Here we are with issue four of Green Lantern written by Geoffrey Thorne and art by Tom Raney and Marco Santucci, and…everybody, page one made this entire issue worth it for me. Something I have wanted for decades was for someone at DC to follow up on the series Green Lantern Mosaic, acknowledge its importance to who John Stewart is as a character, and just tell us what happened to all of it after that series ended…and after almost thirty years, Geoffrey Thorne is finally doing it. This page takes place right around the end of Emerald Twilight, just after Hal Jordan destroyed the Central Battery and became Parallax. By this point, John had ascended and become a being on the level of a Guardian, but now having lost two worlds, John rejects what he’s become, and Ganthet agrees to seal it all away, explaining why John was his regular old self after Emerald Twilight, and why he’s never talked about any of it. John references losing two worlds, the first obviously being Xanshi, and presumably the second is the Mosaic world, the section of Oa populated by dozens of alien cities from different planets. That might actually be where this page takes place…the wreckage around them looks like Earth construction, and there was an Earth town among the Mosaic cities. That may even be what Ganthet is looking at, smoldering in the distance. We never found out what exactly happened to all of those cities…after Green Lantern Mosaic ended, the Central Battery blew up, and then a little while later the entire planet Oa blew up. I had always hoped that Ganthet managed to move them before that happened, but now it seems likely they may have been destroyed when Hal blew up the Central Battery.
But all of that was a flash of memory that came to John while he was knocked out…a Qinoori raider shot him at the end of last issue, and now John’s got to take a different approach to dealing with this mess before the local population pays the price. And Remember that guy from issue one, who dresses kind of like a Lantern and gave me vibes like he’s from the future or something? Well John just happens to run into another guy, wearing the same outfit, at just the right moment, who has detailed knowledge of events that’re about to transpire, and he’s super concerned about making sure John doesn’t get captured at this critical moment. This guy could not be screaming time traveler any harder. Also, he showed up inside the barrier, which I’ll remind you is so hard to do that it took the combined power of one thousand Green Lanterns just for John to make it inside.
One of the Qinoori mentions receiving “grace from the golden ones”, which makes it sound like they’re on some kind of holy mission, possibly tying back to the worship of the New Gods we saw during Future State, although that was the Khund and not the Qinoori. Saqari does briefly attack a Qinoori raider with her psychic hair tendrils, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she got some useful information from that brief link with his mind. It probably wasn’t smart of John to announce to the whole planet that he’s the reason all this violence came to their home, but at least he’s got a ship now, so he can leave whenever he’s ready.
Things get heavy when John finds the head of Green Lantern RRU-9-2…it seems his database is what the Qinoori have been using to get intel on all the Quest Lanterns. All one thousand and one of them have bounties on their heads, and as of right now, three hundred of those bounties have been closed. And John sits there listening to a list of names of his fallen friends, next to a jar filled with their rings. We get a surprising number of familiar names here…Nautkeloi and Palaqua have been background characters in the Corps forever, most silver age crowd shots of the Green Lantern Corps have these two in them. Ash-Pak-Glif is gone. Vath Sarn, a character who’s been a mainstay of Green Lantern Corps stories since way back in Green Lantern Corps Recharge in 2005. And the list keeps growing when we cut over to Oa, where Jo is getting an update on the United Planets’ search for the depowered Lanterns. Both Isamot Kol and Arisia Rabb are confirmed dead…again, these are big names in the Green Lantern Corps. There was a time where Isamot, Vath, and Arisia helped define an entire era of the Green Lantern Corps ongoing series, along with Princess Iolande who was found alive, as was Rot Lop Fan the F Sharp Bell. I am really surprised…I guess I just assumed that the Corps has enough nameless, faceless cannon fodder that any named characters who’ve held the spotlight before would be relatively safe, but…no, they’re not. And it mostly happened off-panel, too, I think we got a single panel of Isamot and Arisia when it happened, but that was it. I can’t rule out that this’ll get taken back somehow before the story’s over, but for right now, this sends a pretty clear message that the danger is real…though not so real that I’m all that nervous for the Human characters, but the likes of Kyle and Jessica have so much potential for deep character exploration in this story that they really don’t even need the possibility of death hanging over them to make it engaging.
Speaking of Human Green Lanterns, Jo is trying her best to keep Keli in line while sorting this whole mess out. Keli even gets a mini version of Jo’s uniform, which she hates. It’s interesting to watch Keli struggle now that she’s finally made it to Oa…up until now, she’s only been surrounded by her peers, by other teen heroes who played by their own rules and viewed her as an equal. Now she’s surrounded by adults who act professionally, and it’s clashing majorly with everything Keli thinks and wants. Remember, she’s only eleven years old, she’s a literal child wielding a ridiculous amount of power, and she isn’t meshing that well with the way the adults are expected to do things.
