Not a single Green Lantern thought, "I can use the ring to pick up the battery and drop it on the massive yellow space pussycat's dumb head!"
It's amazing how easily the smallest yellow thing can defeat a Green Lantern. Don't they train to battle yellow things? Shouldn't that be their most intense training? Why was Kilowog teaching Hal Jordan to grab knives or run across poles or fly around planets? According to this cover, most of his lessons should have been about not trying to beat the shit out of a yellow foe directly. How many Green Lanterns has Legion defeated here? It's not like he has yellow lasers so every single one of these idiots went toe-to-toe with him. Maybe a majority of Green Lanterns are color blind? I guess they couldn't bring the building down around his ears because, according to last issue's depiction of Oa, every building was bright yellow. Or as bright as the color separation process on newsprint in 1990 allowed (which wasn't very bright at all). If I were a Green Lantern in this situation, I would have simply grabbed Brik with my power ring and thrown her into Legion's face, exploding his head. Then I would have not fucked the 13 year old Arisia. But then, I don't think like Hal Jordan, I guess.
"Hey guys! Let's fly as close to this yellow monstrosity as possible!"
The Green Lanterns execute tactical offensive strategy "Red-27." I think it's named that because they're angry and seemingly want to die young in a blaze of glory like a young rock star. I mean, if you can count choking on your own vomit in a Paris bathtub as a "blaze of glory." Surprisingly, I don't know what surprisingly means because this sentence was supposed to finish "one of the Green Lanterns dies immediately." As I pointed out, I would have gone with tactical offensive strategy "Drop-a-Huge-Rock-on-Sinestro-2000." If you can't guess why that move is called that, how are you even reading this?
This drama is supposed to make the reader believe Legion is the toughest opponent the Green Lanterns have ever faced. But I think Tweety Bird landing on Oa would have garnered the same reaction.
Tomar-re basically is Tweety Bird. "I taught I taw a massive yellow space puttytat. I did! I did taw a massive yellow space puttytat!" Also, is that Sinestro in that panel? Was he not a terrible narcissistic jerk yet? I mean, he's probably all of those things. But was he not a villain yet?
The Green Lanterns encase Legion in a sphere of "Oamite," the bedrock of the planet Oa. It's nearly unbreakable when placed under pressure! So, of course, Legion breaks out of it in the space of three panels.
The Green Lanterns encase Legion in a sphere of "Oamite," the bedrock of the planet Oa. It's nearly unbreakable when placed under pressure! So, of course, Legion breaks out of it in the space of three panels.
I don't want to be accused of "yucking somebody's yum" but maybe find a synonym for the phrase "final solution."
On second thought, I absolutely want to yuck somebody's yum: the people who use the phrase "yuck somebody's yum." It's stupid. The dumbest thing I've ever heard. Especially when people use it against somebody who isn't actually doing that. Like if I shit all over the work of Cullen Bunn in a blog post on my little blog space on the Internet, I'm not yucking the yum of everybody who loves Cullen Bunn and happens to stumble across my blog. I would be yucking somebody's yum if they professed love of Cullen Bunn's mediocre DC stories and I commented on their declaration saying, "Cullen Bunn's Aquaman stories were little more than recycled John Carpenter of Mars scripts he probably hadn't sold and they were terrible." People are allowed to have their own opinions without being accused of yucking yums. The yum yucking takes place when you intrude on somebody else's celebration of a thing. More to the point, a person who comments on my blog to tell me I'm a jerk for hating on Cullen Bunn's Lobo and I shouldn't yuck the yum of people who love it is actually yucking my yum of enjoying hating on it! So get the fuck out of here, jerko!
That entire aside about people using "yucking somebody's yum" incorrectly wasn't really an aside but a response to me using the term incorrectly in the caption. I'm not as distracted as you might have thought!
Squagga didn't actually know what he was supposed to do because he's dead one panel later.
The Green Lanterns protect the Guardians by leading Legion directly to where they're hiding underground. It's a weird plan that doesn't make any sense unless you realize that the Green Lanterns actually hate the Guardians.
