Rex and Bobo cameo in 1995's Guy Gardner: Warrior #29...as does seemingly the rest of the DC Universe.

Detective Chimp and Rex the Wonder Dog next appeared in 1995's Guy Gardner: Warrior #29, and they were hardly alone. This is the issue that featured the grand opening of Guy's Planet Hollywood-style superhero bar in New York City, Warriors. The event drew quite a crowd.

In fact, there's a whole crossover event's worth of guest-stars and cameos in the issue, all lovingly rendered by pencil artist Phil Jimenez, one of only a handful of artists who could handle so many characters and do so with such aplomb.

Bobo and Rex only appear in a single panel, and each get a single line of dialogue. It's a very small panel, though, so I scanned the whole tier to post above. Their inclusion should give you a sense of just how wide a swathe of the DC Universe ended up in the book, as does the panels around them. 

In addition to the two animal heroes we've been following in recent posts, above we see also See Orion, Plastic Man, Tiger-Man, Supergirl, Steel, Angel and the Ape, the monster from Stanley and His Monster, Jade, Sentinel Alan Scott, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Captain Marvel and Lobo.

At this point in the book, we've seen a conflicts of varying degrees of seriousness simmering in the background, but Guy has just morphed his right hand into a big spiky mace and sent Captain Atom flying out the bar. Two pages later, Lobo arrives, unconscious Captain Atom under one arm, and the Czarnian bounty hunter immediately gets in Guy's face. A bar brawl quickly erupts.

As for Rex and Bobo, the former's line is simply, "Humans!", apparently said—er, thought—in a dismissive, perhaps exasperated tone. ("Humanoids" might have been more exact though, given how many of the patrons are aliens, robots, animals and not-quite-humans.)

And Bobo seems to be running from Sam Simeon, the ape in Angel in the Ape, protesting that he was not hitting on Angel. 

You'll note that Rex is thinking his line, rather than saying it, so the power of speech he gained as a result of Hector Hammond and Gorilla Grodd messing with the meteorite in Green Lantern/Flash crossover "Gorilla Warfare" seems to have worn off by his very next appearance. 

And Bobo is speaking his line out loud, not projecting his thoughts, but speaking in a regular dialogue balloon like all of the other talking characters in the book do. I believe this is the very first time we've seen Bobo speak out loud like a regular human being—unless he did so during his appearances in 1985-1986's DC Challenge series, most of which I haven't read—and he would continue to do so in all future appearances (I suppose it's possible here that he's meant to speaking in some kind of ape language though, given that here he's directly addressing a gorilla rather than a human being).

As for the rest of the comic, which was written by Beau Smith and inked John Stokes and Dan Davis, I found it to be surprisingly good. (Of course, I've pretty much always been surprised by the relative quality of Guy Gardner: Warrior whenever I read a back issue; given that the title character's famous for being an insufferable asshole and, at this point, he had a garish design that might have been the worst of any DC character of the '90s and that his powers at this point were dumb and gross, I never expect much from an issue of Warrior. Usually, the art is a weak point, but then, that's obviously not the case in an issue drawn by Jimenez.)

Does this issue's surprising quality have anything to do with how little Guy appears, given that this is his book? And how much of the book is devoted to DC characters mostly just mingling, rather than engaged in fighting supervillains or doing various super-feats? I mean, maybe.

It opens with Darkseid and Desaad looking in on the event from a giant monitor on Apokolips, curious about "a gathering of heroes without the purpose of battle." Guy, dressed in a white tuxedo, welcomes various guests. All goes fairly well, until first Captain Atom and then Lobo arrive and a brawl breaks out, but it ends happily enough, Lobo having drank himself unconscious. Then there's a cliffhanger leading to crossover with Superman in Action Comics.  

As I said, hose panels above probably give you a good sense of how wide a net Smith and Jimenez cast for cameos and guest-stars—and I do find myself now wondering if Smith called for each and every character to appear in the background, or if Jimenez just filled the crowd scenes with whoever he felt like drawing. At any rate, the crowd at Warriors includes the likes of Cave Carson and Sea Devils, a bunch of New Bloods (those in the short-lived team Blood Pack even recommending their reality show to Cat Grant) and a few characters that were appearing in DC Comics at the time, but now seem even more obscure than Cave Carson (Anyone remember Technocrat from the 1993-1995 Outsiders, for example?)

Two were obscure enough that I didn't recognize them, and had to do a bit of research to figure out who they were. These were Fastbak (whose design at least pointed me in the direction of Jack Kirby's New Gods) and Black Thorn, whose identity took me far longer to suss out (A character from the 1983-1988 Vigilante series, I don't think I've ever actually read a story with her in it before).

There are some interesting interactions among all the pleasantries, like Aquaman worrying how people will react to his new harpoon hand only to find Guy ignore it completely and bust his chops about his long hair instead("First Superman and now you...What's the deal with all this long hair stuff?") or Guy's old Justice League teammate Rocket Red Dmitri Pushkin giving him a bear hug.

There were also some genuinely surprising interactions, ones of such note that I was surprised they were happening in a couple of panels of Warrior, rather than elsewhere.

