Green Lantern #16 (September 1991)

I bet by this point in the conflict on Mosaic, John's wishing he'd joined the Marines early in his life.

The day I matured was the day I realized "Cat's Cradle" was sung by an unreliable narrator who was trying to gaslight the audience against the son he ignored his whole life just because the son decided, by college, he wasn't going to waste one more second on his piece of shit dad. How I never understood the son's repetition of his father's lies when he borrows the car and informs his dad that they'll have a good time whenever he gets back later that night speaks to either my "child waiting for his father to come home like the narrator in Faster Pussycat's 'House of Pain'" naivete or our cultures ability to push narratives accepted by the ignorant masses over actual truth. So many people think the song is tragic when it's really a bad-ass anthem of rebellion and letting go of toxic family. I'm sure there were loads of dads whose sons never got to know them and later in life didn't want to get to know them who believed their sons were ungrateful jerks who couldn't understand what they gave up to provide for them. But, you know, they understood. We choose what is most important to us and other people observe those choices. Especially children.

Hopefully that winds up having something to do with this story so that I can pretend it wasn't simply a short look into my head after waking up from a dream where my dad was trying to get me back into his life.

America. Where every out of work miner in small towns like Hope Springs owns an Uzi.

America. Where the white guy in the background is more horrified that a cop is trying to stop some other white men from killing some non-white people than how every man in town tried to shoot their way through a white woman for a chance to shoot the non-white guys.

America. Where Christians are taught that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorah because of the gays rather than trying to explain why Lot gets drunk and fucks his daughters in a cave a week later.

You might be wondering why I brought up that last one. It sort of surprised me too because I was planning on listing a lot more shit that was wrong with America's policing and their treatment of our fellow Black citizens. But this issue is called "Scriptures" which made me think of The New Testament which made me think of the Old Testament which made me think of the way the story of Lot's daughters getting him drunk and fucking him is told in a way that makes you think, "Man, incest is hot." I see some you giving me some suspicious side-eye! I'm not the one who thinks incest is hot! Readers of The Bible probably are those perverts! You might be the kind of people who have only experienced The Bible second-hand and think the stories told in it communicate precisely what you've been told they communicate. Now, I don't know "precisely" what the religious dogma is surrounding Lot's daughters seducing their father because the elder daughter gaslights the younger one into thinking that the end of the world has come and no more men exist even though they just, on the way to this cave, passed through the town of Zoar with all those non-father men living there. Some people might think, "That's hot." But those people are disgusting and/or Paris Hilton! What you should be thinking when you read that is, "How drunk would I actually have to get to not realize that I had sex with my daughter the night before and would it be a believable amount so that I can pretend I'm drunk later tonight so I can have sex with my other daughter?"

I've just convinced myself that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was absolutely the fault of Lot's super horny daughters. Sodom was destroyed because a bunch of men were all, "Hey! We want to fuck those hot, genderless winged creatures who are currently staying in your house, Lot!" And Lot was all, "No way! Gross! Get out of here!" But then Lot's daughters were all, "Let us fuck them, Dad! Let us fuck them! Please! Speaking of pathetic, powerless, genderless pricks, our husbands aren't satisfying us! Please let us fuck everybody!" And Lot was all, "Um, okay, uh, hey, do you guys want to fuck my horny daughters?" And the Sodomites were all, "Did we say we wanted to fuck non-genderless, non-winged, non-unmarried women? Get out of here with that shit!" And so Lot was all, "Um, okay, you know what? Maybe we should get out of this town." And God was probably only half paying attention due to all the fucking negotiating about how many righteous people lived in Sodom with Abram that he didn't realize the real target of his wrath, Lot's horny daughters, had left town when he destroys it.

Yeah, you know what? That all makes sense. Don't question any of it. Bible explication time is over now!

John calls his "dream" a "vision" to obfuscate the fact that this massacre happened because he took a nice little nappy time.

America. Where old white guys who think cops serve them exclusively try to convince the younger kids in MAGA hats to shoot the cop who's obviously not about to take their side.

America. Where a person misinterprets a situation and then doubles down on their incorrect take even when it's proven wrong. I only bring that up because I'm way better than "America" and I can admit when I interpreted a panel incorrectly. That old guy isn't shoving a gun into the young guy's hand and convincing him to shoot John. He's wrestling the gun away from the cowardly young kid who won't resort to the terrible things that need to be done to protect the white race from all of these aliens and Black cops so that he can smash John Stewart in the head with the butt of the rifle (which must be a type of "brown-yellow" that I don't recognize because it knocks John Stewart fucking silly).