The Guardians are currently "meditating" meaning they're stashed away in little Matrix cylinders. Before Legion can turn the cylinders into jars of Guardian jam, cables snake out of the Guardian's meditation chamber to immobilize them. The Guardians begin waking up, calmly saying things like, "What is this creature?" and "Who is this new Green Lantern?" and "We have seven heartbeats until we're all dead." Hal Jordan is all, "I'll take care of this!" One of the Guardians is all, "You will think about this situation first to find the optimal solution even though we said that thing about only having seven heartbeats left to live. Better dead than being a dumb jerk who acts without reason!" And the dumb jerk is all, "What? Tell me later! I'm going to final solution this guy for you!"
Hal Jordan hauls Legion to the surface where he gets the brilliant idea to toss him in mud. Now he's brown and not yellow! And I won't be a whiny little shit and point out that any large force that strikes Legion at this point will simply crush the mud out to the sides and eventually the green light will touch yellow before the force can be adequately transferred to Legion. Although maybe the Oamite mud hardens far faster than Earth mud, leaving a small layer of dried mud between the green light and the yellow armor. Who am I to make up the comic book rules?!
That entire aside about people using "yucking somebody's yum" incorrectly wasn't really an aside but a response to me using the term incorrectly in the caption. I'm not as distracted as you might have thought!
Squagga didn't actually know what he was supposed to do because he's dead one panel later.
The Green Lanterns protect the Guardians by leading Legion directly to where they're hiding underground. It's a weird plan that doesn't make any sense unless you realize that the Green Lanterns actually hate the Guardians.
The Guardians are currently "meditating" meaning they're stashed away in little Matrix cylinders. Before Legion can turn the cylinders into jars of Guardian jam, cables snake out of the Guardian's meditation chamber to immobilize them. The Guardians begin waking up, calmly saying things like, "What is this creature?" and "Who is this new Green Lantern?" and "We have seven heartbeats until we're all dead." Hal Jordan is all, "I'll take care of this!" One of the Guardians is all, "You will think about this situation first to find the optimal solution even though we said that thing about only having seven heartbeats left to live. Better dead than being a dumb jerk who acts without reason!" And the dumb jerk is all, "What? Tell me later! I'm going to final solution this guy for you!"
Hal Jordan hauls Legion to the surface where he gets the brilliant idea to toss him in mud. Now he's brown and not yellow! And I won't be a whiny little shit and point out that any large force that strikes Legion at this point will simply crush the mud out to the sides and eventually the green light will touch yellow before the force can be adequately transferred to Legion. Although maybe the Oamite mud hardens far faster than Earth mud, leaving a small layer of dried mud between the green light and the yellow armor. Who am I to make up the comic book rules?!
Modern readers are probably completely baffled by Green Lantern's light construct here.
Look, I'm 52 years old and I was kind of baffled by this for a moment. Mostly because I thought the panel with the shoe didn't have a lot of connection to the panel with the bat. But then I took a moment to look at the art which, frankly, I'm pretty shit at doing while reading comic books, and realized it's a rudimentary kid's tee ball device, probably from the '50s. According to Amazon, these kinds of tee ball set-ups are still being manufactured! It's total shit. How are you supposed to practice batting when you have to get out of position to step on the stupid device and then get your foot back in position to take a swing at the ball?! Do I just not know how baseball works? Couldn't they make this into an app?
I'm not the only one who doesn't understand how baseball works.
Most people think the Green Lantern ring's only flaw is that it cannot affect anything yellow. But it has an even bigger flaw that I totally forgot about.
Oh god. It's a Internet debate nerd who doesn't actually understand the synergy between rationality and emotion.
It's weird that all the other color rings are based on emotions but the Green Lantern ring is based on willpower, rationality, and order, none of which are emotions. Although that's just a problem with the retconning of the whole Lantern system in later years. Nobody cared about the Green Lantern ring being anti-emotion when none of the other emotionally powered rings existed. Whatever the case, Hal's ring is being an annoying jerk. Interestingly enough, I've blocked people on Twitter for far less than what the ring says in that panel. I just don't have time for Internet debaters that have no other joy in their lives than winning arguments against strangers. And by "winning arguments," I mean "spouting dumb shit, constantly changing the goal posts on their original point of contention, and acting like a huge victim when they were the one to begin drudging up the shitty mud."
