Hey everybody, it’s time to talk about Green Lantern #7 written by Geoffrey Thorne, art by Tom Raney and Marco Santucci with Randy Owens on finishes, colors by Mike Atiyeh, and letters by Rob Leigh.
Lonar transports John billions of years into the past, to witness the first encounter between the Guardians of Oa and the New Gods. In addition to having some level of mastery over the entire Emotional Spectrum, the Oans are using weapons and armor identical to what they would eventually give the Manhunters, which is really interesting because between the armor, the guns, and the blue faces, that Manhunters were designed to look like the Guardians, they made them in their own image, which adds a few more layers of symbolism onto the genocidal rampage that the Manhunters would eventually go on.
The Oans decided to intervene in a battle between Apocalypse and New Genesis because they believe all New Gods to be chaotic beings of magic that must be erased. And Ganthet is ready to use the same weapon that was unleashed on Oa in the first issue of this series, but Highfather tries to reason with him, leaving them all open to a sneak attack from Uxas, the guy who would someday become Darkseid.
John, meanwhile, isn’t having any of this. Not only does he have no idea why Lonar brought him here, they’re witnessing past events that never happened. Nothing like this has been recorded in the Book of Oa, and Lonar is just talking around all of John’s questions instead of giving him answers. Regardless, John can’t sit there and watch as the Guardians and New Gods get mowed down, so he punches Uxas in the face, before getting shot with a godkiller weapon. But instead of dying, John’s body is transformed into a being made of green energy, as if his physical form was burned away by the blast, and this was underneath. When Lonar brings them back to the present, John seems whole again, and is wearing a new costume with bright green power radiating from his chest and eyes. He asks Lonar what this is, and Lonar responds that it’s “evolution, and yours has waited far too long”.
This is a big deal, because this seems like the return of John’s Guardian status, the power that he attained at the end of Green Lantern Mosaic but was retconned away immediately afterwards. I also think Geoffrey Thorne quietly retconned John’s origin story in this issue. Unlike Hal, who was chosen by the ring, John was hand picked by the Guardians, and Green Lantern Mosaic told us that it was because the Guardians saw John’s potential to ascend to a higher level. Well this issue let the Guardians literally see John’s ascension with their own eyes, billions of years before he was even born. That’s why they knew to look for him, hell it’s probably why they deem Earth to be so important in the first place. I can’t wait to see this expanded on, because not only is this huge for John Stewart personally, it’s an easy jumping off point to expand the mythology of the Guardians and give new context to a lot of their history.
Over in the second half of the issue, Jo gets Simon and Keli safely back aboard the United Planets cruiser so they can head back to Oa. Simon was able to confirm that the Yellow Lantern he dealt with on New Korugar was Jessica Cruz, a fact that Jo wants to keep from the rest of the United Planets since the situation is tense enough as it is. Ameyra Khalan, the Thanagarian captain of the Untied Planets Brigade, is eager to prove that her forces can do the Green Lanterns job better than the Lanterns ever could, and she remains fairly hostile to any Lanterns trying to undermine her authority. The only thing keeping this tenuous working relationship alive is Jo’s status as the defacto representative of Oa on the United Planets Council.
Jo and Simon get messages from Oa. Iolande and a few other recovered Lanterns want to know what’s going on so they can help, and Counselor Fel found some disturbing information while restoring the Guardians archives that may explain what happened to the Central Battery, and doesn’t want to risk discussing it over a comm signal that someone could intercept.
But all of that will have to wait, because the doctors helping Keli tried removing her gauntlet and all hell broke loose. The entire ship is flooded with constructs of Keli’s friends from Young Justice. As Jo and Simon fight their way to the medical bay, they notice that none of the constructs seem to be affecting Simon. Out of everyone Keli’s lost, Simon is the one person she was able to actually save, so her constructs won’t harm him making him the one person who can reach her hospital bed and calm her down.
And we end on the title “Deus Novus Viarum”, which is Latin, and I kept getting different translations for it, such as “God is New and Varied” and “God is New Ways”. “Deus novus” can mean “new god” which seems right considering this story, and “viarum” can translate to “roads”, so I think the title might be something closer to “Path of the New God”. But I know next to nothing about translation so don’t take my word for it.
Ok, so, we are getting very close to the end of this first arc, and I fully expect that we could start getting actual answers to the big questions within the next issue or two, so it’s time for one last round of theories. As I’ve said before, this is all for fun, and I’m fine with being wrong as long as the real answers end up making it a good story. That said, there are a few things that I feel totally confidant about, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
First let’s talk about the barrier surrounding the Dark Sector. The barrier is made of eruptions in The Bleed and Hypertime. Just so everyone listening is on the same page, The Bleed is the space between universes. Whenever there’s a Crisis event and the sky turns red, that’s the bleed, you’re seeing it because the universal barriers are weak. As for Hypertime…the usual model of alternate timelines is that you have one main timeline that branches off into two different versions, two different timelines, that both continue on forever. With Hypertime, that divergent timeline only goes on for a little while before merging back in with the main timeline.
