We’ve seen what’s become of Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps and Green Lantern: New Guardians in the post-Geoff Johns era, and the final two entries into the aftermath of “The Wrath of the First Lantern” have now arrived – Red Lanterns #21 and Larfleeze #1. How do they fare? Let’s check ’em out, shall we?
Red Lanterns has felt like… well, the red-lanterned stepchild of the GL family of books. Every time I picked up the book, all that ever seemed to be happening was Atrocitus and Bleez were bickering at each other, and they were all just hanging around on their planet Ysmault, posturing and preening about their ocean of blood and rage and blah blah blah. It was entirely ignorable. These are the super-pissed fuck-you lanterns, and you’d think their book would be full of revenge stories and violent justice, but they just dicked around yelling at each other, and Red Lanterns #21, now featuring writer Charles Soule and artist Alessandro Vitti, started out as more of the same.
It opens with Atrocitus murdering a dog-lantern named Phist, claiming the usual culty rot about how “by his blood shall we prosper,” but also because the old Guardians had been spying on them through a listening device planted inside him, and being a dog-lantern, he had no idea. Thankfully, we leave the posturing and jump ahead a month to Oa, where Hal Jordan asks Guy Gardner to go undercover and be the new eyes and ears of the GLC within the Red Lantern Corps, seeing as how Guy has sported the red ring before. Guy responds with how much it sucks to be a Red Lantern – which we’ve seen throughout most of the series (see the aforementioned sitting around lakes of blood and yelling a lot). Checking back in with the Reds, they’re doing some more culty summoning of new red rings to get new recruits, and then they all start fighting the human RL named Rankorr, because of course, he’s the special one with fancy construct powers that the others don’t have, because HUMANS ARE ALWAYS SO VERY VERY SPECIAL and they want to drink his blood in a “communion of rage” and get those powers. Ugh, Red Lanterns, why you gotta be so overblown like that?
Cut back to Oa, and we get a Green Lantern who is also a drink umbrella, named after a swizzle stick.
Cut back to Ysmault, and apparently, Rankorr has outfought all the other Red Lanterns and gets to keep his blood and toys because HE IS SO SPECIAL, and now they’re planning to wait for new recruits so they can spread their “blood gospel.” That’s when Guy Gardner shows up to join them, Atrocitus calls bullshit, then Guy beats him nearly to death and takes his ring and apparently his Corps.
Soule’s addition of Gardner to the RLC might jazz up this book a bit. The cover declares Guy is a traitor to two Corps – and during the fight with Atrocitus, we see him resenting this mission because he sees it as Hal telling him he’s expendable. So is he taking over the RLC and about to direct their anger not at his old friends in the GLC, but to actual bad guys deserving of hate? Whatever the plan, Mr. Soule, get them the hell off Ysmault. Get out there and red it up somewhere! Get revenge on some jerk what has it comin’! If nothing else, maybe the Gardner regime will shake them out of their creepy culty pomp and circumstance and get them into the business of comeuppance. Vitti’s artwork is pretty solid, although some of his human faces look excessively lumpy at times, despite being amusingly expressive. Plus, there’s a swizzle-stick umbrella lantern now. So maybe there’s even some hope for this book.
And now, for something completely different. Larfleeze #1 reunites the beloved comedy team of Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis from the halcyon Super Buddies days of yore for the slapstick adventures of the one and only Orange Lantern of Avarice – an ugly dog-faced guy who speaks in the third person and keeps his own butler/slave in the form of a sarcastic green dude named Stargrave. This is straight out of the backup stories in Giffen’s late, lamented series Threshold, complete with the kinetically-charged artwork of Scott Kolins. Giffen gave us New 52 versions of Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew in that book – so what are the plans for this one?
Comedy.
The whole issue is Larfleeze lamenting that he accidentally destroyed all of the treasure he’d accumulated over the eons of his life, including his Orange Power Battery, and it’s looking like he’s suicidal over it. What gets him out of his doldrums? Re-telling his triumphant life story. Well, triumphant in his words, but as we see in flashbacks, humiliating and awful in actuality. It seems he’s from the planet Sh’pilkuzz (yes, they’ve named his home planet after the Yiddish word for impatience and agitation), born to parents Larfloozee and Larflem, and into a family of seventeen children (not counting the six kids they sold into slavery) that found him exceptionally ugly and beat him regularly starting at 10 months – that is, until the Lakadakians conquered Sh’pilkuzz and forced everyone into slavery. This included apparently Larfleeze breeding with a slave woman named Bronkia, meaning we’re likely to see Larfleeze-spawn in the future of this book. So be prepared.
Anyway, after many trials and much hardship, Larfleeze finishes his origin story, in time for Stargrave to realize that apparently, he no longer NEEDS the Orange Power Battery, and that his body has become an organic source of the energy. Then he’s attacked by a giant glowing space dog.
Giffen and DeMatteis are in fine form with their freewheeling piss-take on the greed-fueled MINE MINE MINE lantern, holding over the same tone Giffen had in Threshold, although not connecting at all with the fact that over in Green Lantern and GLC, he’s apparently launching an all out attack on Oa. Maybe this is after that, maybe this is before that. We ain’t know. What we do know is that if we can’t have more Threshold, Larfleeze will hold us over for a while. Hopefully, DC won’t see fit to meddle with the formula and will allow the veteran writers to carve out their own corner of the DCU this way. They let Scott Lobdell do it, for pete’s sake. Maybe we’ll get some resolution to The Hunted stories tied in with this book. Let’s hope so.
