Like a lot of Green Lantern fans, I’ve been following the adventures of Kyle Rayner since 1994. In all that time, despite never missing an issue, I still haven’t managed read every Kyle Rayner story. There always seems to be another guest spot or crossover or team book that I just never got around to. I figured, why bother? They were side content at best. Maybe they’d be fun, maybe they’d have cool art, but they weren’t really important, because they weren’t in a Lantern book, and the proper Lantern books are where everything important to the character would happen.
That’s what I thought, until I read 2015’s “The Omega Men” by writer Tom King.
The story takes place in Vega, a solar system out of the jurisdiction of the Lanterns. The worlds of Vega are ruled over by the Citadel, a corporation willing to exploit entire global populations to a genocidal degree, if it means assuring its own standing in the galactic market.
The Citadel is opposed by the Omega Men, a rag tag group of extremists made up of people from across Vega who either survived the Citadel’s bloodshed, or just can’t stand living under their boot anymore. The group believes completely in the ends justifying the means, with any loss of life being acceptable as long as it helps contribute to the Citadel’s eventual downfall.
…and then there’s Kyle Rayner, the White Lantern, who decided to show up and save everyone. He agrees to check his power ring at the door, and go meet with the Omega Men to negotiate a peaceful ceasefire.
Everything that happens next is probably among the most pivotal and important experiences of Kyle’s entire life. Because not only is he stripped of his powers and kidnapped by the Omega Men, forced to act as their accomplice, bearing witness to some of the most senseless tragedy you can imagine…but he endures it for more than a year.
Time is important in this story, more important than in most super hero stories, because it means that everything Kyle is witnessing and doing and enduring isn’t some event that’ll pass…it’s the natural state of things, it’s just life in the Vega System. The corruption, the murder, the blood-soaked politics, the evils that can not be stopped or even fought in the conventional way because they’re not villains with an agenda trying to enact their sinister plan. They’re systemic problems rooted in the very core of how everyone in the Vega System live their lives.
Kyle spends the bulk of this story without his ring, reinforcing the idea that he’s literally powerless to enact meaningful change, and instead just has to go with the flow and do what he’s told. Not that he does, mind you. He’s still a Lantern after all. He resists his captors at every turn, he denounces their extremist beliefs, condemns their methods, and still advocates for a peaceful solution. At one point Kyle successfully arranges a meeting where he holds court in front of every influential leader in the galaxy, firmly believing that if everyone just had all the facts, then they’d make the bad things stop and work together to build a better way of life for everyone.
It didn’t go well. Kyle’s a fish out of water, not only because he’s the only Earthling in this book, but also because he’s trying to use classic superhero ideals to sway billions of people who just do not live their lives that way. For generations, everything about their society and their religion has been based on the idea that there can only be two extremes, and only one can be right, and you had better be ready to do whatever it takes to protect what little you have. Simply talking was never going to work, because a lack of information was never the problem. Vega is the way it is because everyone there either wants it to be, or believes it has to be, and you can’t undo a lifetime of experiences with words alone.
…and you’re reading all this, and you’re a Green Lantern fan, and you know the moment is coming. That one, magical moment where Kyle is going to get his ring back, and then everything is going to change. The balance of power will shift, and Kyle will finally have the ability to enact what he’s been wanting to do since the beginning. And that moment comes…and it’s kind of tragic. Kyle’s costume becomes a barometer for his state of mind. He came to Vega as the White Lantern, a literal White Knight in shining armor come to save the day. When he suits up for the first time, after all he’s seen and been through, his costume manifests as a Black suit with some bits of color coursing through it, reflecting how tainted he feels from the experience, the struggle to keep the ring lit a metaphor the emotionally taxing war that he now finds himself fighting. It’s a war of ideals, so no show of force is ever enough to end it decisively. Half a year passes once Kyle gets his ring back, and the only way he can save anyone is to fight their war their way. And by the time it’s over, though he still tries his best to diffuse the final conflict with words that some do listen to…not enough listen, and the war ends with the kind of victory Kyle never wanted to achieve, and his costume remains a very telling shade of Grey. Because he still wants to believe that there’s a better way, that this all could’ve been avoided…but he was just shown for a straight calendar year that no, there wasn’t.