I think the reason John could travel to a past event that never happened is the same reason the events of this series don’t line up perfectly with Future State…some of this story takes place in one or more divergent Hypertimelines. And if that’s true, it could solve one of the biggest complaints that fans have had about the book in recent months: the random off-panel deaths of fan-favorite characters. Hypertime would allow Geoffrey Thorne to have it both ways…he’s said many times now that all these deaths are real and will not be undone. Well the original purpose of Hypertime was to explain inconsistencies in continuity, meaning that if a character dies in a branching Hypertimeline, that would not affect the original version of them in the main timeline. So the deaths would be real and permanent, they just wouldn’t be the main versions of those characters.
Now let’s talk about the Central Battery, because I’m 100% certain that the Battery was taken, and everything we saw up until its supposed destruction was an elaborate heist. The Bright Circle already hated the Guardians for removing half of the magic from the universe, so it was probably really easy to recruit them with the promise of removing the Guardians power from the universe too. They made it look like an attack, meant to unleash monsters and ancient weapons on Oa during the United Planets summit, when really all the Bright Circle was there to do was distract everybody while opening a magic portal deep within Oa, and then leave that door open so that the pieces of the Central Battery could travel through it immediately after being disassembled…and dissembling the Battery in a way that looked like an explosion was the perfect cover, ensuring that nobody would even think it could’ve been moved somewhere else. Right now the most logical place for the Battery to have gone would be the one place nobody can reach or see into: the Dark Sector, where someone called the Lightbringer is amassing power and building an army. I think there’s a good chance that the Lightbringer is a literal name, and they brought a Central Battery full of light to the Dark Sector.
Speaking of the Lightbringer, Lonar said John is going to either save the universe or destroy it. I think Lonar said that because, with time travel and Hypertime at play, there are at least two versions of John Stewart in the Dark Sector. A version of John is the Lightbringer, and another version of John (presumable the one we’ve been following so far) built the barrier around the Dark Sector to contain the threat posed by his other self. If Jo, a rookie with nothing but on-the-job training, could trap the Sinestro Corps in a construct that bends time and space, then a veteran Lantern like John…with the power of a Guardian…could build that barrier.
Also, the concept of Entanglement keeps coming up. Quantum Entanglement is the idea that if you have a set of something, and you separate them across a great distance, a change to one will be reflected in the others. Take the Guardians as an example. The Guardians are ascended beings who only exist physically by choice. The body of a dead Guardian was placed inside the Central Battery and merged with its energy. The Central Battery was then violently deconstructed, while merged with a Guardian, leading to the rest of the Guardians suffering in ways that we still don’t fully understand. John is a Guardian, his ascension was hidden but not undone, so what happened to the Guardians should’ve had some effect on him…except he was sent beyond that barrier before it happened. The Guardians took care to make sure he’d be there before it was too late. The Guardians ABSOLUTELY know exactly what’s going on and they’ve always known.
I highly encourage you to research the concept of Entanglement yourself, because I only vaguely understand it, which is probably enough to make sense of this story, but even so, there’s no down side to learning new things. For example, if I didn’t take the time to do some light research, I wouldn’t have known that there’s another kind of Entanglement, separate from Quantum Entanglement. One of its definitions is “an extensive barrier, typically made of interlaced barbed wire and stakes, erected to impede enemy soldiers or vehicles”. There’s an army being built in the Dark Sector. Entire populations are losing their free will and joining up. That barrier was built to hold them back.
Before we finish up, there’s one more thing I want to point out…back in issue five, we saw Sinestro and some ladies all sporting similar tattoos that Sinestro doesn’t usually have. Both of the ladies end up being shape shifters, and the tattoos are still visible in their other forms. Which means that this most likely isn’t really Sinestro, but someone shape shifting to impersonate Sinestro. I don’t necessarily think this has anything to do with the current arc that’s going to end in a few issues, but it does mean that Sinestro could be literally anywhere doing literally anything right now, so I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more from the Yellow Lanterns at some point in the not too distant future.
…I know a lot of what I’ve said here today is probably going to be wrong, and I’m taking a lot of big swings with this round of theories, but half the fun of this arc is trying to figure it all out. And the answers could come, and be bad, and the whole thing could end in complete disappointment…but I’ll deal with that if and when it happens, because I’m having fun now. And a bad ending won’t erase the fun I’ve been having with these issues along the way.
Comments
Post a Comment