Is there such a thing as a negative emotion? It seems like a question with a simple enough answer. Obviously emotions like rage, greed, and fear are negative while other emotions like hope, compassion, and love are positive, right? After all, Green Lantern gives us characters who fully embody these individual emotions, so all we have to do to learn the truth is look at them. We can see, for example, what rage does to the Red Lanterns. Rage is so all-consuming that once a red ring lands on your finger, its power saturates your body, flowing through your veins. The ring stops your heart and replaces it, meaning that if you ever took the ring off, you’d die moments later because your heart no longer works. It forces intense rage to be at the core of your being forever, cursing you with power and fury, and an inability to ever be anything else. And as the Red Lantern Corps grew, they were presented as a pack of vicious animals, tearing apart anyone in their path without showing regret or remorse, not even coherent thought…only rage.
When the Red Lanterns first debuted, in a story appropriately titled “Rage of the Red Lanterns”, they took the comic world by storm and made a very strong first impression that’s stuck with readers to this day, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s lead to something of an identity crisis for the Red Lanterns, since most readers still think of them as ravenous monsters, even though the group as a whole has changed dramatically over the years. Much of that evolution takes place during the Charles Soule run of the Red Lanterns ongoing series, in issues 21 through 34, as well as a Futures End one-shot serving as an epilogue to his story. Up to this point, the entire Red Lantern concept revolved around the character of Atrocitus. He created the rings and batteries, he recruited the Corps, and all of it was in service of his personal mission of killing the Guardians. Before the Green Lantern Corps existed, the Guardians used an army of robot Manhunters to police the universe, until the Manhunters went rogue and massacred an entire sector, with the only survivor being Atrocitus. He lost his family, his home, everything, and his rage just got stronger and stronger over time, until it became something powerful enough to give him a chance at revenge.
Everything we know about the Red Lanterns comes from Atrocitus, since he was the first one, and served as their leader for most of the group’s existence. But interestingly, Atrocitus is the only person to never lose himself to the ring’s power…his mind has always been perfectly clear, and he’s always been in control. His heart is still tied to the ring, just like everyone else, but for him it’s different. There was already so much rage in his heart that he was willing to literally replace his heart with rage, because at that point he had nothing else. Atrocitus is a fanatic, rage isn’t just his outlet, it’s his religion. But even through his single-minded devotion to his own revenge, Atrocitus was smart enough to realize that he could never oppose the Guardians alone. He would need help, he would need a Corps of his own. And so Atrocitus began sending rings out into the universe, rings that would find people at their lowest points, and force them down a path identical to his own. People like Bleeze, the angelic princess of a beautiful planet, who lost everything when her world was invaded and conquered. Or Ratchet, who lived in a society built on total isolation, and yearned for personal contact…but his desire to be with others was seen as dangerous and taboo, so he was arrested and experimented on, in hopes that his people would come to understand this dangerous anomaly. He had already lost everyone else, and now he’d also lost himself. Then there’s Skallox, a loyal interrogator working for a crime boss, until one day he was accused of stealing from his boss, who promptly threw him away like garbage, right into an incinerator to be burned alive. Today, Skallox looks like a skeletal monster because of the wounds inflicted before the ring found him, and the experience has left him with incredibly weak loyalty to anyone in power who could potentially betray him. And let’s not forget Rankorr, who lived a life of quiet seething repression until an act of senseless violence took his brother’s life right in front of him, causing everything pent up inside to erupt all at once, destroying the person he used to be.
…and then there’s Guy Gardner. He was a Red Lantern before, most notably during the chaos of the Blackest Night storyline, and barely made it back from that experience. And now he’s being asked to do it again, so that Hal Jordan can have a spy within the Red Lantern Corps, and keep the Green Lanterns up to date on what Atrocitus is planning. Hal thinks it’s only natural for Guy to be the one to go, and that Atrocitus is so desperate for soldiers that he’d never turn away someone as experienced as Guy. And after all, Guy’s come back from being a Red Lantern before, so this shouldn’t be a big deal, right? The thing is, there’s something about Guy that Hal has never understood, and that lack of understanding is the reason for everything that comes next.
