Red Lanterns #1

Let's try this again!

Red Lanterns is the 3rd title in the new 52 with a Teen Plus rating. Hopefully that means Milligan can be a little freer with his storylines. The cover of the 3rd issue has that Red Lantern from New Guardians (the one with skeleton wings and garters and boobs and a butt) looking sexy while being soaked in blood.

This garners a Teen Plus rating? Bah! Apparently this is standard fare in my friend Ken's child's kindergarten!

The Red Lanterns begins in Sector 666. So that means it's an evil and depraved section of space, correct? That's a cosmic truth, right? That 666 is an evil number!

In Sector 666, some beings I'm calling the Pain Pirates are busy torturing cute little fuzzy alien things that they come across. And the next cute little thing they come across is this Red Lantern!

Awww! So SHWEET!

This little Red Lantern space cat puking molten hairballs and scratching the bejeesus out of everyone isn't alone. He's hanging out in space with a great big red Red Lantern named Atrocitus. No wonder he's a Red Lantern filled with rage! Who names their kid Atrocitus without a few expectations about the way he's going to act when he grows up? Also, all of his people were killed by the Guardians. So there's that.

But even though he's a Red Lantern filled with rage, he still loves his widdle kitty boo.

As you can read in the panel above, his rage has somewhat tempered over time. And that's where the story of the Red Lanterns becomes interesting. I was wondering how they were going to maintain a series about a bunch of Lanterns that fly around the Universe being angry and killing and maiming everything they meet. Especially since Garth Ennis wasn't writing it. So this little Red Lantern character flaw in Atrocitus is where we find the heart of this series. Um, I'm guessing!

Plus, look! Aw, kitty!

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!

Atrocitus returns to Ysmault (Red Lantern Headquarters in Sector 666?) to let kitty-tat Dex-Starr heal. The Red Lanterns are all fighting and Ed Benes, artist, makes sure to let the comic book readership know that no female Red Lantern is going to be outdone by all of the other DC women who can do The Butt-Boob Showcase pose.

The Butt-Boob Showcase. It's like a signature wrestling move meant to incapacitate male comic book fans with embarrassing pants poles. I think it just causes rage in female fans! Which is why this Red Lantern is being true to her nature!

You have to wonder if it's a Power Ring Design Flaw that allows the ring to make full costumes for males while leaving the pants part of the costume off of the females. On the next page, she walks off showcasing her ashy gray ass while Atrocitus actually makes me look up a word! What kind of fucking English major am I? Oh, that's right. The kind who owns a floor cleaning business.

Febrile: 2. Having or showing a great deal of excitement or energy. Unless it was the first definition about her having some kind of fever. Oh! Probably the Rage Fever!

Afterward, we get some much welcomed background on the Red Lanterns. Perhaps older readers were already familiar with this. Perhaps they griped and bitched when they had to read a bunch of pages explaining how Atrocitus and his Red Lanterns came to be. But I'm happy to get it.

Kronos the Mad Guardian decided the Universe's army of Manhunters should be ruled by emotion. Oh, that doesn't sound like a bad idea at all! So he reprogrammed the Manhunters and they destroyed everything in Sector 666. I like the idea of a Sector being a complete wasteland. That's probably why the Pain Pirates were sailing around in it. Probably scavenging dead worlds. Too bad they ran into the Red Kitty Cat!

Atrocitus used to be called Atros until the Manhunters killed his family and he decided to make his name longer and more diabolical. He claims to have made the Red Lanterns but I'm not sure how since he trained to by a psychologist and not a geneticist. Or whatever makes new creatures. Perhaps he created the Red Lanterns by doing psychoanalysis on them! That actually will probably turn out to be true. Brought forth their dark feelings of rage and hatred until they turned into the napalm vomiting Red Lanterns.

At the end, Atrocitus decides to become the Punisher of the Universe. And he hopes his Red Lanterns will be with him. But they seem a little bit inclined to revolting when the comic ends.

Red Lanterns #0

I'm quite excited to read a new comic series by Peter Milligan. And not only do I get to read one new one, I get two with Justice League Dark as well! Two in a row even!

I don't know how good a writer Peter Milligan really is. He did a fantastic job with Shade the Changing Man. I found something about Shade's odd, tentative, destructive, crazy romance with Kathy George beautiful and uplifting. Enigma was also well-done but I don't think I was at the proper place in my life for it to mean a whole lot to me. Years later I read N. Scott Momaday's Ancient Child and that book took hold of me in the way I think Enigma might have had I read it at a different time. But it was one passage in Rogan Gosh that really bonded me with Peter Milligan.

