Green Lantern Corps #11 – Review

By: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Fernando Pasarin (pencils), Scott Hanna (inks), Gabe Eltaeb (colors)

The Story: Apparently, some people do escape the Alpha Lanterns.

The Review: If you’ve never had a violent quitting experience in your life, let me just say I recommend it.  It’s actually one of the more satisfying and empowering moments you’ll ever have.  Besides giving you the opportunity to stand up for yourself, which requires you to summon up some necessary-for-life backbone, it also scratches every itch you ever had to stick it to your overbearing, crazy-pants boss.

Totally different context, but that’s the general sense of satisfaction and empowerment you get out of watching the day-to-day Green Lanterns rebel against the increasingly brittle Alphas.  Even Salaak, of all corpsmen, gets in on the game.  At first he uses a pretense of regulation to disobey Boodika’s orders, not even flinching when she threatens dismissal and incarceration, then he goes beyond passive resistance, downright ordering other Lanterns to “Engage Alpha Lanterns!”  And when Salaak gets uppity with you, you have to be on the wrong side.

Green Lantern Corps #8 – Review

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By: Peter J. Tomasi (writer), Fernando Pasarin (penciller), Scott Hanna (inker), Gabe Eltaeb (colorist)

The Story: This promotion better come with some cosmic benefits—health and dental!

Thgge Review: Guy Gardner reminds me a lot of a certain type of dude I used to know back as an undergrad: loud, strident, and not afraid to voice half-formed opinions and act on impulse.  They were some of the most irritating human beings I have ever known in real life, but they were also some of the most big-hearted as well.  You could always count on them to injure themselves to help you out—mostly because the risk of injury never occurred to them in the first place

Perhaps that’s the nature of Guy’s appeal.  Even when he flies off the handle and does something crazy, he always has your back, and since he lacks any skill with tact, you can always rely on him to be straight with you.  As a consequence, he reveals underneath all that noise and erratic behavior, there’s a very strict code of honor he adheres to.  For anyone else, refusing to let the Yellow Lantern battery to even be buried standing would be a pointless act of symbolism; Guy’s violence and conviction make it clear even his most symbolic acts make a worthy point.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Guardians choose to honor him as they do in this issue.  They certainly make the accurate observation that for all of Guy’s spitting in the face of authority, he never threatened the “emotional and physical fabric of the corps” the way Hal Jordan does on a constant basis.  The evidence speaks for itself within the scene; Guy may not think much of the Guardians’ discipline (“—here are my wrists—slap away.”), but far from undermining it, he voluntarily submits to it.