…now there is one thing that happened between Keli and Jo that might be nothing, but it came up twice, and is actually really odd. Keli is bilingual, and often inserts some Spanish when she’s speaking English. Jo points out that her ring’s translator isn’t converting the Spanish to English, which is really strange. Usually if a ring can’t translate something, it’s because that language isn’t in the database, or there’s some special quirk like the fact that Rot Lop Fan is blind and also comes from a sector of eternal darkness, so he has no concept of light, therefore they literally couldn’t explain to him what a Green Lantern is without first making the rings produce a specific sound, thus he came to understand them as the F-Sharp Bell Corps. But none of that should apply to Keli, because she’s just speaking Spanish. And Jo’s ring confirms that the translator is working correctly. So why isn’t it translating her? This could be nothing, this could just be them calling it out and then moving on, because they didn’t want to lose this character trait of Keli’s just because everyone’s wearing a universal translator on their finger…but I don’t know. Also, for the record, all of Keli’s untranslated dialog roughly translates to:
1 I understand
2 you are alone there…so alone
3 monster!
4 it’s a monster and you know it!
5 He did this! Hurt all these people! Nobody is doing anything about it!
6 Well, I’m going to do something!
7 I’ll do something!
That outburst of hers is in response to seeing the Guardians who are either currently dying, or they died already but slightly in the future? It’s strange, just know that the Central Battery exploding really messed them up. Right now the top five suspects are the Red Lanterns, the Reach, the Controllers, Sinestro, and the Bright Circle. Most of those are obvious choices…Sinestro and Atrocitus both hate the Guardians more than anyone, the Controllers have always wanted to replace the Guardians, the Green Lantern Corps has always been the main threat to the expansion of the Reach and their Beetles…all of that checks out, but I have no idea who or what the Bright Circle is. I tried looking for it but couldn’t find anything, so it’s possible that this is either a super obscure reference, or it could just be one of the many new characters and concepts Geoffrey Thorne is introducing into this run. If you know something I don’t, please tell me in the comments below this video.
Anyway, Keli freaks out and flies away to go fight Sinestro, which I’m sure will go great, but more importantly: Counselor Fel, of Colu, has been going over all the data from the Central Battery explosion, and she found something very interesting. The Central Battery wasn’t simply blown up, it was deconstructed, disassembled on a quantum level. She also says that getting rid of the battery this way shouldn’t have resulted in all the rings suddenly dying, but we’re going to leave that alone for right now, because how energy gets from a Central Battery to a power ring is so much more complicated and contradictory than you could ever imagine, and it’ll have to be its own video at some point. But I want to focus on what actually happened to the Central Battery, because as crazy as this sounds…it may not have actually been destroyed at all.
If you wanted to destroy the battery, you could have just blown it up. You wouldn’t even be the first one, blowing it up works really really well. Instead, you choose to make it look like it blew up, when really it was being disassembled on a quantum level, an action that sounds a lot like the first step in some kind of teleportation. A couple pages earlier, Simon and a United Planets security detail reported in from the science cells. Seventy percent of prisoners escaped, but the sorcerers from issue one are still locked up tight, including their leader Yridian, who specializes in opening doors…and not only does that mean she can probably break out whenever she wants, but chooses to stay, the act that got her imprisoned was using her magic to force open a portal deep within Oa, which is what caused the big monster attack from issue one. Yridian is even sitting in her cell giving clues…she says “Every storm has an eye, this one sees yer fate. All burned or dead, black blind with dread, ye’ll ne’er shut the gate”. Not only does that make it sound like she’s at the center of all this, it sounds like the portal she opened is still there. So we’ve got a big magic door deep below the surface of the planet, and a Central Battery that’s freshly disassembled. So the question is…where would it go? Maybe inside the giant mystery barrier that nobody can breach or see into. All those bounty hunters seem pretty determined to kill the Lanterns and collect their rings…maybe the person who put out that bounty needs a thousand rings because they’ve got a battery that can power them.
There is another possibility I want to throw out there. This might be a reach, but I can only think of one time when a Green Lantern has been teleported somewhere by first being violently disassembled and then put back together on the other side…the time Kyle Rayner was kidnapped by the Sinestro Corps, when a yellow ring landed on his finger and brought him to the Anti-Matter universe of Qward. Does that mean Keli’s on the right track, going after Sinestro? I don’t think so…if he brought down the Guardians, he’d want the whole universe to know it, and besides, Sinestro has always believed in the potential of the Green Lantern Corps, he’d never purposely destroy it. So no, I don’t think it’s Sinestro…but it could be his suppliers. The Weaponers of Quard always get lumped in with Sinestro, but they’re really an independent faction, and actually hate Sinestro after he enslaved and killed so many of them to get his Corps of Yellow Lanterns started. They could be working on their own, or with someone else. They could’ve even built Keli’s gauntlet.
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