Has Rockwell ever fired one of these things before? I'm pretty sure he's holding it upside-down.

Maybe Rockwell learned to shoot from Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cartoons and he believes you're supposed to blow your own fucking head off every time you pull the trigger.

Rose tries to explain to the crowd that she knows John Stewart is trying to help because she "spent last night with him." Having grown up in a rural white mining town, she immediately understands how that will be interpreted, especially when she sees every white guy pull a rope out of nowhere and begin forming a noose. I wouldn't know how to tie a noose but then I went to high school in the San Francisco Bay Area where we never had "noose tying" as a choice in our Physical Education classes. Somehow we still had Square Dancing though.

America. Where a white woman implying she had sexual congress with a Black man has resulted in an amount of deaths roughly equal to ten percent of the number of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. Maybe slightly less than that because I'm sure not all lynching deaths were because a bunch of fucked up white men thought a Black man had sex with a white woman. I'm sure some of the lynchings were due to some white man not feeling like a Black man was respectful enough, or grateful enough, or, you know, any fucking reason they could come up with that every other white person in town would have felt justified the killing.

The editors were probably all, "We're so sick of letters from offended white dudes. Make sure the person who first accuses Rose of an interracial sexual liaison is a POC woman."

If you think white dudes haven't been offended by any suggestion of liberal minded social justice in non-modern comic books, all you're revealing to me is that you've never really read the letters pages in older comic books. There's a reason white dudes came up with the term "snowflake"; they've been flaking their snow all over everybody else for generations. They've got to be the most offended demographic in the history of taking offense (which began, I believe, when God was all, "Hey, Cain. Where the fuck did Abel go?" And, yes, *I* know Cain and Abel weren't white. But just ask any white person to describe them and guess what? White as snow, motherfuckers!).

Some guy named Ibrahim manages to calm Rose down before she's murdered for crimes against white humanity.

America. Where some white guy uses a Muslim guy's last name and I automatically think it's a slur I've never heard before.

You might be surprised, based on my tumblr reputation as an "edgelord," how many slurs I never knew growing up. I probably learned the majority of them via comic books! Like Green Lantern's pal Pieface! I didn't even realize that one was a slur until this century! Learning that one, I felt like Randal in Clerks II being educated on the etymology of porch monkey. Not that I ever called anybody by Green Lantern's pal's nickname. Christ, imagine if I loved the nickname so much I just started using it as a chummy name for decades while everybody around me was thinking, "What the fuck is wrong with this way-too-jolly racist piece of shit?"

Looking up "Pieface" just to make sure that was Hal's pal Tom's "nickname," I wound up on "The Racial Slur Database" and, holy shit, I really, really don't know many slurs. They've got to be mostly made up by Internet trolls, right? I mean, this can't actually be one because nobody is native to Antarctica: "Ant. Antarcticans. Self-explanatory." No, no. It is not self-explanatory. Are we saying people use this slur against penguins?! What the fuck is happening?!

Now that the humans have attacked a peaceful delegation of Xudarians, the Xudarians have decided to join in on the violent fun. They now roam the skies of Hope Springs with Xudarian rocket launchers. But being a calmer species, they don't go blasting away yet. But the fuse has been placed in the powder keg and a match can be struck at any moment!

Which means it's time for an advertisement to break the tension! Ball Park franks. Eat them! They're "hot dogs"!

Current generations probably look at this and think, "He's dressed so wacky because he's a cartoon!" as opposed to "He's dressed so wacky because he's from the '80s!"

Notice the ad copy uses the term "skate away" and then has the stupid dog on roller blades. Yes, yes. Technically, he's "skating." But I'm from California, dude. Skate means skateboard or get the fuck out.

I was just watching an old episode of Project Runway and one of the contestants had decided that their "girl" they were designing for was a skater. And then she proceeded to dress this "skater girl" in a quilted outfit. A skater wearing a fucking quilted outfit. Michael Kors should have did a kick flip into a grind to slide across the runway slapping the fuck out of her as he passed (and all the other contestants too, just so they would learn not to be dumb idiots on the next runway).

And now back to our regularly scheduled twenty-two pages of tension!

This page reads so differently to modern readers who only think of Narration Boxes as a character's internal monologue.