This story takes the concept of Kyle being a classic, altruistic, idealistic super hero and makes it more noticeable than in other books, because unlike with the Green Lantern Corps or the Justice League, where Kyle’s surrounded by characters who share those same values, Kyle’s the only person in Vega who sees the world that way…and that’s fascinating, not because they can tear his values down, but rather because we can interrogate why he built them up so high in the first place. We get a wonderfully well-written scene where Kyle talks about the fact that he was the only person in the history of the Green Lantern Corps who was just handed a ring out of the blue without having to meet any requirements, and how scared he was all the time. How the death of his girlfriend Alex made him triple down on his determination to save lives, to save everyone…and to see what’s been happening in Vega, to see an entire planet reduced to a mass grave while he was off flying around in his shiny white suit playing super hero…it shakes him to the core. It makes him furious with the people who did the killing, it makes him furious with himself for not being there, it makes him furious with God for allowing it to happen. It reminds him that no matter how much power he has or how much good he does, there will always be something like this happening somewhere, whether he knows it or not. It shatters his delusion that a hero can save everyone, and in a very sobering moment forces him to be honest with himself about his role in the universe for probably the first time.
They call him the Omega Lantern in the last few issues of the story. Partly because he’s a Lantern allied with the Omega Men, but also because he’s become a man at odds with himself over how to see the world and how to really save people. The Omega Men and the Lanterns have completely incompatible ideologies, and Kyle has been put in a position where he now has to reconcile both within himself. And to his credit, he works it out pretty well. Every single character from Vega thinks in binary extremes, and carries those beliefs through to their bloodiest conclusion. But the one thing Kyle’s always able to hold onto through all of this is that coming from outside Vega, being a hero, being the White Lantern, has shown him that people aren’t pure extremes. We’re not all one way or the other, we’re not all black or all white. We’re all grey, we’re a mix, we’re both at the same time. And that knowledge is what keeps him from losing who he is in the face of all this…but it also forces him to realize that everything that makes the villain of this arc so awful are qualities that are present in everyone, even Kyle himself.
People always used to call Kyle Rayner DC’s Peter Parker. He’s the everyman hero, his greatest strength is that he’s the most Human. And to be Human is to be flawed. This is a story about Kyle’s flaws. The flaws of his ideology, the flaws of his morality, the flaws of his faith. This is a story that exposes all of the cracks in the armor that he wears to protect himself…the duty of a Lantern, the ideals of a Hero, the symbol that stands for something so great that nobody could actually live up to it. This is a story that exposes the vulnerable person underneath, forces him to reconcile his beliefs and ideals with a universe that could not care less about them…and in doing so, truly makes Kyle Rayner Human.
Something I’ve come to really appreciate is the way Tom King takes the sheen off of super heroes. Usually that kind of thing is limited to some dark subversion of normally idealistic characters, like Injustice or Dark Knight Returns…but that’s not what King does. He takes a look at the history, and adds something that makes sense for the current story while giving a broader context to what came before. I think about Kyle’s origin differently now that I’ve read The Omega Men…actually I think about his entire career as a Lantern differently, because now some dots are connected that just weren’t before. And it does make Kyle a more tragic character, but it also makes him a stronger one, because even though the goal he’s chasing, to save everyone to make up for not saving Alex, even if that’s impossible…trying to achieve it has allowed him to push himself to new heights and do amazing things that otherwise would’ve been out of his reach. Kyle Rayner is now a character that teaches us that our faults expose our limits, and how we deal with those limits open new doors.
This entire 12 issue series is collected into a volume called “The Omega Men: The End is Here”, and I highly recommend reading it for yourself, especially if you’re a Kyle Rayner fan who skipped it, either because it’s just some side book, or you were turned off by the overtly political nature of the story. This is a heavily political story with a ton ripped straight from the headlines, and much like Tom King’s other works, it does not pull punches with your favorite characters…and honestly? Both the story and the characters are better for it.
Comments
Post a Comment