When I was just a kid, possibly around ten to twelve years of age, I was sitting on the toilet. I remember this moment clearly because I began thinking about time and about death. I was raised in a household that gave no thought to religion one way or another. It just wasn't a factor. And I was thinking about reincarnation because I was desirous to have something more than this. But try as I might, I could not recall any past lives. And I realized what good was living again in another life if I couldn't remember me, Grunion Guy (or Tess (or The Red King (or The Red Lizard (or The Red Lizard King)))), in that life? So I tried to cement myself in that place and time for all time. I concentrated as hard as I could to make that moment last forever. Did it work? Who knows. If it did, that poor kid is still on the Goddamned toilet.

So that was that memory. And then many years later, I read this in Rogan Gosh: "Ah heard of a fella down Memphis way, called Wild Bill Osiris. They rekken he keep gittin' deaded an' keep gittin' hup again. Folks say when Osiris gits reborn he becomes a cock-slinger called Horus Thuh Kid. But is it Osiris or Horus Thuh Kid thut's alive? Ah mean, whut foxes me is thuh continuation of personality...'coz if'n yuh reborn an' yuh can't recall a frigid coyote 'bout yuh preevus existence, yuh might jus' well be dead."

You know, we all have those moments. It's why we cherish literature as much as we do. It's that constant dialogue with others, living and dead. It's finding things in common. It's realizing we're not alone no matter how alone we always, inevitably, are. It's that connection that makes literature truly awesome (awesome in the real sense and not in the California sense).

For an introvert and a hermit, connecting to others through literature (and television and movies as well. I'm not Pop Culture elitist by any means!) means a hell of a lot more to me than gluing a cell phone to the side of my head or a text messaging machine to my lap. And of course this blog is part of that. I read. I write. You read. You write. We all connect.

Let me just say, though, for clarification's sake, that this blog was originally thought up as a way for me to remember each of the 52 storylines I'm reading from month to month! I figured if I wrote about each story and had an easy to reference place to see plot points, I wouldn't have to reread the last few issues before reading each new issue as it came out. I don't know if it works yet because I'm still so far behind in my reading I'm still reading issues 1-4 of every title before getting to 5 and 6! And the sevens start coming out next week! Fuck.

While I'm rambling about literature and pop culture and the reason for my blog, I think I'll discuss another aspect of this blog that is important to me. Any regular readers may have noticed that when I'm wondering about something, I usually just leave the question out there instead of instantly searching the internet for an answer. Unless I specifically mention that I'm searching the web for something, I tend to avoid going to it for information. I like keeping what I write authentically me and the knowledge (right or wrong!) that's in my head. I hate that term, 'authentic', but well, fuck, that's what it is. What I write here is, for the most part, what I would be able to bring to a conversation with someone about comics while face to face with that person. I will use references that I have on hand though! Like pulling Rogan Gosh down from the bookshelf to get the exact quote I wanted. Or going for my Who's Who binder to look up some facts about characters I'm currently reading that I don't know a lot about, like Firestorm.

My friend Upright and I wrote a web comic many years ago called Future Retard. While I'm sure many people read it and thought it was a Dadaist mess of random ball-eating jokes, it was actually a very clever science fiction story. The Future Retard lives in a society that can instantly access any information at any moment. So he has no need to retain any information. With the ability to do web search at everyone's fingertips at all times, nobody needs to retain anything anymore. We're a society of future retards and nobody has any idea what anybody else actually knows. Especially online when you can be an expert on everything and just pretend that you pulled it straight from your head instead of typing it into Bing.

I'd like to avoid that for as long as I possibly can. The advantage of actually having knowledge in your head is that you can make connections between all of the various stupid ass facts you've accumulated. If somebody asks you something about Star Trek, you can easily go online to find out what you need. But by having the Star Trek information crammed into your head already, now if somebody mentions a passage in The Bible, you can reference how Kirk went through the same thing on Wrigley's Pleasure Planet. See? Now you're awesome at parties (awesome in the California sense and not in the real sense).