For example, Kyle meets Arisa, former Green Lantern and Hal Jordan's problematic ex-girlfriend:

And as tensions rise and the brawl becomes imminent, Donna Troy, at that point a Darkstar, introduces herself to then-Wonder Woman Artemis, apparently in order to start some shit:

Anyway, Warrior #29 a pretty good comic, one that is well-drawn, takes full advantage of DC's huge character catalog and engages in something I particularly enjoy seeing, the publisher's superheroes just hanging out together, rather than fighting or saving the world as they usually do when they get together in any real number. 

Oh, and of course, 30 years later, it serves a great time capsule of the DC Universe circa 1995.

Now, why Guy and his staff decided to invite a chimpanzee and a dog to the grand opening of a bar, well, your guess is as good as mine...

*********************

Two more quick things before I move on from this issue.

First, remember when we recently revisited 2005's Day of Vengeance, and Captain Marvel said this...?

At the time, I pointed out that he was in a bar in L.E.G.I.O.N. '91 #31, the War of the Gods tie-in where he found himself in a space bar, ordered a milkshake and fought Lobo (A comic which was collected in 2015's Shazam!: A Celebration of 75 Years). 

Well, here he is in another bar. Jimenez draws him quite prominently arriving in a two-page splash along fellow fliers like Donna, Kyle, Steel and Sparx, and he appears in a few panels within Warriors as well, helping Nuklon and Obsidian hang a hammer on the wall, talking to one-time Dmitri about how Guy's jaw is as big as Jay Leno's (?) and then getting dismissively tossed aside by Lobo in the panel at the top of this post (A callback to their L.E.G.I.O.N. fight, I wonder?).

So that's two bars you've been in by my count, Captain Marvel.

Second, remember how I said that Warriors seemed to be based on Planet Hollywood, what with the superhero memorabilia on the walls and in display cases? Well, Smith pays debt to that inspiration with some unnamed cameos from Planet Hollywood's founders, a scene that wouldn't have worked if Smith wasn't here teamed with an artist capable of drawing such likenesses so well:

Oh, and if you're wondering, Planet Krypton, the Planet Hollywood-like superhero themed restaurant introduced in Kingdom Come, debuted in 1996, after Warriors opened. 

Actually, they're both kinda jerks, aren't they?

Simon Baz's mom tries to sort out the various Green Lanterns in Green Lanterns #7, written by Sam Humphries and drawn by Ronan Cliquet.

The best part of Hal Jordan and The Green Lantern Corps #4:

Captured by the Sinestro Corps, Green Lantern Guy Gardner is brought before their leader with just the minimum charge left in his power ring. Guy immediately expends this last bit of energy attempting to attack Sinestro, and so his ring-generated costume dissipates. Sinestro is in the middle of monologuing about his Fear Engine super-weapon when he glances over his shoulder to see that Guy doesn't even wear a pair of underwear when he's in his uniform, so, with his ring-generated costume gone, he's now standing there naked.

The look on Sinestro's face in that third panel, drawn by Ethan Van Sciver, is maybe my favorite single image of the week, and there were a lot of great images in this week's comics. Writer Robert Venditti does a pretty swell job with the entire Gardner/Sinestro scene, actually; despite their many battles over the years, those two just don't quite fit together right as archenemies the way Hal Jordan and Sinestro do.

Sometimes I'm torn.

Here's a good example.

So, on the one hand, there are the above panels from Charles Soule and Alessandro Vitti's Red Lanterns #22, in which is former Green Lantern Guy Gardner, who has recently become a Red Lantern and adopted a terrible new costume as per New 52 regulations, meets Red Lantern Zilius Zox.

Zox is a being from a planet where the predominant lifeform are guys with giant, spherical heads with arms and legs attached.

Guy worked with a similar being in the Green Lantern Corps for pretty much his entire superheroic career (The Internet tells me his name was Galius Zed, but I always just called him The Guy Who's Just a Giant Head with Arms and Legs), but here appears to have never seen one of these guys. And he then refers to him as a "testicle with teeth."

Gross. And crass. And juvenile.

But then, on the other hand, the very same issue of the very same comic has this panel in it:

And if that's not a perfect one-panel encapsulation of everything gloriously, hilariously insane about superhero comics than man, I don't know what is.

Pre-New 52 review: War of The Green Lanterns: Aftermath

Well, this is the exact point at which the creators as well as the editors and executives must have found out that DC Entertainment would be scrapping the DC Universe as it existed prior to Flashpoint and re-jigerring it with the New 52boot; the evidence is all over the comics contained in this collection.

First, Geoff Johns opted out of participating all together; rather than shipping an issue of his Green Lantern in August of 2011, DC shipped two issues of War of the Green Lanterns: Aftermath by writer Tony Bedard. They are collected in this 200-page volume, along with the last three issues of Green Lantern Corps (two of which are also by Bedard, one of which is by Scott Kolins), and the last three issues of Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors, which were written by Peter Tomasi.

On the cover, you'll note Bedard and Tomasi are the two creators credited, and in such a manner that it looks as if Tomasi was the artist of a Bedard-written story. As it turns out, the reason they didn't credit the artists is simply because there are way too goddam many of them.