All his life, no matter what Guy Gardner did, it was never good enough. Not good enough for his dad, not good enough for his boss. Couldn’t cut it as a cop, never the first choice to wear a ring. Someone else is always better, someone else is always stepping in and putting him in his place. Even now, the most important mission Hal could think to give Guy was one that required him to not be a Green Lantern anymore, and it reinforced what Guy had been thinking for a very long time: that he’s considered disposable, and nobody sees him as being good enough.
Guy is a character possessing a strong will that’s always swirling around in a vortex of rage. When asked why he would ever accept a mission to go back to the Red Lanterns, he explains it by mixing a drink, a Michelada. It combines lime juice with tomato juice, mixes in some chili powder, and a cold beer to finish it off. Everything you need to know about Guy Gardner is in this drink, right down to being a mixture of green and red ingredients that come together to form a final product that’s blood red. And just like Guy, it’s better with Ice.
To Guy, this mission was an acknowledgment that the Green Lantern Corps didn’t need him around, but he still tried to play it Hal’s way, to deceive Atrocitus into accepting him into the fold. But Atrocitus saw right through it, and refused to give Guy a red ring. Another authority figure telling Guy he isn’t good enough, another instance of Guy being told he doesn’t get to wear a ring. And he finally snaps. Sick and tired of playing by everyone else’s rules only to be told he isn’t good enough, of being discarded whenever it’s convenient, of being pushed down while everyone else climbs higher. He’s done with it, and he lets it all out in the form of a bloody, brutal fight with Atrocitus. The power of a Red Lantern ring degrades the charge in Guy’s Green Lantern ring, but it doesn’t matter, because Guy is so angry that his fists are enough to topple Atrocitus and rip the ring right off of his finger.
With Atrocitus gone, the entire Red Lantern Corps has been reduced to just six members, counting Guy Gardner, though the rest of the group aren’t very happy about welcoming a Green Lantern into their ranks. With the exception of Blackest Night, the Green and Red Lanterns have been at each other’s throats non-stop, for years. Even now, at their weakest point, they would need a really good reason not to just kill Guy where he stands. So he gives them one. He does for them what too few people have ever done for him. He does for them what Atrocitus never did. He treats them with respect. He promises to make their lives better, and then does it. The Red Lantern homeworld, the planet Ysmault, is a harsh, rocky desert with no life but the Lanterns who call it home. The only structure on the planet is the Red Central Battery that powers their rings, and the Red Lanterns spend every night sleeping outside on the ground, wherever they happen to drop when they get tired enough. Atrocitus thought it built character. Guy took one look at the area and offered to put a roof over their heads. They couldn’t say yes fast enough. This was a good opportunity to not only earn the trust of the other Red Lanterns, but also to pick up the slack left by the Green Lantern Corps, who’s territory had grown beyond their ability to properly manage. There’s a space pirate named Barg who has free rein to steal and smuggle anything he wants all over his sector. The Green Lanterns have always known about him, but never had the time or manpower to do anything about it. By stealing Barg’s flagship, it would both disrupt his business and give the Red Lanterns a place to live. Nice and easy…at least, until Guy and Zilius Zox discovered what Barg was smuggling this time. They opened a cargo hold and found piles of bodies resembling Chaselon, a Green Lantern made of crystal. Their bodies are considered to be extremely valuable, so Barg has been harvesting them. Up to this point, Guy had intended to simply steal the ship with no casualties…but after seeing this, he marched into the control room, looked Barg right in the eye, and threw him into the vacuum of space. It was the first time Guy had chosen to kill someone out of anger while in his right mind…and he liked it.
Bringing this ship back to Ysmault meant the world to the Red Lanterns. Suddenly they had a comfortable place to sleep and eat, as well as a productive recreational outlet. Zilius Zox very quickly became obsessed with fixing and maintaining the ship, and even designed new upgrades for it. Before becoming a Red Lantern, he had been an apprentice at his stepfather’s shipyard, and has a real passion for that kind of work. Skallox, meanwhile, revealed himself to have a deep appreciation of weapons, and was like a kid on Christmas morning when he found the ship’s armory. On a practical level, neither Skallox or Zox need these things…their rings are better weapons and transportation than anything the ship has to offer, but that’s not the point. This is the first time since becoming Red Lanterns that they’ve had the opportunity to engage with hobbies that mean something to them. Atrocitus kept them as mindless animals for as long as he could, and only restored their minds when it would give him a tactical advantage against his enemies, and even then they weren’t treated much better. This one simple gesture from Guy Gardner quickly snowballed into a complete overhaul of the Red Lanterns quality of life. He promised them a good thing, and then over-delivered.