Legion, finally on their backfoot and about to be killed by Hal, finally decides violence isn't the answer. Diplomacy is what is needed now that they've lost the upper hand! Killing others is fine but when you're about to be killed? Accuse the other person of not being reasonable! Legion is all, "Would you kill us just because we killed a bunch of your buddies in our need for revenge against the Guardians who committed genocide against us first?" Their entire species wound up dying once they were imprisoned on their planet because migration was built into their DNA. They cleverly leave out the part about how their "migration" also included genociding the races of any planets they migrated to.
Legion, finally on their backfoot and about to be killed by Hal, finally decides violence isn't the answer. Diplomacy is what is needed now that they've lost the upper hand! Killing others is fine but when you're about to be killed? Accuse the other person of not being reasonable! Legion is all, "Would you kill us just because we killed a bunch of your buddies in our need for revenge against the Guardians who committed genocide against us first?" Their entire species wound up dying once they were imprisoned on their planet because migration was built into their DNA. They cleverly leave out the part about how their "migration" also included genociding the races of any planets they migrated to.
I love this page. Legion is all, "You're right. Bad attempt at saving my life." But Hal, not wanting to be a complete tool for little blue people he doesn't even know, shows mercy.
Once Hal frees Legion from its massive yellow space pussycat armor, it becomes a massive silver space ooze. The ooze grows and grows and grows, encasing and, presumably killing, numerous Green Lanterns. Is the lesson that showing mercy is bad and soldiers should always follow terrible orders because their leaders know best? I'm not sure I approve of those things. Maybe I'm just being cynical! Although it is hard not to think, "Hal should have just killed Legion." I mean that's hard for other people. I would never want a hero to kill a villain, especially with a villain with such a tragic back story! I'm sure Hal will find a way to give the last members of Legion's race a nice place to live.
Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn #5 Rating: A. I don't approve of a lot of the ways the Green Lanterns and the Guardians do things. The whole system has been around for millennia and they don't have a proper method of defeating a yellow-encased enemy attacking the planet? And the Guardians, with the massive amount of power they wield, can think of no other means to protect the universe against a race that commits genocide (perhaps through no fault of their own other than their own intrinsic nature which they can't change) other than committing genocide against that race? Didn't somebody in a previous issue point out that genocide was frowned upon by the Green Lantern Corps? Not that I expect the Guardians to be anything more than hypocrites after all the stories I've read about them. But I did like how Hal acted without thinking because immediate action was called for (which is the whole point of Hal, really). The whole "Legion becomes a massive silver space ooze consuming the entirety of Oa" conclusion to this issue just seemed tacked on because DC wanted this to be a six issue miniseries. Obviously one more issue is needed to allow Hal and the Guardians to interact but did they need one more huge conflict? Legion could have been shoved in a cell at the end of this and Issue Six could have been a wildly informative 22-page talking heads issue! My favorite kind of comic book!
Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn #5 Rating: A. I don't approve of a lot of the ways the Green Lanterns and the Guardians do things. The whole system has been around for millennia and they don't have a proper method of defeating a yellow-encased enemy attacking the planet? And the Guardians, with the massive amount of power they wield, can think of no other means to protect the universe against a race that commits genocide (perhaps through no fault of their own other than their own intrinsic nature which they can't change) other than committing genocide against that race? Didn't somebody in a previous issue point out that genocide was frowned upon by the Green Lantern Corps? Not that I expect the Guardians to be anything more than hypocrites after all the stories I've read about them. But I did like how Hal acted without thinking because immediate action was called for (which is the whole point of Hal, really). The whole "Legion becomes a massive silver space ooze consuming the entirety of Oa" conclusion to this issue just seemed tacked on because DC wanted this to be a six issue miniseries. Obviously one more issue is needed to allow Hal and the Guardians to interact but did they need one more huge conflict? Legion could have been shoved in a cell at the end of this and Issue Six could have been a wildly informative 22-page talking heads issue! My favorite kind of comic book!
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