Red Lanterns #39

A baby?! Now I bet Guy's really pissed off!

I am not a fan of babies. Their incessant crying to have their needs met. Their inability to control their bowel movements. Their smug demeanor as they just sit basking in the glow of endless opportunity not yet wasted and free from the weight of a past full of poor decisions, burned bridges, and failed intimacies. Fuck you, baby. I hope you wind up loving an incompetent dreamer with little ambition who is incapable of getting emotionally close!

Damn it. I just hurt my own feelings. It's also possible that curse fell through a wormhole and attached itself to the Non-Certified Spouse. Ugh. I'm the worst. I have nothing to offer anybody. I should just drive off and hide away in the Badlands living off flashlight corn and mashed potatoes. I can't even get my pop culture references right or apply them appropriately to this situation! Why did my father ever stick his dirty penis in my mother's nasty vagina? I wish I knew a Doc Brown so I could reenact the first half of Back to the Future and then watch pleasantly as I slowly fade out of existence. Except I don't think I could accidentally make my teenaged mother fall in love with me. I'm sure after spending ten minutes with her, she'd push every button I have and I'd wind up screaming at her until I was hauled away by some burly teenagers with duck tails and beaten in an alley.

Stupid baby! See what you've done?! Now I'm a fucking spiraling out of control mess. This is why I hate babies!

Hunh. This baby seems alright.

What does a baby have to be angry about? You need to have some years behind you before you can be truly angry! You need a past. You need a language. You need an awareness of yourself within your environment and amongst other people. All this baby needs is food and somebody to lick its ass clean. I may have been raised by cats. A baby can't be angry. It's impossible. They might be able to feel some of the things that would make an older human angry after ruminating on their feelings in a darkened room with a freshly opened pack of razor blades and plenty of unscarred skin on their left forearm. But they can't be angry about those things! Sure, it'll be hungry and crying and desperate for food. But its brain just can't put the pieces together enough to be mad at the fat asshole that's busy watching Jerry Springer and can't be bothered to feed it yet. Although I wish babies could get angry! That would make people think twice about producing so many of these fucking bundles of joy.

Guy Gardner has been busy pulling a David Banner wandering the country trying to get his head straight and dealing with his anger. Everybody who just corrected me by thinking "That's Bruce Banner, Tess you gigantic fucking idiot" can go shove their heads in the toilet and take a deep breath. Stop thinking you're right all of the time simply because you're working with incomplete information.

I know most people reading this know the whole David/Bruce thing because the internet brings us all closer together by overwhelming us with outdated information about things nobody would fucking care about if they weren't easily accessible in an entertaining way. But I figure I have to have at least one reader out there who immediately assumed I made a mistake and called me an idiot! That paragraph was for that one person. If you drop me a message, I'll go back and edit the paragraph to include your name.

Guy Gardner begins the story at a point where the baby wasn't kicking his ass and he was actually just trying to save it.

Don't worry about saving the baby, Guy. You can have another one just like it in about fourteen months.

Here's a philosophical question that I already know everybody's answer to because you're all soft and weak: what's worse? The death of a baby or the death of a middle aged person? Is the loss of potential worse than the loss of experience? If a monster were heading toward me and a baby, fuck the baby! It should have worked on developing a sense of self-preservation! I wouldn't throw the baby in the monster's way or anything to give me an advantage. But I know the baby isn't going to try to save me so why should I try to save it! The baby doesn't even know enough to understand its mortality! And anyway, it's not like much of a distinct personality is being lost. And it potentially could have been the next Hitler! Everybody would agree to let the Hitler baby get eaten, right? No? Really?! You're all just a bunch of Dick Graysons. I'm a fucking Midnighter, bitches!

That was an insult to you readers and a compliment to myself in my eyes. It may have seemed like the opposite to all the baby lovers infected with baby rabies but I assure you that wasn't the intent.

Guy gets his ass kicked by the monster and blacks out just as the monster picks up the baby. I understand that Larry Q. Walker really liked his first page introduction and, I admit, it was a nice way to pull people into the story. "A baby kicking Guy Gardner's ass?! This I gotta have somebody else read to me!" But it would actually have been nice to read this story without knowing that the baby was behind it. I suppose Larry weighed out the two different ways of telling the story and decided the current incarnation was more effective. It's probable that even without that first page, most people reading it would have seen the baby on the corpse and thought, "The fucking baby did it. What an asshole. Babies are dicks!" But it might have been interesting to read this story about Guy trying to save a baby and failing only to find out the baby was creating the monster.

Because you're feeling that guilty sense of relief that the baby is gone and you won't be saddled with raising it to adulthood?

Guy Gardner learns that the baby feeds on people's anger. The baby is living with the monster and feeding it anger. Or they're one and the same. Or...well, whatever they are, they're going to battle Guy. And this time instead of the monster taking Guy on, the monster enters the baby and the baby does the fighting.

If I had a nickel...!

Guy defeats the baby by sitting it down in front of a television. Ha ha! Take that, baby! Easily distracted by moving images and comforting sounds! Also the images are of its mother. I don't know how that doesn't make the baby angrier. Maybe it gets so mad that the rage entity explodes out of the top of its head and dissipates in the atmosphere. I think that's what happened in my mid to late thirties. I just finally let all of my anger about our past dissipate so that I could look at the relationship between me and my mother differently and just appreciate my mother for all of the things she sacrificed for me and my sister while having to raise us alone. And I matured enough to not give a shit when she tried pushing my buttons. And the funny thing? When I stopped reacting, she stopped pushing. So weird how that works, right? You can be so angry at another person that you can't see the part of the problem that you own. Which, funny enough, is the only part you actually have any control over. I dealt with my part and, lo and behold, that was all that fucking mattered. I still like to write as if I can't stand my mother but our relationship is probably better than it's ever been (discounting the under twelve years. I'm sure she resents that I didn't remain that kid that actually didn't mind being touched). And even though it's not true in the truest sense of true things, I still say I love her when I get off the phone with her because I'm sure it's true in some manner of speaking. And besides, she needs to hear it and it makes her happy. Unless she's thinking that I need to hear it and that it makes me happy? Eww! She better not be thinking that! How embarrassing!

Wait. He's keeping the baby?! Now I'm angry!

Red Lanterns #39 Rating: No change. Guy Gardner is lucky I didn't drop the rank on this book by twenty positions just because he's become friends with a smelly, stupid baby. And why is he walking across America? Because it's romantic? Is it just because he's a fan of Kung-fu? Can he not afford train fare? And now he's dragging a baby on these long walks? All that's missing is Midnighter tagging along asking if it's time to eat the baby's heart.

Oh! Here's my critical review: "You probably liked this comic because you're a dirty rotten baby lover."