Unfortunately, all that good will almost got thrown out the window when Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps showed up to save Guy and take him home. All of a sudden, nobody knew who to trust or what was going on, and Guy found himself in an interesting position. If he wanted out, this was his chance. It’s true that they didn’t yet have a way to get the red ring off of him, but that would come in time, and this was his best chance to escape Ysmault safely. But the thing is, Guy wasn’t just being nice to the Red Lanterns to save himself from them, he honestly sees himself in them, and believes that this is where he belongs. So he negotiated with Hal, who at this point was the leader of the Green Lantern Corps, and they came to an agreement: the Red Lantern Corps would get their own sector to patrol as their territory, and the Green Lantern Corps would stay out of it, as long as the Red Lanterns agreed to come help the other Corps fight Relic, the big bad of the “Lights Out” crossover linking all of the Lantern books at the time. It was an incredibly good deal for the Red Lanterns, and it also gave the Green Lanterns the help they needed.
With all of that behind them, the Red Lanterns were suddenly faced with a new challenge: how are they supposed to enforce the law in an entire sector when there are only six of them? And I really like this discussion, because it’s the second time that this run has addressed the fact that the Green Lantern Corps has never been large enough to actually patrol all of this territory themselves, with Skallox pointing out that there’s a chance some planetary systems don’t even know what Lanterns are, and those that do probably only know about the Green ones. This group of Red Lanterns can not possibly function the way the Green Lantern Corps does, even if they wanted to…but they don’t have to, because Ratchet has a plan. The best way for the Red Lanterns to keep the peace is to do something so big and high-profile that the entire sector will know about it. Once that information spreads, the reputation of the Red Lanterns will do most of the work, discouraging anyone from trying anything all that bad out of fear of attracting their attention. But that means their target has to be something as big as it is terrible, and Ratchet knows just the thing. A warlord who’s totally subjugated his entire planet, turning the population into a workforce to build a dyson sphere around their sun, turning it into a literal Death Star. That kind of weapon would be a threat to every other world, and very quickly change the balance of power in the sector. Once again, the fact that someone like this could rise to power and build a weapon like this right under the Guardians noses, in sector 2814 of all places, the one sector in the universe that’s home to the largest number of Lanterns and should be the most protected…it’s a harsh reminder of how big space is, and how not even the light of the brightest Lanterns can possibly shine everywhere. But that won’t stop the Reds from trying.
Unfortunately, this time they’re up against someone who vastly outclasses them in terms of both military power and strategy, and Guy’s entire team is easily neutralized by a weapon that dulls their emotions and keeps them docile. The only one left to save them is Zox, piloting their ship…and remember those upgrades he was working on? Zilius Zox installed a port that let their rings interface directly with the ship’s systems, greatly amplifying the shields and weapons, and this gives them the opening they need to break free and overthrow this whole empire. It’s a great moment, because this victory would have been impossible without the changes Guy helped make to the Red Lanterns lifestyle…he brought them a ship to live in, and gave Zox the opportunity to tinker with it as much as he wanted, and now both of those small gestures just saved the entire sector from a tyrant wielding a Death Star. It’s an incredible victory, but it came at a high price. During a crucial moment, Ratchet protected the group by taking a fatal blow in their place. There was no time to get him to the ship’s medical bay, but even if they could, it wouldn’t matter. For a while now, Ratchet’s ring had been trying to leave him, to seek out a new host, because his rage had mostly subsided. All he ever wanted was to form close relationships with other people, and once Guy Gardner came and got rid of Atrocitus, that wish came true. For the first time in his life, Ratchet had friends…and in his final moments, they all gathered around him, and he couldn’t have been happier.