And now that I've rambled on like that, I think I'll change the title of this post to Red Lanterns #0 (the title that you thought it was always anyways! Ha ha! Reality is subjective!) and start actually writing about the Red Lanterns comic book next post.

New Guardians #4 Update

I should apologize to Tony Bedard. I've been reading the Green Lantern comics fairly quickly because I've got such a backlog of comics to get through and haven't been giving them the focus I should. For the most part, I've been reading the comics while writing a stream of consciousness blog. As questions come up in my mind, I spit them out on the blog. I speculate about where the story is going and how it's going to resolve. But I completely failed to do this with New Guardians. Because this morning as I was waking up, I realized I, like the Lanterns, have been looking at the situation in completely the wrong way.

Maybe I shouldn't apologize to Tony Bedard! Maybe I should congratulate him on writing the comic in the way that he did so that even the reader is lost in the confusion. But one of the main reasons I missed what was so obvious and what ties the whole thing together is that I wasn't writing out the things that were bothering me. Like how the rings seemed to consciously be leaving their hosts to choose Kyle Raynor. It's so obvious once I stopped looking at the rings as being 'stolen' like everyone else in the comic book.

Just like all of the interstellar ships that sensed something coming into the universe and were waiting outside the White Hole and just like Sayd who sensed something terrible coming, the Rings also sensed this great cosmic threat. The rings leaving their hosts was a reaction to this thing coming to our Universe. They left their hosts, in many cases to die, because the need of the whole universe comes before the hosts individual lives. And they went to Kyle Raynor because he is the only one capable of wearing all of the rings at one time. One of the Guardians mentioned that someone named Krona had done it once for a meager amount of time but he was immortal. Kyle does it for a bit and seems to fail. But he also retains a bit of all the colors powers.

So does it all make sense now? Yes. It works. And it works well! Especially with the Red Herring that makes no sense: the ring thief. There isn't one and I was snowed just like the rest of the characters in the comic book.

But this brings about a complication to Kyle saving the universe! If the rings joined like this to give Kyle the power to save the Universe, what does it mean that he never actually wore the Orange Ring? That was one question I had that never made it to the blog because I assumed I was missing something about the Orange Corps and the fact it has one ring. When Kyle wore all of the rings, the Orange one never said anything. Turns out this is because it wasn't a ring at all but a construct.
Either Larfleeze (Agent Orange) and Kyle are going to have to work closely to stop this threat (I'm sure all the Lanterns are going to have to help. This is the NEW GUARDIANS, after all!) or Kyle is going to have to don the Orange Ring at some point to get its power as well.

And about the Oans getting their asses kicked by the Lanterns? It makes sense as well. I was just being grumpy and internetty and yelling, "You suck!" at Tony Bedard because I could. The Oans had just put down all the Lanterns before the Orange Lantern gives them a chance to regroup! And after the Lanterns get the upper hand, Kyle has everybody retreat. Possibly because the Guardians will eventually kick their asses. But maybe also because Kyle didn't want to hurt them. He just wanted to get away and deal with the problems at hand.

So, yeah. I really like this comic. And I apologize to Tony Bedard. Hmm, no. I'll apologize if this all works out the way I said. I'm sure it will. It makes sense. So I think I need to start filling out an envelope with DC's address and stuffing a nice dollar into it.

New Guardians #4

I really like this cover even though it's a total lie and has nothing to do with the comic inside.

Let's start at the end and work backwards to see if this storyline makes any sense. I'm of the opinion that it doesn't but I might convince myself otherwise as I work through it. And starting at the end is like starting at the beginning because the end is the big reveal of how it all started. And it started with this thing:

This thing is a ship called the Orrery. I don't know if it's called the Orrery because it's an Orrery or if it's just a cosmic coincidence! But Agent Orange's pet Guardian, Sayd, tells the Lanterns that if they wish to know who stole their rings, they would have to search the Orrery.

But if the Orrery and its denizens were behind stealing the rings, why didn't they actually, um, steal the rings? Maybe Sayd the Immortal just used the wrong terminology. Maybe Sayd meant if you want to find the person responsible for removing the rings from the fingers of their respective Lanterns and then sent the rings to Kyle for some mysterious reason, you need to search the Orrery.

So that's one big piece that doesn't make any sense. A ship entered our universe through a white hole and stole the rings while not actually stealing the rings but forcing the rings to choose Kyle. Because that's another problem. The rings weren't simply stolen. They were switched from the Lanterns to Kyle.

