It’s Halloween, and that means I get to dig through Green Lantern’s 80 year history and pull out one of the many, many examples of this franchise telling a pretty cool horror story. And this time around, I decided to pick a fairly recent one, since I’m confidant not a lot of people read it when it came out. The comic in question is “Secrets of Sinister House #1”, a horror anthology published in 2019. And I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t even know there was a Green Lantern story in this until about a month ago. Not many people talk about these holiday anthologies, and a lot of good stuff ends up going unnoticed and getting buried.
The story in question is titled Fear 101, written by Che Grayson, with art by Miguel Mendonca, colors by Bill Crabtree, and letters by Dave Sharpe.
The story centers on Jessica Cruz, a character who suffers from crippling anxiety and agoraphobia. She has her good days, but her bad days can leave her struggling just to get out of bed, buckling under the weight of her own thoughts, of demons swirling around inside her head, telling her lies about being worthless and pathetic, a burden on everyone around her. One of the only people who can help Jessica deal with any of this is her partner Simon, who’s plans to cheer her up with pancakes always gets interrupted by official Green Lantern business. This time, the two of them are tasked with evacuating the crew of a derelict space ship before it gets too close to the nearest star. But when they show up, there’s no sign of anyone.
Something unseen grabs Simon, pulling him away as the walls of the ship move to erase the doorway, as if the ship itself was alive and trying to separate them from each other. All alone, Jessica walks the cold empty corridors, silently stalked by the creatures that haunt her nightmares. She lashes out, but but the fear remains, and it grows, overwhelming her senses, drowning her in thoughts she can’t control…until she sees them. The bodies of her friends, who died all those years ago. Before she had her ring, before she was afraid of the world. They lurch towards her, calling to her, blaming her for what happened to them.
The source of Jessica’s anxiety was witnessing the murder of her friends. She relives that moment every time she closes her eyes, she hates herself for being the only one who survived, and she’s tortured by the irony that the power she has now could have saved them all easily, if only the ring had come to her sooner. But in the end, it’s that regret that saves her in this moment. She finds Simon, strung up and helpless, at the mercy of the same demons coming for her. And just like that, something inside Jessica snaps. She couldn’t save her friends that day, she didn’t have the power to do anything…but she does now. Another friend is in danger, and she has a Green Lantern ring on her finger. And Jessica uses it like Simon’s life depends on it, letting out the biggest surge of power she can, in every direction at once, hitting whatever’s out there as hard as possible. The surge destroyed a Yellow Lantern power battery, who’s energy had permeated the ship, causing Jessica’s fears to physically manifest.
…and just like that, it’s over. The length of the story is a bit of a problem. It’s only ten pages, and you can tell they were running out of space at the very end. If it could’ve been eleven or twelve pages instead, I think the story could’ve finished much stronger. Though I am happy that she managed to keep all the pieces of the friendship bracelet Simon gave her at the beginning of the story. Actually, friendship is a much bigger theme than I thought the first time I read this. So much of what Jessica experiences every day stems from what she saw happen to her friends, what she wishes she could’ve done for her friends, and now what she needs to do to save her newest friend. It’s why the bracelet was shown to be broken when she hit her lowest point, and why the pieces reform and surge with willpower when she hits her highest.
They chose to go with a story that’s a mixture of Nightmare on Elmstreet and Event Horizon, which both plays with the cosmic nature of Green Lanterns while also being a perfect fit for Jessica’s character. I also really appreciate the legally distinct “Nightmare on Oak Street” shirt she’s wearing on the first two pages. The other visual detail that I loved a lot was the creative use of panel borders. It only happens twice, on page one and page nine, but in both cases the framing of the page matches the personality of what’s going on. The first two panels have almost no separation at all, reinforcing the claustrophobic sense of being overwhelmed, while the third panel is practically melting as Jessica sinks deeper under the weight of her nightmares.
Page nine is almost the polar opposite of page one. Instead of being at the mercy of her anxiety, Jessica is front and center, asserting her will over everything else on the page, pushing her fears away from her while her power forms the panel borders…she is literally, physically dictating how her story is being told, even if only for just one page. But for that one page, she took back control of her life, and proved to herself that she has the ability to be strong.
The story does take some liberties with how the rings work, with Jessica’s power level going up or down based on her ability to deal with fear in the moment, which isn’t how that works, but it is an effective narrative device to reflect her inner turmoil. That said, it’s something that’ll likely bug some fans, and isn’t really even necessary, since we’re given so much information about what’s going on in Jessica’s mind already. But an idea they hit on here that I actually love a lot is the notion that if you take a yellow power battery, or a yellow ring, and just leave it somewhere long enough, it’ll start to saturate the area with fear. These things are literally just containers filled with pure fear, so the idea that over time it could seep into the structure of a ship or a building, and have an effect on the minds of anyone who enters…this is a phenomenal potential explanation for haunted houses in the DC Universe.
…and, at the end of the day, I really like how this story is a throwback to the Simon and Jessica Green Lanterns book, which had ended almost exactly one year before this anthology was published. I just re-read that entire series earlier this year and I really miss seeing these two play off of each other, and I liked having Lanterns who stayed on Earth and who’s families were part of the ongoing supporting cast. Simon and Jessica are both about to get a lot more mainstream popularity thanks to the tv show coming to HBO Max, so hopefully that also means the return of the formula that worked so well for them once their book hit its stride.
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