Here then is Exhibit B in the prosecution's case that these few months worth of Green Latnern comics demonstrates that everyone stopped giving a fuck at this point, and were getting ready to start over with the New 52 versions of these titles: There are 21 different artists credited with working on this book, which breaks down to about one for every ten pages. If they were split evenly into pencilers and inkers, that wouldn't be so bad, as it would be about one creative team per issue (although that is still an awful lot of art teams), but that is not the case...many of the issues herein are split between multiple art teams.

It is, to put it as generously as possible, a complete fucking mess, visually. There are some decent artists involved, I like the work of a lot of some of these guys, and don't mind the work of some of the others, but the whole thing looks hurried, lazy and hacky, and none of the settings or characters are drawn by the same artists long enough to ever establish any sort of implied reality or consistency. It looks like a jam book, drawn by guys without access to character design sheets, prior copies of the book or even the ability to see what their fellow artists are drawing.

How big is Killowog? Four-feet-tall? Fourteen? Fifty? Whatever. What are Green Lantern costumes made out of? Polished jade stones, spandex, paint? Whatever. How big is Salaak's head in relationship to his body? Eh, who cares? I've read a handful of comics featuring the Green Lantern who is a big gray rock guy kinda like The Thing but not, and I still can't tell if he has a chin or if his mouth is embedded in his neck; everyone draws that fucking guy's head different.

Additionally, the chapters pretty baldly contradict one another, something I would charitably put down to the fact that the collection is arranged by series rather by the order in which the books are published, but the fact remains several of them are quite clearly pulled-out-of-the drawer fill-in issues, being published to fill space and kill time before the reboot, not because they have anything at all to do with the Aftermath of the War of the Green Lanterns.

Here, let's take 'em one by one.

Aftermath #1, by Bedard and two art teams, Miguel Sepulveda, inking himself, and Tyler Kikham and Batt: This is a straightforward recap of where every one was left at the end of the "War" story, with a lot of added yelling at each other. Hal's on Earth, ring-less. Mogo's dead, forming a ring of debris around Oa. Sinestro's a Green Lantern. Everyone's pissed about Sinestro wearing a ring. Everyone's pissed at John for killing Mogo. Kyle Rayner and his girlfriend are fighting because...eh, they kinda gloss over that.

Sepulvda's art work, which he either colored or was colored by a different of the five credited colorist than the one who colored the second half of this issue, is super-effects heavy, with his characters having rather posed, photo reference-y looks about them, and strange tetures permeating everything, and photos of shrubbery, police cars and night skies dropped in behind and around the drawn art.

Kirkham and Batt's, by contrast, is very comic book-y, looking flat and drawn the way a superhero comic book's art should and, more importantly, looking more like the rest of the Green Lantern comics than Sepulveda's weird-ass art. If you are drawing, say, a tiny, big-headed blue space man in a robe who floats, you can only go so "realistic" with the depiction before it just looks dumb; Sepulveda draws Ganthet like a regular sized human being kneeling, his robe covering his legs.

Aftermath #2, by Bedard, pencil artists Ransom Getty and Andy Smith, and, good God, eight different inkers: Everyone is still mad at everyone! In this issue, some of the tough guy Green Lanterns decide to get Sinestro's daughter Soranik Natu to help them storm the Guardians' citadel and slot Sinestro. Her boyfriend, Kyle Rayner, decides to stop them by beating them all up, and she and him fight each other for a little bit before the Guardians call a big meeting in which they tell the various Lanterns to stop being a bunch of jerks and go back to work. Kyle is sent back to Earth, but before he goes, he an da few others haul Mogo's remains off and throw them into the sun that orbits Oa.

GLC #61, by Bedard and the art team of Daniel HDR and Keith Champagne: This reads a bit like a fill-in issue, although it was obviously written after the events of "War" were decided. It's a stand-alone story in which one of the GLs recruited at random by the mind-controlled Mogo (Er, none of this makes any sense at all if you didn't read the comics, does it?), decides she want to keep her ring, and reaches out to John Stewart, who everyone else is shunning, on account of his having killed Mogo. They go on an adventure together, broker piece between a race of capitalist insect people and socialist plant people, and she learns a very valuable lesson. Stewart flies past the remains of Mogo at the climax and looks sad; the remains that were just removed and disposed of in the previous chapter.

GLC #62, by Bedard, HDR and Champagne: This is another stand-alone, done-in-one, featuring Kyle and Soranik. The Star Sapphire Miri hatches a dumb plot in order to bring them back together—she attacks an innocent planet in the hopes that their fighting alongside one another to defeat her will rekindle their love—they manage to work together, but then Kyle blurts out that when he looked into a magic love gem that was supposed to reveal to them the loves of their lives, he lied and told Sora he saw her face in it, when he had actually seen his dead girlfriend Jade (who has since been resurrected). They are totally broken up now!

GLC #63, by writer Scot Kolins, and four different art teams, each of whom draw a different "chapter" of this chapter, focusing on a different character. Robot Alpha Lantern Boodika is having a five-page crisis of faith, two funny-looking Lanterns who are supposed to work as prison guards abandon their post to go visit their even funnier-looking fellow Lantern, who is suffering from PTSD. Kyle Rayner, who was ordered to return to Earth about 100 pages ago, is trying to eat a hamburger in the cafeteria and gets in a big fight with some racist aliens. Then the Guardians are like, "Hey, quit having emotional problems and go back to work everyone!" and they all fly away in a two-page spread. That's the end of GLC, until it was rebooted the following month with a new #1, and the new creative team of Tomasi and Pasarin.

