The Third Army".

* Tony Bedard also said that upcoming stories will spell out more of Kyle Rayner's past - a neccesity given, as Geoff Johns pointed out, that over half of his girlfriends may not exist in the new continuity. Jade definitely doesn't. The fate of Donna Troy and Soranik is still in question. No word on if Major Force still fridged Alexandra DeWitt.

* There probably won't be any resolution to the dangling plot-thread of Lobo getting a Red Lantern ring.

* The Dex-Starr Valentine's Day special is coming. They just need to bring Krypto back before it can happen.

An Ode To Alexandra DeWitt. Or Why Ron Marz Might Not Be Quite As Big A Pig As You Think.

I was catching up on When Fangirls Attack this afternoon, when I read an article by one Marron regarding Kyle Rayner's first love and the inspiration for the phrase Women In Refrigerators, Alexandra "Alex" DeWitt.

It's a good read. There's a few factual errors (Alex and Kyle weren't on their first date in Green Lantern #48 and Major Force had always been depicted as being relatively immortal) but these are things only a die-hard Green Lantern fan is likely to know. And ultimately these mistakes are unimportant compared to the main point of the article, which is made wonderfully. That is to say, to quote Marron, "Brutality against women in comic books is not acceptable as a plot device, especially when the character in question was created with no purpose other than being murdered."

Marron's main point is that, in creating a character whose death would forever change Kyle Rayner and force him to manhood/maturity as he took his first steps on The Hero's Path, there is no reason why the death had to be that of a female character. Alex could have easily been a man and the death need not have been that of Kyle's girlfriend but his brother, father, uncle or best friend.

Now, this is a fair complaint, if only because the male hero avenging his wife/girlfriend/mother/sister/daughter is probably the biggest cliche in the action/adventure genre. But I think it's also a little unfair to draw major conclusions about Ron Marz's feminist credentials (or lack thereof) based on one character in one story. Particularly given that he managed a hell of a feat with Alex DeWitt given what he had to work with... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

In her article, Marron quotes from a statement Ron Marz made to Gail Simone's website about Alex Dewitt. Marz said, in defense of Alex's death, that "Alex was a character destined to die from the moment she was first introduced in GL #48. I created her with the intention of having her be murdered at the hands of Major Force."

While this does seem like a damning statement at first, the rest of the paragraph does, in my mind, absolves Ron Marz of some of the flack he has gotten. For while he did create Alex solely for the purpose of killing her off, he did realize how important her death needed to be and what that required of him as a writer.

" I took a lot of care in building her as a character, because I wanted her to be liked and her death to mean something to the readers. I wanted readers to be horrified at the crime, and to empathize with Kyle's loss."

It would have been easy for Marz to make Alex a one-note character... but he didn't. He made Alex smart. He made Alex funny. He made Alex, in a lot of ways, a much more stable and likable person than Kyle. And he did this in just three issues.

Just think about that. Three issues.

Three issues he has to develop this character who many readers fell in love with instantly... just to kill her off so the audience would get good and pissed off at the bad guy. Given that it's some 15 years or so after that story and people are still talking about it and still pissed off about how Alex died - I'd say that Ron Marz accomplished his goal with the story.

Yes, Alex DeWitt's death was tragic. It was stupid and pointless. But it would have been stupid and pointless regardless of whether Alex had was a man or a woman. So whatever else you may say about Ron Marz, I don't think you can call him a bad writer. He accomplished his goal with Alex DeWitt and created a character who we were genuinely sorry to see die. And I find it hard to level charges of sexism against a man who concluded his thoughts on Alex DeWitt's death with these words.

"Comics have a long history as a male-oriented and male-dominated industry. That's not a statement of judgment, simply one of fact. I do think comics can and should be more sensitive to female characters. But these are times in which the general editorial mindset is "cut to the fight scene," in which half-naked women on covers spike sales. Publishers are unfortunately more concerned with survival than with sensitivity to women. And that's a shame. If we want to save our industry, maybe we should stop ignoring half the population as possible readers."

It's funny what prompted me to think about this was another remark about Alex. How "the only way Alex DeWitt is coming back is possibly as a Black Lantern in Geoff Johns’ Blackest Night event. Sadly, I don't think we're going to get even that which is a shame as I always liked Alex better than Donna Troy or Jade. And I can't believe this malarkey we're getting now about Jade being Kyle's One True Love.

Read Green Lantern/Green Lantern #1 from the Circle of Fire mini-series. That's all I'm saying.

Good night, Ms. DeWitt. Wherever you are.