Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps Reviews

Okay. The Fourth is past. My ankle is healing up again. And I have two months worth of Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps details to make up for and annotate.

Let's do this.



GREEN LANTERN #41

* Hal Jordan is taken hostage by Larfleeze aka Agent Orange - leader of the Orange Lanterns. Hal thinks he looks like "... a boar crossed with one of the Muppets. The furry one who hangs out with chickens." Personally, I think he looks more like Uncle Deadly.

* Being bound to the Orange Power does make you insanely powerful. It also makes you ever hungry and uncontrollably greedy to a point of making Verruca "But I want an Oompa-Loompa NOOOOOOOOW" Salt look reasonable. Larfleeze, naturally, wants Hal's Blue Ring, since he's never seen one like it before. He can't take it, however, since Hope is - by it's nature - dependent on selflessness.

* Larfleeze tells Hal the story of how he discovered the Orange Power. The short version is that he was part of a group of bandits who stole a box holding a great treasure from The Guardians and went on the run. They holed up in the Vega system, following a treasure map among their other loot - a map which lead them to the Orange Power Battery. Larfleeze and his companions fought over the Lantern even as they fought the Manhunters and Guardians who were chasing after them to a standstill. Eventually, there were only two survivors among the bandits and The Guardians agreed to give him control of the Vega system to them in exchange for the box... after one of them killed the other. Obviously Larfleeze won, and he kept to the bargain to stay in Vega so long as the Guardians agreed to stay out - a bargain that was recently broken.

* For some unknown reasons, The Guardians themselves seem to be totally helpless in fighting The Orange Power with Green Energy. (Willpower can only do so much against Greed?)

* Fatality (or rather, the woman who WAS Fatality before joining the love-empowered Star Sapphires) shows up to save John Stewart from the Orange Lanterns and tells him that she has forgiven him for failing to save her homeworld.

* Sinestro plots with his loyal soldiers on how to make an attack on Zamaron - the home of the Star Sapphires.

* We find that another Green Lantern besides the dead-speaker Saarek has been sent to search for the body of The Anti-Monitor. This Green Lantern - Ashel Sabian Formanta, or Ash for short - lost his wife to vampires and became a Green Lantern to fight the blood-drinkers common to his sector. Cooly enough, both of these guys are established characters who have appeared before. Look them up at http://www.comicvine.com


GREEN LANTERN CORPS #37

* Bad news - it looks like pawn of prophecy and Ion-Power wielder Sodam Yat is dead. Good news - he uses every bit of power he has with his dying breath to change the red sun of his native Daxam to yellow. Why is that important? Well, yellow sunlight has a similar effect on Daxamites as it does on Kryptonians. So with one bold move, Sodam gave his people the power they needed to fight back against the Sinestro Corps members currently holding the planet captive.

* Ash meets up with Saarek, and they both discover they were sent separately on the same mission by The Guardians. They elect to continue on together.

* The prison riot on Oa continues to get worse, with Kyle taking the desperate measure of deputizing the less evil and dangerous criminals into helping them deal with the Red Lanterns and Sinestro Corps members that are running amok.

* Lyssa Drax, keeper of the Fear Lantern holy book; The Book of Parallax - discovers a similar tome in the caves deep under Oa. She winds up trapped on a page of the book by Scar, aka the freaky scarred, death-obsessed female Guardian who appears to have been corrupted by The Black energy.

*Speaking of which, Scar does some kind of ritual saying that "The door needs to be opened". This somehow leads to the sky opening - literally OPENING - above Oa and a bolt of darkness shattering the Central Power Battery... just after the Green Lanterns, several rookie Green Lanterns and the deputized baddies contain the rest of the rioters.


GREEN LANTERN #42

* Larfleeze cuts off Hal's hand to get the Blue Ring after Hal proves unable to remove it. The ring gives him a vision of having the Blue Power and not being hungry anymore... only for the ring to wind up back on Hal's fully healed hand.