The remainder of the book contains three stand-alone Guy Gardner stories taken from the last three issues of Emerald Warriors: Nothing have much of anything to do with "War," or one another and, in fact, they seem to contradict one another. In the first, Guy is on his way back to Earth for "some R and R" and negotiates extending it after completing his mission before taking it on, but he's there for two more issues. All three read like fill-in issues, and as to why they appear here at all, I imagine it's simply because there was nowhere else to put them. The first Emerald Warriors arc filled a single trade, the next few issues were every third chapter of "War," and that left only three issues to collect...not enough to fill their own trade.

So here's what's left...

Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #11, by Tomasi and the great Bernard Chang: Guy intervenes to save an interstellar diplomat, is betrayed and loses his ring, but beats up the bad guy in gets his ring back.

GL:EW #12, by Tomasi, Chris Batista and John Dell: A giant space monster is attacking Green Lantern precinct houses and eating Green Lanterns, so the Guardians ask Guy to recruit a bunch of badass Green Lanterns to go kill it. They do. It's a cool monster design, and some of the Green Lanterns were kinda cool; one looks a lot like one of the Dinosaucers.

GL: EW #13, by Tomasi, Ron Frenz, Dell and Marc Deering: This is a Batman team-up, powered by nostalgia for the Giffen/DeMatteis era of Justice League comics. There's a murder on a high-tech space station, and Batman and Guy converge there to solve the mystery. They do.

And that's the end of this book, and of the Pre-New 52 Green Lantern franchise.

Pre-New 52 review: Green Lantern: War of the Green Lanterns

This hefty, 240-page hardcover collects the early 2011 storyline that ran through all three of the DC's Green Lantern titles at the time, and which, in retrospect, ended up being the climax of writer and franchise-runner Geoff Johns' six-year run on the character and concept prior to "The New 52" reboot/relaunch (A few more issues of the secondary Green Lantern titles would be published, and collected in another trade I'll discuss tomorrow, but they were merely exercises in schedule-filling; the "story" ends with a bang here...although Johns would actually keep telling his part of the story after the relaunch, having apparently earned some sort of reboot-proof pass).

Although each successive chapter of the ten-part storyline (plus a prologue!) appears in a different issue of one of the three Green Lantern books—Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps and Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors—and each chapter's creative team depends on which book it falls in (Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke, Tony Bedard and Tyler Kirkham and Peter Tomasi and Fernando Pasarin are the three writer/penciler pairings on the three books), it's all one, long story.

I had previously read five of the eleven chapters of this story, as I read Green Lantern but not the other two titles, as it was serially published; I was able to follow it remarkably well like that, thanks, in part, to the fact that each book focused on their primary star or stars up until the end of the storyline, in which all of the heroes unite together. It also helped, I imagine, that the story is so simple.

Provided, of course, you know the basics of modern Green Lantern lore, which Johns has made pretty sure most DC readers were familiar with over the course of spearheading the Blackest Night storyline/event.

Krona, a blue alien who rebelled against his fellow blue alien Guardians of the Galaxy one billion years ago, has been traveling the universe and collecting "The Entities," the god-like avatar/mascots of the seven colored emotions of "The Emotional Spectrum" that each of the variously colored Corps use as their power source. These are all monsters that look vagueley like H.R. Giger-designed Pokemon, with names that sound like refjected '90s X-Men: There's Ion, the green whale thing of willpower; Parallax, the yellow bug-dragon of fear, Ophidian, the orange snake of Avarice, and so on.

Krona sticks six of the seven monsters into the Guardians of the Universe, turning them into his possessed servants, and he sticks Parallax into the Green Lanterns' central power battery on Oa, which gives all of the Green Lantern costumes yellow highlights, and turn them into Krona's slaves.

The only ones spared are the four Earth Green Lanterns—Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart and Kyle Rayner—who are immune to Parallax-infection due to prior exposure. But they can't use their rings, so they choose differently-colored rings from the different Corps, and must take on the remaining 7,196 Green Lanterns, plus Krona and the Entity-possessed Guardians, as Sinestro Corpsman Hal Jordan, Red Lantern Guy Gardner, Indigo Tribesman John Stewart and Blue Lantern Kyle Rayner.

And poor John Stewart has to look like an idiot doing it.

I've made fun of Stewart's appearance in this storyline before; but oh man, it's even worse when you read the whole story.

Putting aside the aesthetic nightmare of his costume, putting aside the fact that the one black guy is the Lantern who has to join the Indigo Tribe, even putting aside the fact that no one uses the pink, love-powered Star Sapphire ring because they don't want to wear the skimpy costumes that comes with it,

the fact remains that he's a compassion-powered superhero who wears an army guy uniform and carries a compassion sniper rifle.

I'm afraid that's one element that is well on the "stupid" side of the awesome/stupid balancing act that is Geoff Johns' Green Lantern comics.

Okay, that probably took too many paragraphs to convince you that it's a very simple story. Let me try again. It boils down to this: Villain attacks Green Lanterns, all of the Green Lanterns fight, our heroes come to their sense and get new costumes and powers, they beat the bad guy. It's got all the complexity of a Power Rangers episode, although there's plenty of nuance and texture for those primed to enjoy it.

