Ok everybody, it’s time to get some theories confirmed in Green Lantern #9, written by Geoffrey Thorne with art by Tom Raney, Marco Santucci, and Maria Laura Sanapo, colors by Michael Atiyeh, and letters by Rob Leigh.
John has gone through a portal and arrived on the world of the Lightbringer, which we now know is the name of this gigantic incomplete being standing among a sea of what appear to be buildings, but are actually Matrix-style pods each containing hundreds of people. These people are the populations of all the planets who were brainwashed into becoming loyal followers of the Lightbringer, all for the purpose of hooking them up to these towers and feeding their collective life force to that incomplete giant.
All of this is being orchestrated by our mysterious hooded man in the chair, who identifies himself as Esak, a God of New Genesis, and during a confrontation with Lonar, lets it slip that his goal is apparently to resurrect the New Gods, starting with Lightray. If we look at the symbol on the giant’s chest, and then the symbol and head design of the angels, and then compare them both to a Silver Age image of Lightray, it’s an exact match. We know from John and Lonar’s trip to the past that the New Gods draw power from their believers, so Esak’s plan is to use mind control to forcefully convert entire planets into believers of Lightray and drain them of their energy until it adds up to the amount you’d need to actually rebirth a God.
Presumably, once he’s done with Lightray, Esak would move on and repeat the process with more of the New Gods, but John’s not giving him the chance. He builds up as much willpower as he can, and destroys the giant unfinished Lightbringer…and unknowingly unleashes something called a Godstorm. Lonar did say that John can now draw strength from all cosmic forces, maybe he’ll absorb the God Storm and become some sort of Super Guardian or something.
Esak says he’s doing all of this to save the universe. From what? No idea, but I do like the fact that this is all for a larger purpose that we can’t see yet, it helps the story feel like it’s going somewhere. He does say that all of these captured people aren’t actually people, but fragments and splinters. I’m not sure if he’s going for a “we’re all part of our God” sort of thing, or maybe it’s something about the multiverse, I don’t know.
There is a moment in here that has major implications for Green Lantern history. Lonar confirms that Esak is the one who ordered the bounty on John and the Quest Lanterns, because even without their rings, they still present a threat to him, since their strong willpower makes them immune to brainwashing. They are an army of people who can not be made to submit to the will of the New Gods…and according to Lonar, that’s why the Guardians gathered them in the first place. We know from the time travel done in this arc that the Guardians have been clashing with the Gods of New Genesis and Apocalypse for billions of years, and specifically call out the danger posed to the people of the universe by the almost parasitic nature of the bond between the Gods and their followers. It would make sense, then, that the best force to oppose the New Gods would be a massive collection of people overflowing with so much willpower that they could never be controlled. That said, the Green Lantern Corps has had minimal dealings with the New Gods…at least as far as we know. That first encounter between the New Gods and the Guardians happened billions of years ago, so I think we’re going to need another flashback or two to fill in some gaps for this to really make sense. I’m not against the idea of the Green Lantern Corps having had a secret true purpose all this time, but there needs to be a good reason why none of the Lanterns ever knew, and why they almost never interacted with the New Gods throughout their history.
Also, Lonar makes another mention of how willpower might not actually be part of the Emotional Spectrum. They’re bringing that up more and more often, and I really want to see what’s going on with it. One of the most fun parts of the Geoff Johns era of Green Lantern was exploring the Emotional Spectrum and trying to figure out how it all worked, so if Geoffrey Thorne has some good ideas about how to shake it up, I’m here for it, I want to know.
The one part of this chapter that doesn’t make any sense to me, no matter how many times I read it, is that John gets knocked out and has a dream of being in high school talking to his teacher, which morphs into him talking to the Guardians, and ends up being a message about not charging in head first and trying to solve problems with violence…which is fine, that’s all pretty clear…but as John wakes up, there’s dialogue from Lonar that says John made the right choice, and is going to start approaching things differently…except he doesn’t do that, he actually rams into the giant and blows it up, making everything worse. At first I thought that John might have unconsciously teleported all those people out of their pods, but those could just be the new converts who walked through the portal with John last issue. So I have no idea what the purpose of that scene was, since John apparently learned an important lesson and then completely ignored it a minute later.
Something I’m struggling with more and more as this story goes on is the fact that my New Gods knowledge is limited, and it seems their status is vital to understanding what’s going on. It never even occurred to me that this could have anything to do with bringing back Lightray because I had no idea Lightray was even gone. And a big problem this story still hasn’t confronted is the fact that most of the mystery and ambiguity comes from characters who know everything just deciding not to share that information, for whatever reason. It’s starting to feel less like a mystery and more like a small collection of characters who just don’t feel like explaining themselves, and that’s pretty annoying. I’m not saying it can’t still lead somewhere cool and satisfying, but I wish we were taking a different road to get there.
Back on Oa, Jo goes to the science cells to interrogate Yridian, and confirms what we’ve suspected for a while now: the attack on Oa was in fact an inside job. The Guardian Koyos, the one who was killed by a magic arrow in issue one and sent into the Central Battery in issue two, spent a month on Sorceror’s world and made a pact with Yridian and the Bright Circle. We still don’t know exactly what Koyos was after, but he told Yridian of the existence of the Starheart, and promised her that she could reclaim it and restore all of the missing magic to the universe. The Starheart, if you don’t know, is roughly half the magic in the entire universe condensed into one spot, and is the power source of Alan Scott the Golden Age Green Lantern, and I don’t know if Yridian knows that last part. So as we’ve discussed in the past, the magic arrow did something to change Koyos, causing a reaction when his remains were put into the Central Battery, leading to the supposed destruction of the Battery.
…we know where the Central Battery is, by the way. It, and Koyos, were teleported into a Shadow Vault. If you don’t know, the shadow vaults are located deep within Oa, and are reserved for the most dangerous things that the Guardians need to keep locked away. They don’t really come up in many stories, and even this story only mentioned them in one stray line in the first issue, before making them super important right now. Apparently Koyos has spent the last six months in the shadow vault with the Central Battery becoming something new: a gigantic Guardian saturated with green energy, the Central Battery implanted into his chest, and some kind of yellow squid monster on his head. I won’t lie, this looks pretty dumb. It’s just a big Guardian with a funny hat.
I feel a certain amount of satisfaction that I did figure a lot of this out in advance, but the reveal ultimately fell kind of flat for me. I like the multiple layers of misdirect, making us think the Central Battery was destroyed, only to drop hints that it was actually teleported away, only for it to still be hidden on Oa the entire time…except hiding it in a location that the story barely acknowledges the existence of until the moment of the big reveal feels kind of cheap. Then on top of that, big kaiju Koyos looks too silly for me to take all that seriously. Although if I’m being completely honest, I am still very interested in finding out the answer to the one big question that’s still hanging over this entire run: what was all of this for? What were the Guardians planning that made Koyos and Nemosyni do all of this? And what does it have to do with the New Gods? I find it interesting that in both halves of this issue, we don’t yet know why the antagonists are doing what they’re doing, but both of them thought it was necessary to create a gigantic Godlike being of incredible power. Esak says he’s acting to save the universe, are he and the Guardians preparing to finally go to war with each other? Or is there something else out there that they’re both preparing to confront?
The title of this issue is “Praxis”, which is the act of turning a desire or idea into reality, like building a God out of peoples’ belief, or in our case seeing a theory proven correct.
Comments
Post a Comment