* Hal remembers, at this point, that the Muppet he was thinking of was Gonzo. But we all know better. It's everyone's favorite blue dragon - Uncle Deadly!

Tell me I'm wrong, folks!


* Fatality tells John Stewart that she no longer hates him and that he must learn to forgive himself for his failures - i.e. not being there to save his wife and his failure to save the planet Xanshi.

* Hal tries - and fails - to steel Larfleeze's battery. He briefly winds up in an orange version of his usual costume and is overwhelmed by voices telling him of all the things he should have. It turns out that Larfleeze has been holding onto the battery for so long, he is as connected to it as the Guardians are to the Central Power Battery on Oa.

* Hal finally gets the Blue Ring off of his hand... as he hopes that the ring will stop asking him "What do you hope for?" assuming he gets out of his current predicament. This somehow triggers the sincerity block, turns Hal into a Blue Lantern and allows him to toast Larfleeze with a point-blank burst of Blue Energy. It then recharges the rings of all the Green Lantern's present and flies off looking for a new host.

* The Guardians agree to bargain with Larfleeze in return for a reaffirmation of their bargain. The Guardians then give Larfleeze the one thing he wants most at this point; the knowledge of where to get another Blue Ring. This leads to Larfleeze attacking the home of the Blue Lanterns, who just inducted their third member and... oh GODS, are The Guardians little bastards or what?

* Ash and Saarek get to the location of the Anti-Monitor's body in Sector 666. And then they fly like mad as they discover a big Black Lantern and the hands of corpses begin to come out of the ground faster than you can say Thriller.


GREEN LANTERN CORPS #38

* The Green Lanterns go to work on going after all the Power Battery pieces that are drifting into space while the Alpha Lanterns (aka the Internal Affairs of the Green Lantern Corps - agents who elected to be bonded with Manhunter technology, making them lose all vestige of personality in favor of intense logic and Lawful Neutral behavior)

* Soranik Natu - Green Lantern of Korugar - deals with the revelation that Sinestro is her birth father and attempts to burn a tattoo he gave her as a child off. She can't do it, so she elects to keep it as a reminder of her hatred for the man who nearly destroyed her world.

* The Daxamites retake their planet, forcing Mongul to lead the Fear Corps he's won to his side to "a planet that may fit our requirements and serve the symbol of this corps in a MUCH more fufilling way." Now taking bets on if it will be Earth, Warworld or the planet of the Black Mercys.

* Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner discover that the Alpha Lanterns are vaporizing all the unarmed and helpless criminals they captured. Naturally, they protest and say that this goes far and beyond the Guardian's edict to use lethal force against Sinestro Corps members in the field since they are killing everyone, doing it without trial, doing it secretly and doing it after Kyle promised that there would be leniency for the criminals who helped stop the riot.

* In the middle of all this Alex Nero - the mad artist/killer who was given a yellow ring and briefly served as Kyle Rayner's opposite number in the Sinestro Corps - is killed without ceremony.

* There's a nice, unpreachy parallel here with real world events re: the USA and torture, as Kyle makes the point that by doing what they are doing, The Guardians are now effectively killing the best weapon they have with the general populace of the universe; good will. That is to say, you know a Green Lantern will give you a fair shake if you surrender to them - allow secret executions and that all goes out the window.

* In the span of minutes, The Guardians elect to make the executions public, promise to honor Kyle's promise to spare the criminals who helped stop the riot and teleport Guy and Kyle back to Earth as a temporary reassignment "until you can keep your emotions in check." It is unclear if the Guardians keep their promise or not since it looks like Kanjar Ro and Bolphunga the Unrelenting are bathed in Green Light but could just as easily be being vaporized as they are being protected from the Alpha Lantern death rays.

* Across the galaxy, more black lights erupt from an asteroid belt. At the center of each is a black ring and a voice demanding "Flesh".



