By: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Fernando Pasarin (pencils), Scott Hanna (inks), Gabe Eltaeb & Wil Quintana (colors)
The Story: The downside of a do-over is there’s always a chance you’ll screw it up even more.
The Review: If you’ve read Tomasi’s work for any good bit of time, you’ll have realized by now that he is definitely a character-driven, rather than plot-driven, writer. To him, plot is more of a framework for revealing something about his characters or developing their personalities. I’m not saying he considers a logical, gripping plot as unimportant in any way, only that it isn’t the source main source of what makes his writing compelling.
This may explain why for this issue, he simply skips over the details as to how Volthoom manages to get his hands on Guy in the first place. Instead, we open on Guy already in the First Lantern’s clutches, with no explanation as to how we got here, and we dive right into Guy’s “life constellation” as Volthoom so picturesquely put it in Green Lantern #17. This issue acts more as a character study, with no advancement of the plot in any way, but this plays right into Tomasi’s strengths anyway.
Here we get some very deep exploration of Guy’s history, which is a luxury you don’t often get with comic book characters. Most of the time, you get a nice chunk of their past in their origin story, and everything else you learn through bits and fragments over years and years of continuity—if they even get that far, of course. By the time you finish this issue, you will know Guy Gardner better than every other Lantern out there, even Hal.
Family clearly plays a central role in his life. That sounds silly and obvious when you just say it, but you have to realize that this almost never happens in your superhero comics. Generally, writers build a family around a character so as to make their untimely and gruesome deaths all the more tragic later. Tomasi doesn’t tend to do that, but he gets close to it here when Volthoom twists Guy’s past* to send his siblings to their watery demise. This kind of reality-warping always gets me a little nervous; it makes me wonder how much will wind up permanent.
This issue also treats us to the story of what went down the day Guy lost his badge. It’s a pretty intense sequence, one very much grounded in the real world (sensibly enough, as this is Guy’s pre-Lantern days), thus all the more wrenching in gut and heart. The agony Guy goes through when he makes his life-changing choice does leave you a little shaken afterward, and it gets even worse once Volthoom adds his own little twists to the story.
Now, Volthoom’s alterations of Guy’s childhood and his cop days feel a lot more sophisticated than the usual mental manipulation scenes; it’s the sequence where Guy as Red Lantern goes crazy and graphically slays every other Green Lantern he knows that feels ridiculous and out of control. It’s not exactly gratuitous since it’s not real and it’s Volthoom playing around, but the violence is so over the top that you can’t quite take it seriously after a while.
Superhero artists rarely get the opportunity to show how true to life they can be, so we tend to take them for granted. The sequence of Guy chasing down a suicide bomber in the airport is probably the most dramatically challenging work Pasarin has done on this title, and he pulls it off more than passingly well. It truly has the ring of traumatic suspense in it, from the panicked, careless way the bomber shoots a flight attendant in the chest point blank, to Guy sweating and wavery as he aims his gun, knowing the cost of his shot. Eltaeb and Quintana gamely go along with the multitude of colors required by an arc delving into all parts of the emotional spectrum.
Conclusion: Not really a step forward for the Wrath of the First Lantern arc, but a valuable look into the life of Guy Gardner.
Grade: B
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: * So Volthoom can change not only the actions of the person in his grasp, but he can actually change circumstances around them also (as he does when he switches Gerald for Guy during the ice-skating scene). That wasn’t totally clear in Green Lantern #17.
Grade
Conclusion