Me, I like seeing the new costume designs (even if John Stewarts' hurt my eyes and stomach), the possessed-Guardians designs, and all those colors on every page.

It was also a great pleasure seeing the four human Lanterns working together as a team. Despite the fact that they're all members of GL Corps, we only very, very rarely see the four of them interacting; Green Lantern: Rebirth and "The Sinestro Corps War" being the only examples I can think of. Generally Johns has Hal Jordan working solo, and various pairings of the remaining three show up in GLC.

I missed a few things by reading roughly every third chapter the first time I encountered this story. One was the not-too-subtle image of...well, of this, which Tucker Stone pointed out when it was first released.

Stone was right. There is exactly zero context for that panel. In the panel preceding it, we see Guy Gardner lighting a signal fire in the shape of the Green Lantern symbol with his ring. In the panel after it, we see Guy Gardner in the middle-distance, complaining about the weather and regarding a trio of alien animals that look like koala-headed rhinos with polar bear fur.

The other is a pretty big plot point, I guess: John Stewart kills Mogo.

Mogo is, of course, the Green Lantern who is also a planet created by Watchmen creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for a short, one-off sci-fi twist story entitled "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" in 198-fucking-five. (One of the many, many, many things that makes me want to scream about this whole DC/Moore/Before Watchmen thing is the way the publisher has been continually, constantly exploiting every little bread crumb Moore gifted them with decades ago. Mogo is a joke character, yet at this point he's had more appearances than dozens of characters created to anchor their own books, and even appeared in the last Batman cartoon series).

After Geoff Johns' rejuvenation of the fallow Green Lantern Corps concept, Mogo was given a big role in the new structure, as an entity that is responsible for guiding the semi-sentient Green Lantern rings throughout the universe; sending them along their way to wroth recruits.

In this story, which of course features the required stupid fucking joke about whether or not Mogo socializes, Krona is using Mogo to send rings out like crazy, swelling the ranks of his mind-controlled army. John Stewart, the guy with the compassion powers, decides the only way to stop Krona is to put a compassion-bullet in Oa's planet brain, killing/destroying him, over the objections of Kyle.

This is weird, because...

1). John Stewart once destroyed a whole inhabited planet, in Cosmic Odyssey. How many planets are you allowed to destroy before they kick you out of the Green Lanterns...? (Actually, there probably isn't a limit; Hal destroyed all of existence in Zero Hour, and they let him back in the Corps).

2.) It quite obviously wasn't the only way to stop Mogo and Krona, since Krona was mind-controlling Mogo and, a few pages later, Hal and Guy are able to break Krona's mental control over all of the Lanterns. Of course, by that point, Mogo was already dead.

3.) I hate when superheroes find themselves in these "I have to do something shitty for the greater good" stories, because a good superhero should be able to find the third of two options—seeing only two options is a pretty limited way of looking at anything, really—and it's always an artificial reason. Stewart was only faced with that decision because the writers wanted to put him in that situation, and he couldn't come up with a non-dumb solution because either the writers couldn't come up with a non-dumb solution themselves, or because they wanted him to kill Mogo in order to follow up in a later storyline.

Anyway, Ugh.

That aside, it's a pretty good read, and the three writers' voices all mesh very well. The artwork could be more consistent in style—there are large gaps between the styles of Mahnke, Kirkham and Pasarin, plus that of prologue artist Ed Benes—but each of them do a pretty decent job (Mahnke's chapters are by far the prettiest looking, though).

At the conclusion, there are a few pretty big cliffhangers, including Hal Jordan being kicked off the team for killing Krona and Sinestro becoming a Green Lantern, which I know Johns has followed up on in the re-booted Green Lantern, and that made me somewhat curious about the other Green Lantern titles in the post-reboot DCU (Is Mogo still dead? Is everyone still pissed at John Stewart for totally killing him?)

And as with what Johns was doing in Brightest Day, it was clear that he was continuing to build towards future stories, rather than wrapping up the old DCU in order to make a brand-new one (this seems to be wear talk of a post-Green Lantern, "Third Army" to serve the Guardians first comes up).

One thing haunts me, though. At one point, Krona decides that since the Guardians of the Universe suck so bad at their jobs, because they try to run the universe without opening themselves to any emotions, he should make the four emotion-feeling Earth-born GLs the new Guardians, and he even captures Hal and Guy, dresses them in Guardian red robes and covers them with "ancient evolving bandages" that apparently turns people into giant-headed, tiny-bodied Guardians.

It really sucks that Mahnke didn't get to draw Hal, Guy, John and Kyle with giant, wized heads and tiny little floating bodies in robes. For a cover, if for nothing else.

Oh well, maybe I'll win the lottery and can commission Mahnke to draw that for me someday...

Anyway! This is a pretty good Green Lantern story arc, and I for one would like to see all four Green Lanterns get together more often than every few years.

Come back tomorrow night, when I'll waste a chunk of my Fourth of July holiday discussing War of the Green Lanterns: Aftermath, which is so horrible it makes War of the Green Lanterns seem like the complete works of Shakespeare, as illustrated by Michelangelo, on the ceiling of the Vatican.