The next problem is what happens when Agent Orange busts in on the Oans and the other Lanterns.

Agent Orange arrives because he was following the other stolen rings. When he discovers they're on Oa, he just comes in blasting the Oans. And he expects the other Lanterns to join in. And they do! Why? The Red, Indigo, Violet, and Yellow Lanterns were all searching for the person who stole their rings. All the evidence pointed toward Agent Orange being behind it since his Orange Ring was actually one of his Construct Lanterns. So why don't they attack him? I get that the Guardians are diminutive bastards but it doesn't make sense for them to suddenly attack them all.

Kyle may have the only reason for really hating them because of what they did to Ganthet. But even that's a bit of a sketchy reason to just start obliterating them. He's the one that suggests they all join Orange to 'keep up with him.' Instead of them attacking Green Lantern again because he had stolen the rings, suddenly they don't care anymore. Even though Green Lantern just destroyed all of their rings by trying to wear them all at the same time.

So let's try a brief recap:

A Red, Yellow, Indigo, Violet, Blue (not shown), and Orange Lantern all have their rings stolen. The Orange Lantern resists though so his is actually safe. But no Green Lantern loses his ring. All the lost rings are drawn to the Green Lantern Kyle Raynor. This was caused by beings on a ship called the Orrery which just entered this universe through a white hole. All the Lanterns wanted the rings back so they attacked Kyle who they assumed stole them. But after Kyle wears the rings and actually destroys them (while absorbing some of their power), the Orange Lantern appears and gets everyone to beat up the Oans. They decide to stop fighting Kyle and band together to beat on the little pricks before Kyle comes to his senses and forces them all to retreat to Agent Orange's homeworld. It's on this world where they learn they must go to the Orrery to figure out what's going on.

Whatever. Like I said, I really want to like this title but this storyline is just shit. If the next few issues explain it all in a satisfactory way, I'll send Tony Bedard one crisp dollar bill!

UPDATE HERE! I thought more about the storyline and it fucking works.

New Guardians #3

Did the cover artist not get the notice that Ganthet's hair has been cut?

I really, really, really want to like this comic. I'm hoping it all comes together eventually. I'm hoping that it slowly reveals the reason for all of these different color rings internally instead of relying on the reader's previous knowledge of the Green Lantern storyline. I would go ahead and read Blackest Night except it's one of those big cross-over events that is never collected in a decent way. And picking up all of the single issues would be more work than I'm willing to put in at this point. I like going to the comic book store for comics but I don't think I'm ready to start shopping around at every place in Portland to find the books I need. Although there are some really great back-up comic book stores out here that very rarely disappoint. You know this is a good comic town when your back-up stores are every bit as good as your main store.

Let me just say my main comic book store is Excalibur Books and has been since I moved to Portland. Their store is much better than their website!

Issue #3 is mostly a confusing bunch of fighting scenes while sort of advancing the plot. Actually, the book sort of just jettisons the plot and kind of starts over. The first two issues were really just about getting one representative of each Corps on to Oa in a confrontation with the Guardians. So the rings going to Kyle lured them together. Then Kyle goes to Oa and they follow. Then Kyle wears the rings which actually just brings about the destruction of all the rings except the Orange ring and his Green ring.

Got that? Forget all that stuff with the rings that was the mystery in the first book because the rings are all gone and the Orange ring isn't actually an Orange ring anyway! It's an Orange construct! So now there are no random rings at all! It's just Green Lantern with one of each Corps member and the Guardians of Oa.

Except the Orange Corps member is missing. I guess their is only one Orange Lantern and he makes an appearance at the end of this issue.

I think the Guardians know this guy.

This reminds me of the Bill Cosby album where he tells some story and then says, "I told you that story so that I could tell you this one." I don't remember which stories he bookended that statement with. I think it might have been the buck buck story describing Fat Albert so that he could tell the story where they scare Fat Albert with the Frankenstein head. But I'm probably wrong.

This reminds me of that because the first three issues really are just setting up whatever is going to happen with all of these Corps members, the Guardians, and Agent Orange in Issue #4. Let's hope Issue #4 and beyond begin some kind of really interesting story. Because this whole concept of all of these colorful Corps is something I can really get behind. If it's told well and isn't just a confusing jumble of bullshit like the last four years of Green Lantern. Okay, that's not totally fair. I didn't read the last four years of Green Lantern. But the online synopses are a bunch of confusing crap!

