I hate to make this blog so comics heavy, but I haven’t read a novel all the way through in too long. I guess that means I need to take a long trip where I’m not driving. I have an Elmore Leonard book I need to finish. At any rate, this post is pretty much full-on comics. This is to say that the recently released “Sinestro Corps” one shot from DC is as steeped in CD comics continuity as you can possibly be. I am about to plunge the depths of my geekiness.
There are icons in comics, immediately recognizable to almost everyone in this country - Superman, Spider-man, Batman, the Incredible Hulk, and Wonder Woman, are the safest examples. And then there are the next rung down on the ladder, where they are recognizable to the general public, but they may not have been heard of by up to a 5th or a half of that public - The Flash, Aquaman, Iron Man, and [NOTE: don't send me hate mail, as he doesn't belong in this category, but he's in it -- maybe the publicity surrounding his death will change this] Captain America.
Green Lantern, is kind of in the second category, but still I don’t think that many people outside of comics fans actually understand the character, or know who he is. I say this because I’ve gotten strained and confused looks from people who knew about all of the other characters mentioned above, had read comics, and had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned Green Lantern. So already the story starts out without wide appeal to a general audience. That’s fine.
After “Green Lantern: Rebirth,” and the first New Corps miniseries, I feel like GL is ready to take its place as an actual character in the pantheon.
Then the book focuses on Sinestro, who is a purple David Niven, dressed as a court jester, who’s evil. One of the Iconic villains of the DC Universe, Sinestro has always been plagued by the least threatening appearance imaginable. Even Black Manta is a scarier looking character, and he’s Aquaman’s evil counterpart [NOTE: I grew up watching reruns of the old Aquaman cartoon, and even at the age of three, I knew he wasn't that interesting. I think Michael Turner figured it out -- the only way to make people really interested in an Aquaman like concept is to give it a female star. DC should totally do their own version of the Little Mermaid]. So they’ve given him a uniform now, which actually looks interesting, and functional, and makes much more sense than the purple and black get up.
And they’ve been giving him his own group of Yellow Lantern Corps over the past few months. This is perfect. He has always been the kind of character who wouldn’t have left and gone out on his own — he would have gone out and created his own gang, so he could be top dog.
And the characters have been compelling. In fact, this has been, admittedly, the only reason I continued getting the Green Lantern monthly. The story line hasn’t been doing much for me. I dropped the Corps ongoing. There’s too much in space based comics that conspires to make them boring. People writing them focus exclusively on elements that lose their luster quickly, and almost all space based characters are capable of flying without a space ship.
I haven’t seen a story set in space (other than some stories in Invincible) in a long time that actually showed the dangers associated with being there, or showed the majesty or shear size of it. And the only thing worse than a space based comic set in generic, uncompelling space, is a space based comic set exclusively on Earth, as Green Lantern has become.
So, while I haven’t been wowed by the current stories in GL, I felt excited about picking up this one-shot, and hopeful for the story it would bring.
I was beyond impressed. Even if my expectations had not be tempered by disappointments which came before it, I’m pretty certain I would have been extremely happy. It’s probably one of the best GL stories I’ve read in a long time.
It is also much more important than I thought it would be… see below for why.
[SPOILERS FOLLOW! BIG ONES! Also, I think I've done a pretty good job of summarizing several decades of important back-story].
So, I knew that Sinestro would be part of this, and I knew Hank Henshaw (the cyborg Superman who was created for the Death of Superman event that made all of the papers would be in it. [NOTE: for anyone who's reading and doesn't know, Henshaw destroyed Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Green Lantern's home town during that event, leading Hal to go crazy, and become Parallax. As it turned out in the "Green Lantern: Rebirth" series, however, Parallax was just the embodiment of fear, who possessed Hal. This is important, as there's a quiz later]), as he’s in some of the released cover art.
This is, as I say, admittedly all pretty involved DC continuity stuff.
Then they took a step I wasn’t expecting, and the Sinestro Corps grabbed Kyle Rayner [NOTE: formerly the only Green Lantern, following Hal's killing of all the rest of the Green Lanterns while possessed by Parallax]. Kyle has recently become Ion. Ion is like the next generation Lantern, who has internal power and doesn’t need a ring (thereby saving him the need to get unsightly tan-lines on his ring finger). As it turns out, Ion is like Parallax — the embodiment of will power. So Sinestro rips the Ion entity out of Kyle, and replaces it with Parallax, turning Kyle into Parallax.
Now, we’ve gotten to the point where I am almost embarrassed that I even know this stuff.
Pushing past that, and going into even deeper territory, we come to Superboy Prime. I was wondering the other day if they were going to bring him back soon, or just wait for a couple of decades. Well, as it turns out, he’s back. Superboy Prime is such a complex concept, involving Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, and the multiverse, that I’m not even going to try explain it… if you want to learn more, look here.
When I realized that he was being busted out of the Green Lantern prison, I thought that this would be the biggest single addition to this plot. I also thought this would be the weirdest addition to the story.
I was wrong.
[Mother of a SPOILERS below]
On the last page, you discover who is responsible for everything, and it’s the Antimonitor, who has apparently recently been reborn.
You don’t get much more geeky than that… the Antimonitor was responsible for the Crisis on Infinite Earths. This was single most important event in DC Comics history. Consequently, if you haven’t heard of it, I’m surprised you’ve made it this far. I’m not even going to link to it.
At any rate, this is big. It’s surprising. I highly recommend keeping an eye on the GL books for the next few months if you want to follow what’s going on in Countdown, or any of the other big books, because I’m pretty sure this is all going to meld together.