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Aw, what the hell, since we’re on the topic: Red Lanterns #1 is perfectly okay for what it is, and ‘what it is’ is the genre commentary segment of the DC relaunch program, a superhero-tropes-taken-to-garish-extremes kind of thing. Like, the issue opens with evil aliens torturing some smaller creature, and then a small cat in a spandex superhero costume bursts in from the void of space with a GRRRRRR, molten blood gushing from its jaws, swinging a fuzzy paw to pop the head torturer in the kisser before latching onto its head and puking its scalp off — even as dialogue insists the cat tore his scalp off, leaving me to wonder if penciller Ed Benes simply elected to draw a gooshing blood effect on his own to obscure the point of impact, him being one of those superhero artists who’re considerably better at drawing hulking dudes grunting and flexing than communicating bodies in actual contact, leaving his fight scenes kind of like pornography where nobody touches — before the comic’s nominal rage-powered hero Atrocitus explodes through a wall, musing “[i]t’s though I’m simply going through the motions” before skewering a guy on a snapped wooden pole. Naturally, Atrocitus’ motivational crisis mirrors comments by a torturer only six pages before: “Zuuq, my friend, your palate has become jaded.”
The concept is understandable enough, particularly after Atrocitus decides to reboot his life by tapping into the endless succession of reactionary assaults that are the bread & butter of the classic superhero concept — Hawk & Dove-style seething brothers on the thug-laden streets of Harry Brown’s England are set up as audience surrogates — but there’s a hereditary problem in the form of Green Lantern franchise boss Geoff Johns. Put simply, there’s absolutely nothing that Milligan can think to do in this comic that Johns hasn’t already established in earlier Green Lantern sagas — puking space cat and all — utterly stripped of critical signal. Essentially, Milligan is superseded, because Johns acknowledges that superheroes can be violent and absurd – in fact, he embraces it. The very ‘project’ of his writing, I’d argue — and I haven’t read all of it, but I think I’ve seen enough — celebrates the jarring, surreal, potentially off-putting aspects of superheroes-qua-superheroes as part of the show, pitting his virtuous he-man squares against any aberrant threat, the nastier the better, safe in the knowledge of the devout fan that any ugly extreme can only reflect back upon the goodness of the True Hero in that final, inevitable moment of triumph.
As such, Milligan’s work seems a little irrelevant, ragging on violent superheroes in the context of a side-series to a franchise premised in large part on violence as an attractive but eventually inferior alternative to Hal Jordan, whom Milligan is evidently not handling. Moreover — in case you don’t give a shit about all this shared universe context — it’s not a very fresh or interesting concept on its own, full of violence-as-sex and superteam dysfunction – probably the best part is how thoroughly the Sexy Girl member of Atrocitus’ Red Lanterns is framed as completely repulsive and unpleasant, her writer perhaps anticipating he’d be teamed with a penciller who can’t help but draw her in lip-parted contrapposto 2/3 of the time; the conflict is kind of funny, which is how I’d describe the issue as a whole.
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Ha! Turns out Jog wrote a perfect review of Peter Milligan and Ed Beanz’ Red Lanterns in the comments to one of his own posts.
Damn, that Jog kid’s good. Someone should really pay him to write about comics or something…