It’s with heavy hearts that the team enjoys their greatest victory. A massive threat to the entire sector has been removed, and word has begun to spread: the Red Lantern Corps is here, and anyone looking to do harm had better watch out. The problem is that they’re not the only Red Lanterns out there. Unbeknownst to Guy’s team, Atrocitus is still alive. He was saved at the last second by Dex-Starr, the Red Lantern who’s always been his most loyal follower. For the time being, Dex-Starr is able to sustain both of their lives with his ring, but now the two of them are on the hunt. Before Guy Gardner showed up on Ysmault, Atrocitus had sent out a hand full of rings, to increase the ranks of the Red Lanterns…but now they would serve a different purpose. Atrocitus is fixated on revenge, on making Guy Gardner pay for what he’s done, so he and Dex-Starr are hunting down every single newly chosen Red Lantern. The first one they find will be sacrificed so that Atrocitus can have a ring of his own again, and the rest will form a new faction of Red Lanterns, with the intention of going to war against Guy Gardner and his team of traitors. It ends up being a really interesting confrontation that’s unlike any other battle involving Red Lanterns, revolving around tactics and misdirection, attacking your enemy’s resources to limit how long they can fight. Vital supplies are poisoned, Central Batteries are destroyed…and then it gets personal. Atrocitus made a new batch of rings, hundreds if not thousands of them, more than enough to build an army capable of killing his enemies. But Atrocitus didn’t just want to win. No, he wanted to hurt Guy Gardner. So he sent all of those rings to Earth.
Atrocitus and his Red Lanterns attacked without warning, destroying monuments and natural landmarks. Then, once the population was sufficiently angry, he released the rings. An army of new Red Lanterns were harvested from the Human population, making an already desperate situation even worse for Guy and his group. And I won’t spoil it here, but Ratchet wasn’t the only friend they’d lose before this was all over.
In the end, it all came down to a rematch between Guy Gardner and Atrocitus, over the fate of all those cursed to be Red Lanterns, and what being a Red Lantern even means. And that’s when the real difference between Guy Gardner and Atrocitus became clear. For Atrocitus, rage is a selfish thing, a tool to get what you believe you’re owed. His vengeance, his mission…it always revolved around him, and he was willing to use other people, condemn them to a horrible life as a means to an end, all to serve his goals. Atrocitus is the kind of person who will put a red ring on your finger and allow you to remain an incoherent beast until it would benefit him to restore your mind. And for Guy Gardner, rage is all about punishing people just like Atrocitus. It’s about getting angry on behalf of the people who can’t fight back, and then doing the fighting for them. It’s about reaching out to everyone who’s ever been pushed down, and pulling them up to where they belong. It’s not a bad thing to get angry, as long as it’s for the right reasons…because if you’re able to control yourself, anger can be a powerful motivator to do great things. It took Guy his entire life to learn that, and now that he has, his rage has become the greatest tool he could have ever asked for.
Atrocitus thinks rage is a weapon, and his entire understanding of it was forged in a single moment, when his sector was destroyed all those years ago. But Guy knows better. Guy lived with rage for his entire life, and understands it in a way that Atrocitus can’t. And it’s because of that level of understanding that Guy Gardner is able to manage one last act to set everything right. One last gift to what remains of his Red Lantern Corps. Guy takes back every red ring worn by Atrocitus and his army, absorbing their power into himself, momentarily becoming a single being with the power of an entire Lantern Corps. He uses all of that power to restore the Central Battery and rebuild what Atrocitus tore down, so that the good work started by his friends can continue, even if not all of them are still around to see it.
…and incase you’re wondering, no, not a single person who lost their red ring died. The story doesn’t explain it, and even attempts brush it off as some sort of miracle, but I like to think it’s confirmation that the negative aspects of being a Red Lantern were put there by Atrocitus, whether he was aware of it or not. He was angry, he lashed out, and he inflicted his own pain and suffering on everyone else he touched. Red rings replacing your heart with rage, overloading you with so much anger that you become something else…those aren’t qualities inherent to the power or rage, that’s simply how Atrocitus himself has lived since losing everything. And for one brief moment, Guy Gardner held all of the power in his own hands, and he freed every Red Lantern from the curse Atrocitus placed on them.
There’s so much more that could be said about this run. There are entire characters I haven’t even mentioned, plots and subplots that flesh everyone out, and running gags that’ll endear this cast to you if you give them the chance. Guy’s team of Red Lanterns is one of my favorite groups in all of Green Lantern, and I highly recommend you read all of this for yourself to truly understand why. This run is the reason why I can never agree with anyone who says that there are good and bad parts of the Emotional Spectrum. The truth is that all emotions are neutral, and it’s us that makes them lean one way or the other. Rage is a terrible thing in the hands of someone like Atrocitus…but in the hands of Guy and his friends? It’s a powerful motivator to do good. Rage isn’t evil, it’s just motivation to act, and each of us has to decide on the best way to do that.
Comments
Post a Comment