On first reading this page, even I was taken unawares by the omniscient narrator's voice. I simply assumed it was John Stewart's view of the surrounding conflict and his musings on what fear drives people to do. But then I got to the narration boxes that sounds so fucking arrogant and narcissistic: "Only one being has power on this mad planet. One being has the power of sanity. The power of indifference. The power of estrangement." Okay, maybe the last two powers aren't that arrogant. They're a bit confounding when you think John is thinking it. "Why would he think of indifference and estrangement not just as powers but as attributes he perceives in himself?" I suppose I've often looked over a crowd of people and thought, "Only one person here is sane." But of course I've thought that, being the only sane person in existence.

John uses the ring to blast the shit out of every weapon being used against another being and then throws up walls between every single civilization. He also says, in a Narration Box, "Comfort yourselves with your scripture, little lunatics. I will keep you safe and secure." So, um, you know what? Pretty sure all of these Narration Boxes are John's inner monologue. The comic was written in 1991 and while you could still find omniscient narrators often enough, the Narration Boxes were definitely changing into inner dialogue and the "thought bubble" was on the way out. You still see thought bubbles from time to time but it's pretty rare already by 1991.

Anyway, I guess John isn't as sane as he thinks he is if these are the types of thoughts he's thinking.

By containing and separating every alien species on the planets, John disappoints the Guardians. The old farts look on his work and despair for it is the same work that they did before they all loosened up by getting laid. They should look down on the planet and think, "Of course this was John's solution. This is a stupid experiment. You don't take a bunch of different species and throw them in the same box and see how they get along. You do that to see them fight and determine the most vicious and powerful. Maybe we should fuck off and go get laid again?" Instead, they decide to continue to observe and hope things go differently than the way things went when they were trying to force order on the universe. Obviously things are going to go differently! All of these creatures have the ability to fuck with each other without worrying about space travel. John's solution is less of "doing the same thing they did by partitioning off species from each other" and more "using walls in place of the vast distances of space." All John's really done is move the parameters of the experiment closer to how things would naturally be across the universe. If you accept my metaphor of walls as space! And you should because you're mad and I'm sane.

Robert Frost's line shouldn't have been "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." It should have been, "Everybody can come together with their hatred of walls."

Through the use of a spy, Rockwell and his militants learn that many of the aliens feel the same way that they do. They want the walls to come down and Green Lantern's head. I'm not sure why they care about the walls being that there are "natural" walls between most of the civilizations anyway due to different gravities and atmospheres. I suppose the illusion of freedom is something they find worth dying for.

Meanwhile, the Guardians have been observing everybody's violent reaction. They're confused as to why mortal beings react out of fear and anger instead of trying to work together with beings that might stab them in the back and shoot them in the face at any moment, thus ending their, you know, mortality. Funny how these high and mighty immortal beings can't seem to ever understand how potent a fuel the fear of death can be. Plus they have no intention of sending any of these aliens back to their home planets because watching bugs in a jar fight each other to the death is so fucking thrilling. Better than sex, apparently, since they've given up sex to watch aliens kill each other.

The crystal aliens jerk each other off to create a harmonic disturbance that brings Chaselon the Crystal Green Lantern headed back to Oa. Hal realizes this probably means John's fucked up yet again, so he heads back too.

John has discovered that maybe he's more insane than everybody else on Oa when he tries to maintain the walls and his psyche is overtaken by the Mad Guardian's thoughts. Remember how the Guardians "cleaned" the Great Power Battery on Oa by shoving all the bad shit into John? Particularly that red electric creature thing? Pretty sure that's coming back to fuck everything up. You'd think that after John's mind is cleared of this being, somebody would have gone over the central battery with a fine toothed parasite comb and rid it of the other flaw that's soon to haunt Hal Jordan.

Green Lantern #16 Rating: A. The obvious solution to this entire problem has been a wall. But that's just the point, isn't it? Gerard Jones has written a story about an architect who must find a way for disparate races to get along which makes you think, "Well, build something. A wall!" And a lot of modern conservatives were probably putting pillows over their hard-ons as they read that. But just as I noted previously because of all the shit Robert Frost taught me (because I read "Mending Wall" correctly), I knew the wall would fail. So here in the penultimate issue, we see John resort to the wall to keep the peace. And we see how the wall fails miserably. Everybody hates the wall and it's just increased their passion for violence, especially violence against the Green Lantern. So how will John figure it out? Will John even figure it out? My guess is that Rose will figure it out by reaching out to the most violent aliens that started this whole mess. They'll find some common ground, hug, and peace will last for ten thousand years. Or Hal Jordan will arrive and start a massive brawl which well end with everybody laughing uproariously about how silly they were all acting and putting alien steaks on their blackening eyes.