Green Lantern Now Has the Power to Suck

•Word on the street is that the Green Lantern movie is not so good.  All the more reason, I suppose, for DC Comics to be grateful that September brings a fresh start for its fifty-two ongoing superhero comics, all rebooting from issue #1. 

•But even then, the comic book Green Lantern may prove mockable.  There’ll be not just a Green lantern corps but multiple colors, already reminding at least one commenter of...Care Bears. 

•I guess that’s preferable to everyone being reminded that the idea of the space police team known as the Green Lantern Corps was actually heavily influenced by the eugenics-themed 1920s novels by E.E. “Doc” Smith about the similar interplanetary force known as the Lensmen (whose leaders, called the Watchmen, even fretted over things like the spines and posture of females who might mate with Lensmen leaders). 

•The Jedi also seem to have been influenced by the Lensmen, though if the idea of the Jedi had actually existed back in the early twentieth century, maybe they would have looked a bit like these steampunk Star Wars models.

•One Green Lantern Corps member who presumably won’t be seen so much anymore is the recently-killed sentient planet named Mogo (created by Alan Moore in the story “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize”) – but he lives on in the new animated film Green Lantern: Emerald Knights.  And apparently one of the villains on that DVD is voiced by Rowdy Roddy Piper, star of They Live, among other things. 

•I, of course, have a soft spot for the Green Lantern villain Krona – who I believe is glimpsed in the Green Lantern movie – since I used him in the ten-page DC Comics story I wrote years ago (and I dare say the anti-Green Lantern Corps I created, the Hand of Krona, would work well on screen, hint hint royalties hint hint). 

•But who would win a fight between Krona’s multi-colored

spectrum gauntlet and the similarly multi-hued and reality-altering Infinity Gauntlet of the deathgod Thanos, briefly glimpsed in Marvel’s Thor movie?  What if they were being worn by the same person, and his hands were fighting a la Night of the Hunter?  What if Death were wearing the Infinity Gauntlet and the life-protecting elemental named Swamp Thing were wearing Krona’s gauntlet?  Vice versa?  OK, what happens if both gauntlets are right-handed but worn by the same person?  What if that person is Mogo?  I’ll stop now. 

•An interview on Newsarama with DC Comics editors Harras and Berganza is vague but says the editors possess a five-year timeline for the fledgling so-called DCnU and that it includes several major previously-depicted story arcs such as “Death in the Family,” “The Killing Joke,” “Identity Crisis,” “Blackest Night,” and “Brightest Day” (no word on bigger, time-altering Crises).  They explicitly refuse to answer the question of whether Superman being called the first superhero in ads means there was no Justice Society of America back in WWII, before Superman’s debut five years ago, saying you’ll just have to read and find out.  (Though I suggest we don’t.)

I wouldn’t mind some simplification and the edict that “no crazy time-shit ever happened,” if they tidily cleaned up all that in one swoop and kept things consistent in the future.  (It’s not like we’d be sacrificing the Anti-Monitor's nuanced psychological growth as a character or something.)  But one friend of mine fears they’ll jettison all the old, fun stuff while keeping all the recent maimings, rapes, murders, and deaths-by-zombie. 

I think the weirdest aspect of them reducing superhero history to a five-year timeline – while keeping all four of Batman’s male former and current sidekicks active – is that it means Batman must have gone through about one sidekick per year, apparently an intensive one-year internship that turns young boys in rapid succession into Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, and the current Robin (Bruce Wayne’s son by the assassin Talia, who will appear in next year’s Dark Knight Rises movie).  Never a dull moment with Batman.