There's nothing I can honestly review here, folks. I think it's brilliant but I admit my own bias and freely admit that there is a LOT going on here that isn't really friendly to new readers. Get the trade-paperbacks and start catching up, though. You are NOT going to want to miss Blackest Night once it gets going. Hopefully Johns and company will make that one a little more accessible to new readers.

Fast Thoughts - The Week of 05/13/09

This time: Another War of Light Battlefield Report, a double-size Knights of the Dinner Table, a review of Power Girl (finally!) and the funniest issue of Secret Six yet!



FABLES #84 - The great crossover continues, with Jack's bastard son finally catching up with dear old dad as Jack throws the Animal Farm into semi-chaos by masquerading (somewhat accidentally) as a resurrected Boy Blue and romancing a listless, depressed and suicidal Rose Red. Again, I shall say it; grab the trades and catch up on this book ASAP.


GREEN LANTERN CORPS #36 - Okay. Not a lot of expansion on the Green Lantern Mythos here, but a lot of good character moments and some information that will likely be vitally important later.

* Sinestro reveals exactly how he has a daughter who is now a Green Lantern. Long story short - Mom went into hiding and gave the daughter to her friends to raise after a political argument with Sinestro - something he agreed to wanting to keep his daughter safe and having some idea of the battle he would be fighting to "save" his world from chaos.

* Along with the prophecy about the threat to his planet he received from Empire of Tears member and Red Lantern leader Atrocitus, Sinestro also received this prophesy: Two Korugarians with One Mind and One Corps to right all that is wrong in this corrupted and darkening universe. He believes it refers to himsekf and Soranik and warns her that the Red Lanterns intend to kill his daughter but, for now, they have no idea who precisely she is.

* Things are becoming nine kinds of worse inside the sealed prison levels underneath Oa.

* Back on the Fear-Corps beseiged planet of Daxam, Green Lantern Sodam Yat makes an apparent suicide run on his planet's red sun in order for reasons that are too complicated to go into. Suffice it to say, I can't wait for the next issue.


KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #150 - Annoyingly, none of this issue's comics deal with the major cliff-hanger that came of the end at last issue. But for a ten-years-in-the-making sequel to the classic "Luck of the McCaw" pirate RPG story as well as Sara's revenge on the guys for killing her character on the weekend she was away from the game, I can deal with it. All this, and an honest-to-dawg "Dawg, The Roleplaying Game" based on cast character BA's infamous failed first attempt at publishing an RPG, all for $9.00 American.


POWER GIRL #1 - My shop was sold out of this last week, so make of that what you will regarding the quality of this book. Sure, Amanda Conner's artwork is heavy on the cheesecake. But like PeeGee herself, buxom and showing it doesn't equate to exploitative. And you have to give props to any comic that follows the First Rule of DC Comics; when in doubt, have the hero fight a gorilla. And when said gorilla is a psychic madman known as the The Ultra-Humanite, you just know it's got to be even better.


SECRET SIX #9 - A Battle For The Cowl tie-in that really isn't, this issue sees the Secret Six reduced down to a Recondite Trio as Bane and Catman work to stop a series of anarchist attacks on the children of noted captains of industry as Ragdoll tags along to play Boy/Girl/It Wonder... in his/her/its' own Robin costume.

Honestly, Ragdoll steels the show every issue but this one was a more difficult battle than usual with Catman - the most moral of the Secret Six - playing at being a hero because there's a part of him that honestly DOES want to be a hero and Bane playing at heroism because of his own issues with children being endangered. All the while, both of them deny their own heroic impulses AND that either one of them would wish to follow in Batman's footsteps. But even the touching scene Bane gets with a child he is horribly unprepared to comfort and Catman's own "awwwww" moment cannot compete with Ragdoll facing the revelation that ANYTHING sounds perverse when he says it... and proceeds to spend most of the rest of the issue testing that.