I like this drawing:

It is, of course, by Kevin Maguire, and it depicts a rather fondly remembered moment from early in his run on DC' Justice League comics, the moment when Green Lantern Guy Gardner gets in Batman's face and wants to go mano-a-bate with him, and Batman casually knocks him cold with, as Blue Beetle excitedly repeats over and over, "One punch!"

Remember?

I like everything about the drawing up top, which would work just fine within the context of that story, if it were somehow magically inserted into it as a splash page (of course, back then Justice League artists used to draw as many as nine panels per page, and splash pages were rare, generally reserved only for one page of each 22-page issue).

I like the look on Batman's face, I like the casual stance he's in, implying the above wallop was just a casual, tossed off punch-in-the-face, I like the way the scallops of his cape frame the lower part of his figure, I like the comic book-y explosion and stars, I like the arc of Guy's body as he flies backwards through the air, folded in half by punch and gravity.

I would just link to the source of the image, but I found it on Facebook, via a comment of a friend who is friends with Maguire, so I'm not sure if you'll be able to see it or not. If so, it's here, and you can see more fine Maguire art here.

Of that black and white Batman-belting-Guy piece, Maguire commented, "One of the few drawings that I am completely satisfied with."

I am completely satisfied with it as well.

Pre-New 52 review: Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors

Even coming off the high of the Blackest Night line-wide crossover in fall of 2010, adding a third Green Lantern monthly series seemed a little overzealous on DC’s part. Superman and Batman only sustained two ongoing monthlies apiece the first 40 years or so of their existence, after all, and the Green Lantern franchise was only a hot one for about five years at the point that they launched Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors, written by Green Lantern Corps’ Peter J. Tomasi and drawn by Fernando Pasarin.

That they launched it at the Marvel-established $3.99 for 22-pages of story price point (Exhibit Y of DC stealing only Marvel’s worst ideas) seemed like market suicide.

Well, as it turned out, the price was quickly adjusted, with #6 dropping down to DC’s $2.99/22 price point, and yet the book was still rather quickly canceled, with #13 being the last issue shipped.

The cancellation, however, seemingly had little to do with there being too many Green Lantern books on the market, but rather with the “New 52” reboot. This particular title didn’t survive, but post-reboot there were four Green Lantern books (GL, GLC, Green Lantern: New Guardians and Red Lanterns, if you’re curious), and the characters and plotlines all survived un-molested.

This collection includes the first seven issues of the series, a storyline that spins directly out of Blackest Night and directly into the “War of The Green Lanterns” crossover series, as Tomasi takes Green Lanterns Guy Gardner, Arisa and Kilowog right where he left them at the end of the “Blackest Night” arc in GLC, teams them up with the goofiest looking Red Lantern, and sends them off to investigate a mysterious event that leads to the villain of the next crossover.

(I’m curious to see how the rest of the series gets collected, as #8-#10 are chapters of “War of The Green Lanterns,” and will therefore likely be collected interspersed with the rest of the comics hosting the other chapters, and then there’s only three issues left of the series, which isn’t enough to fill a trade collection).

I haven’t read any of the post-“Blackest Night” issues of GLC, so I’m not sure if it managed to sustain the intense level of insanity that it had during that story arc (although I sincerely doubt it, given that the stakes would necessarily have to stop escalating at that point), but Tomasi certainly seems to have focused a lot of the bizarre gore and aggressive gross-out moments that characterized that storyline into this new book.

The pacing is much more leisurely, as the trio of Lanterns fly off on a journey into the lost sectors of the universe, where they investigate the presumed death and/or resurrection of one of their own, and a gradual drain on their power rings.

The villain responsible, a sub-villain who gets defeated in this story arc, who serves the villain of “War of the Green Lanterns,” is a big, tall alien with three eyes, long white hair, clothes that look like they were stolen from the closets of an Aztec high priest and Shiva, and a flaming sword made out of bad memories (I think he’s an old Green Lantern character, but I couldn’t tell for sure). He’s also got a bunch of snakes of various sizes, furthering his resemblance to a living version of the sort of idol Indiana Jones might come across.

He’s psychic, and captures and imprisons other psychic aliens in a bizarre but visually arresting manner in order to increase his psychic powers. His plan is to take over the minds of a bunch of Green Lanterns.

I mentioned that the Green Lanterns are teamed up with a Red Lantern in this story (Also, the Blue Lantern who is basically just Ganesh with a trunk tattoo makes a brief but welcome appearance). She’s Bleez, and she’s the one who looks like a pale Barbie doll with skeletal batwings growing out of her back and, for reasons unclear to me, dresses in a Red Lantern uniform that consists of a fetish mask (with little batwings on the side), thigh high, high-heeled boots, and garters.

Being a Red Lantern, she’s full of rage, talks a like the Tasmanian Devil, and vomits burning blood-vomit. It’s hard to tell if you only see her on covers, like the one where she’s showering in blood, where she just seems like an overly-sexualized fantasy that some heavy metal-loving teenager drew in the corner of his spiral ring notebook in 1986 when he should have been taking notes in social studies class, but she’s actually funny.

