Red Lanterns #15

She's probably back looking for Blue Beetle's boner.

Last issue, Peter Milligan wrote a panel that reminded me I have a serious essay to write about Shade the Changing Man #1-50.

This is relevant to Shade's interests.

This is a major theme running through the first fifty issues of Shade the Changing Man (you know, also written by Peter Milligan): You can't go home again. He explores it from many different angles and finally wraps it up in the most literal way possible: Shade destroys Meta, his home. That's about as much of it as I want to go into here. At some point when I want to revisit those issues of Shade again, I'll really get my teeth into it. Until then, I have Red Lanterns and, hopefully, Dex-Starr to read!

Apparently the vision Atrocitus was seeing on Ryut was some kind of alien parasite that feeds off the dreams and visions of the dead. Maybe. There may have been a reference to this creature in a previous issue but I guess it doesn't matter. What does matter is Atrocitus kills it and uses its blood for a Blood Ritual to resurrect the long dead Manhunters.

Of course he re-kills a few for good measure!

Meanwhile on Earth, Rankorr decides to visit his brother instead of heading off to kill the man, Baxter, that was responsible for his grandfather's death. Now I thought Rankorr's brother had been beaten to death by the cops in an earlier issue. But maybe he was just beaten senseless. Sometimes it's hard to tell in a comic book if someone that gets his ass kicked is dead or alive. The only sure ways to tell are if they're stuffed into a refrigerator, if they're shot in the head and the head of DC hates their fucking guts for no apparent reason, or have The Atom's ex-wife tap dance on your brain.

Rankorr's visit gets him a little bit worked up so that he might now be ready for vengeance.

I wonder if Rankorr will continue to be the only Red Lantern to make constructs? Probably because, in comic books, Humans are always so Goddamned special!

Meanwhile Dex-Starr heads over to Sector 990 where the guards of a penal colony space station wear suits that have chin spikes. He massacres a bunch of people thinking he's getting vengeance on Midnigter. Hopefully he'll realize none of these guys are the man he's searching for. But in the meantime, he kills a bunch of people to help restore the Red Power Battery.

But even this blood and the blood that Zilius Zox and Skallox bring it do nothing to help. Ratchet notices that something is draining the power and causing a planet wide anemia in the Battery and the Corps. What he doesn't know is the problem is an old enemy of Atrocitus's.

These guys have something to do with the creation of Atrocitus. It's all in the Zero Issue, I think.

So the Red Lanterns might have the jump on the Borg Lanterns (who never even appear in this issue) but the entire Corps is still too weak to do much about it. And Atrocitus's plan to raise the squadron of Manhunters that he was keeping in storage just for this kind of occasion have different ideas about what they're going to do with their lives.

They want to rock!

Red Lanterns #15 Rating: No change. As a Red Lanterns comic, this was a fairly average issue and a bit short. As a Rise of the Third Army crossover event, it sucked Zilius Zox. I just realized Zilius Zox and Skallox both have "ox" in their names. I'm so fucking observant!