"Pea Pods! Velvety Throw Pillows! Tuna Salad! Hold the Mayonnaise! Ewwwwwwwwww!"

Greatness. Absolute greatness. And I'm not just saying that because Simone writes a heroic Bane the same way I wrote a heroic Bane, once upon a time during one of my few stabs at fanfic.

Green Lantern: War of Light News Briefing.

Sorry this is so late. Busy week and I've felt too unfocused to write until this afternoon.

Right. So what's happening in the War of Light this month?



* The Controllers - a fascist off-shoot of the Guardians responsible for creating a lot of lame Green Lantern rip-off groups (The Darkstars, The Effigy Platoon and... The Beta Men...) - travel into The Vega System and wind up waking something up while searching for "the Orange power".

* The Orange Power - for those of you not keeping up - is Greed/Avarice. Which kinda makes sense for the "we wish to bring about order with an iron fist and control everything" Controllers to be looking for but still seems like a weird emotion to draw power from, compared to Wrath or Fear.

* The thing controlling The Orange Power doesn't want to share and it kills all the Controllers. For the record, these guys are born of the same elder race that created The Guardians and The Zamarons so this one guy must be pretty damn powerful.

* Hal Jordan still has a Blue Lantern ring stuck on his hand and he notes - for those who missed it last time - that Blue Lanterns are completely useless without a Green Lantern to leach off of. Saint Walker admits this is broadly true, noting that Blue Lanterns can still fly through space and shield themselves but they do need a Green Lantern to do make projections or do the other Green Lantern tricks because "Hope needs Will".

* Hal complains about all the people he knows who hope for things to improve but who never actually do anything about it. Which seems kind of whiny for Hal and unfair to the Blue Lanterns given that they ARE trying to do something and help.

* Hal bitches some more about how useless and pointless Hope is as a force and then gets dressed down by Ganthet, who notes that he never intended for Hal to get a Blue Ring OR for Hal to leave the Green Lanterns since all the "good" emotion Corps will need to work together in the end. Ganthet also notes that Hal won't be able to take the Blue Ring off until he finds something to hope in AND finds a worthy person to pass the ring on to. Hal basically says nuts to that and flies back to Oa.

* Ganthet and Sayd - in addition to running the Blue Lanterns - are now searching for the Indigo Lanterns of Compassion. Again, note the color/emotion balance theme. Hate vs. Love. Greed vs. Compassion. Fear vs. Hope.

* Elsewhere, Green Lantern Stel of sector 3009 chases a Sinestro Corps member into the Vega system - an area Green Lanterns are forbidden to enter. His ring allows it, since the Guardian's edict to kill all Yellow Lanterns on sight apparently surpasses the old law... at which point the Yellow Lantern is consumed by a giant orange head thingy and Stel calls for back-up.

* Back on Oa, the Guardians are near-killing Hal trying to pull the Blue Ring off of him. It seems they're more concerned about going after Sayd and Ganthet than dealing with the Red Lantern menace until Hal points out that the Red Rings are forcing themselves on people whereas Ganthet and Sayd are - nominally - trying to help. Then John Stewart comes in with Salaak, interpreting the meeting to tell them that Stel has seen an Orange Lantern...

* ... at which point an image of a big orange dragon thingy explodes into room and is identified by The Guardians as Larfleeze. Larfleeze, who I'm guessing is the long-awaited "Agent Orange", complains to the Guardians about The Controllers having broken their treaty to allow him control of the Vega system so long as he never left it and they and their agents never entered it. He notes that he was willing to ignore their transgressions going after the Sinestro Agents and the Spiders Guild (see Green Lantern Corps for the details of those stories!) but that The Controllers actions were the final straw. This leads the scarred Female Guardian to declare that a Fourth Law be written into the Book of Oa - Vega is no longer off-limits and The Guardians are going to start fighting alongside the Green Lanterns.




It's getting even more interesting folks.