And Agent Orange is a really stupid name for an alien.

New Guardians #2

So a brawl breaks out in New York just like Issue #1 promised. First, the Red Lantern does this:

Is this what I have to look forward to in Milligan's Red Lanterns? Month after month of bloody vomit?

And then the Sinestro Corps Member does this to Kyle:

I bet those building contractors are wishing they'd listened to Green Lantern 2814.3 now!

And then the Star Sapphire utters complete nonsense:

So usually only vengeance in one's heart can prevent an Indigo from sneaking up on you?

So then a Blue Lantern appears and...what is going on? Where did all of these Lantern Corps come from? Time to check the DC Wikipedia which I don't normally do. But seeing as how DC doesn't seem to want to drop any of the Rainbow Corps mythology they created or negate the Blackest Night storyline, I'd better read up on this crap. Unless DC is immediately planning on retelling the whole Blackest Night storyline for the new 52 readers! Be right back!

I'm back! I give up! What a confusing mess. I'm just going to pretend there was a rainbow explosion inside the Central Green Power Battery and it rained down different colored rings upon Oa. Then those rings zipped off to find bearers filled with the correct emotions. And just like a bag of Skittles, there were more of some rings than others. That's why there are so many green and yellow rings and only one orange ring! Although if it were truly like a bag of skittles, there would be more orange ones and only one purple one.

So the Blue Lantern appears, some guy named Saint Walker. He and Kyle zip off to Oa where the Guardians get angry at Kyle for having so many rings.

I would expect the rings to line up by spectrum.

Putting all of the rings on turns Kyle into this guy:

Fabulous!

New Guardians #1

Oh! There's Kyle!

New Guardians doesn't tell us when in the New 52 timeline it occurs. It doesn't say NOW or TEN YEARS HENCE or SIXTEEN YEARS AGO or LAST CONTINUITY or anything that explains anything. But Ganthet has a pony tail so it either takes place before Green Lantern #1 or long enough after Green Lantern #1 for Ganthet to regrow his ponytail. But all of the other Guardians who cut off his pony tail seem to be dead. So that means this takes place either before all of the Guardians were reborn as babies or, again, long enough after Green Lantern #1 for Ganthet to regrow his pony tail.
Ganthet has one last power ring to give up and it looks like it's going to end up in Kyle's hands. And since Guy Gardner mentions Kyle in Green Lantern Corps, this comic must take place in the past. A past that old readers probably recognize but I can barely remember except in bits and pieces.

After Ganthet gives the ring to Kyle, the comic gives us a Present Day notation and changes locales to Space Sector 422. Thanks for that! Good job, Tony Bedard, making a bold proclamation about the history of the Guardians of Oa and the creation of the Kyle Green Lantern but not giving us a time stamp for it. Way to weasel out of your responsibility to DC Continuity!

Jonni DC, Continuity Cop says, "Well, I guess I can't fine you for this. But I've got my eye on you!"

With Kyle being chosen like this, it's looking more and more like Superman was actually killed by Doomsday in this continuity as well. I guess it make sense. Batman apparently died and came back, so Final Crisis seems to be canon. I'm starting to suspect DC hasn't changed anything except the numbers on the front of the books! And Firestorm!

Off in Sector 422, we see that Sinestro, the grand and empathic chap he is, has created his rings so that they can decommission an active Sinestro Corps member whenever the ring finds a better replacement. Boy, that should keep everyone on their toes! Or whatever piece of alien physiology acts like a toe.

But then we see a Red Lantern who suffers the same fate. So it must be a general ability of the rings. But didn't Sinestro make the Yellow Rings himself? Maybe he just took credit. Or maybe I'm mistaken and should be checking Snopes for Sinestro's Ring.

A rash of decommissionings happens across the universe to all of the various colored Lanterns. All of the replacements seem to be in Earth's sector so the Lantern Rings head off to LanternCon 2011. Probably in Geneva. Um, I mean San Diego! I channeled the wrong kind of nerd there for a second.

Oh, I guess it's in New York!

For some reason, a bunch of rings have malfunctioned (or are functioning properly?) and have chosen Kyle Raynor as their Lantern. So Kyle Raynor has just become the Rainbow Lantern!

Except that awesomeness doesn't happen at all. Instead the comic ends with a great big brawl about to happen.