Like, you have to invest in spending time with these seeming dumb-ass characters to get to the point where you enjoy them, but Bleez, like so much of the Geoff Johns era of Green Lantern comics, is so ridiculous it’s impossible to tell if she’s being presented seriously, or if DC and its writers are making fun of you for reading the comics, or if she’s a self-aware parody or…what exactly. Tomasi’s work on this book, like Johns’ on Green Lantern (and Brightest Day, which was published at the same time as this) is beyond ridicule. Because anything you can imagine as a mildly exaggerated thing they might create or right in order to make fun of their past oeuvre, they have already done it themselves, and to a much greater degree than you thought of (Tucker Stone describes this phenomenon much more succinctly in his review of the latest issue of John’s Green Lantern here; I need to think of a nice, short term for that aspect of Johns’ writing, as I usually simply resort to “stupid/awesome,” which seems to vague).

But how about some examples?

After two issues or so of getting the team together, we get to the gross stuff like snakes eating the eyeballs out of aliens, or the villain puking snakes (Vomitting plays a huge part of the action in this book), or the first battle with Bleez, in which Guy Gardner attempts to capture her in a ring-generated green energy orb and she breaks out by continuing to vomit so much red rage blood puke that she fills the entire orb up and keeps vomiting until it pops like an overfilled water balloon.

Later, there’s a scene where Guy, still somewhat infected by “red” from the previously discussed Blackest Night: Green Lantern Corps, vomits up a few bathubs full of blood, which transforms into a sphere, which then takes the shape of the leader of the Red Lanterns, who delivers a message, before turning back into a sphere (This is apparently how Red Lanterns communicate: talking coughed-up blood sculptures…?)

Then Bleez humps the sphere:

The climactic battle involves Guy and Bleez wrestling the villain in pool filled with snakes, everyone vomiting on each other until the snake guy has two anaconda-sized snakes swallow Guy and Bleez, John Voight-style.

The snakes begin to not so much digest our heroes as integrate them into their own interiors. Guy’s not having that though! He uses his last ounce of willpower to take control of the snake, shove it down the throat of the other snake, the one containing Bleez, pry open it’s jaws from the inside, crawl into Bleez’s snake, swallow her blood-vomit (!!!), push his arms through the eye sockets of their shared snake, grab it’s jaws, and then rip that motherfucking snake to shreds with a burs of blood vomit power! (!!!!!)

I am not making any of that up:

By the time he re-engages the villain, taking a ring-generated ice scream scoop to his third eye, it seems like no big deal.

This book, and particularly that climax, pretty much blew my mind. It’s not as well-drawn as the ultraviolence and Johnny Ryan-level of puke and blood you might find in the other Green Lantern books of the time (The Doug Mahnke-drawn Green Lantern and the Patrick Gleason drawn GLC), but good God, what do you really say to a scene like that, beyond “Bravo.”

Is it decadent and depraved? Is it wildly inappropriate for children? Is it downright bizarre to be appearing in a more-or-less all-ages book? Yes, yes, yes, yes. But once the decision has been made that the best thing to do with the Green Lantern characters is to use their magic wishing rings in order to effect as much gore and violence as would be impossible to do with traditional, non-wish-powered weapons, you kind of have to give Tomasi and Pasarin and everyone involved credit for going as far with an ill-considered decision as they can.

I mean, we’re really only a few years away from an “MR”-rated, Johnny Ryan Green Lantern comic published in a sealed, black plastic slipcover to protect the eyes of any children you accidentally come into a comic book shop and think they see a character they recognize from a Cartoon Network cartoon and want to look at the book, right?

(The blood vomit guys are starring in the Green Lantern cartoon right now, right?)

I end up enjoying this a lot more than I thought I would, as I assumed I would not enjoy it at all. I’m glad I didn’t buy it, but borrowed it form a library. If I had money invested in it, it might not have struck me as quite as enjoyable. There’s a gob-smacking, “I can’t believe this got published” sort of humor to the endeavor, but it’s not the sort of pleasure that’s worth $3, let alone $4 bucks, per 22-page installments of. (And you would have had to invest $26 to get to the climax seven months later anyway).

Even as a trade, this hardcover cost $23, and while I took pleasure in seeing a Green Lantern comic in which the hero drank the vomit of gothed-up alien dominatrix (while calling her a bitch!) while inside a snake choking on another snake, getting powered up by the blood-vomit and/or misogyny like Popeye gets from spinach, I’m not sure it was $23 worth of pleasure. I mean, that’s a two, maybe three days worth of groceries.

Still, Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors: Fucking insanity.

******************

Bonus What The Hell Is Wrong With These People (Me Included) Scene!

When the mind-dominated Green Lanterns attack our protagonists, they capture them in Green Lantern logo cells.

This necessitates Pasarin drawing Aris and Bleez’s breasts pressed up against the “glass” of the cells. Oddly, there aren’t any panels of Guy and Kilowog’s asses or crotches pressed against the glass, just their faces. I guess only the girls though to try breaking out of the traps using their bathing suit areas…?

******************

Zardor. The villain’s name is Zardor. I guess I couldn’t remember it while writing up the review because it is the most generic evil alien name ever.

A few minutes of Internet research reveals that he is an original creation of these particular creators (unless the Internet is wrong, which would be unheard of). So good job guys; he’s actually a pretty cool villain, and a good foil for these characters, given his vomit-based powers.

Not at all liveblogging Batman: The Brave and the Bold

If I had cable, I would totally liveblog Batman: The Brave and The Bold, which is probably the best show on television. Even better than 90210 and Dancing With The Stars, and I didn’t even think such a thingn was possible. But I don’t have cable. So I watch it o Cartoonnetwork.com a couple days later. So I guess this is, like, a delayed liveblogging of the latest episode…? I don’t know what you call it exactly. Anyway, I watched it, and typed some things while I did. And these are those things, if you’re interested…


—What’s this crazy flying house in Dr. Strange Land? Oh, the Library of Infinity, the flying guy in a cape announces helpfully. I hope he identifies himself in a similar fashion.

—He does. It’s Wotan.

—A glowing ankh means…sweet, Dr. Fate! He’s talking with an echo-y British voice. Kinda like the Justice League Unlimited version.

—I still sometimes have a hard time believing we live in a world where you can watch animated Dr. Fate on the TV.

—Where does Batman keep grenades the size of his fists?

—Holy shit, his utility belt also functions as a scabbard for some kinda crazy blue light saber? That is awesome. Have I said awesome too much already? I’m trying to mix it up, with some “sweet”s…..

—I’d say that the whole Escher stairs thing is totally played out now, but I’ve gotta admit, it still looks cool when people run around and get in magic swordfights in such a setting…

—Batman just destroys the fuck out of some magic fire guys, but it’s not actually killing if they’re made out of fire.

—Dr. Fate loses a magic-off against and then just lays out Wotan with a quartet of punches in the face. The message is supposedly that it’s not the tools, toys or equipment that makes the difference, but the person using them (Bats says something along the lines of “It’s not the helmet, it’s the man under it”). But I think the real takeaway here is that sometimes brute force and the application of violence will solve problems that special skills and knowledge can’t.

—And the show hasn’t even started yet! Now the title sequence begins. God I love this show.

—This episode is entitled “The Eyes of Despero.” I wonder who the villain will be?

—Comics writer J. M. DeMatteis wrote it this episode.

—Hey look Green Lantern fans, it’s the GL Corps! There’s your boyriend Hal Jordan, plus Kilowog, Tomar-Re the lizard chicken man, the cycloptic space cucumber with tentacles, the crystal guy who looks like a 20-sided die and has a Mohawk, the guy who’s just a big head with limbs growing out of it…

—“So this is the legendary Green Lantern Corps,” Despero says in a very goo villain-y voice. Shameful confession: I always pronounce “Corps” as corpse in my head while reading it, rather than core.

—What the fuck? Despero has eyes on his palms too? Now that’s just gross.

—More GLC cameos! Ch’pp! (sp?) Salaak! (sp?) Hal’s underage girlfriend! (Maybe. She’s wearing a GL costume instead of the white mini-dress from the comics)

—Meanwhile, on Earth, The Cavalier! That dude doesn’t get the panel-time he deserves in the comics. If I wrote comics for DC, I would have totally pitched a Club of Heroes book spinning out of “Batman R.I.P.” The second or third arc would have been a two-part Cavalier vs. Musketeer story.

—Ah ha, no more of that Hal Jordan bullshit, it looks like this episodes GL will be…Guy Gardner! And G’Nort?!

—The vocal work on Guy Gardner is just perfect. Just the right amount of annoying obnoxiousness.

—Huh. I always pronounced G’Nort guh-nort, but apparently the G and the apostrophe are both silent. I’m learning a bunch about pronunciation in this episode.

—I really like when Batman wears different costumes for different occasions, like this will-fueled Green Latern power suit the GLs whip up for them.

—I don’t care for Sinestro’s moustache in t his. It’s a little too sparse; I like it best when it’s either a John Waters, pencil-thin sort of affair, or a long, whip-like Snidely Whiplash sort of affair.

—G’Nort looks like he has the most comfortable of all the GL uniforms.

—Mogo? Really? Man, have DC and Time Warner ever gotten a lot of mileage out of that one throwaway Alan Moore story from 250 years ago…

—Oh no, it’s Tomar Re’s world! That egg-stroller that one of the space chicken lizard ladies is pushing looks familiar…wasn’t that on an episode of Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes….?

—“One punch!” Oh, DeMatteis, you scamp!

—Woah, Mogo’s fighting Guy “hand-to-hand”…using a mountain!

—Nice to see these GL’s making giant, green glowing objects to fight with. It seems like on Justice League/JLU John Stewart was always just doing boring things like laser beams and bubbles, rather than giant hammers and baseball bats and the like.

—Ha ha, Guy bites! Of course he bites!

—I like the fact that Batman’s version of telepathic combat involves head butts.

GUY GARDNER

likes whatever Ted Kord is having.

Friday Night Fights: When J'onn J'onnz had pupils...

Ted "Blue Beetle II" Kord and Guy "Green Lantern" Gardner step into the square circle to settle their differences, while Batman, Martian Manhunter, General Glory, Fire and Ice watch.

And watching them from a ringside seat beyond time and space, nay, beyond all mortal understanding, is Bahlactus.

That's right, it's Friday night, and that means it's time for...






Just click to better scrutinize J'onn's baby blues...










(From 1991's Justice League America #52 by Keith Giffen, J. M. DeMatteis, Trevor Von Eeden and Randy Elliott, published by DC Comics.)