Gardner & Dex-Starr: Red Lanterns #23 Review

I had stopped following Red Lanterns all that closely because, well, it wasn’t ever all that good.

I’m sure original writer Peter Milligan had some kind of message he wanted to convey about the destructive nature of hate, and a little something about violence toward women maybe, but I always felt like whatever he was trying to say was being gently masked by ugly monsters puking blood on each other while Bleez shook her ass at people while simultaneously denigrating them. And while I’m sure that description just lit up someone’s hidden and deeply shameful fetish buttons – you know who your are, pervert who found us by Googling “chemotherapy submissive S&M porn” – it really never did a lot for me, and I categorically deny that I’m just saying that as an excuse to click-whore for that lucrative chemotherapy submissive S&M porn dollar.

But I decided to give Red Lanterns #23, written by Charles Soule with art by Alessandro Vitti and Jim Calafiore, a try mostly based on this cover, which, after a couple of beers, seemed to me to depict Atrocitus losing a Declared Thumb War with some kind of energy demon, despite that demon’s obvious distraction from being skullfucked by Dexstarr.

(And before you ask, yes, I take my comics seriously. But after a week that brought us an event without an ending and a stack of comics so generally weak I felt the need to praise Scott Lobdell for writing a nearly actionless teenaged soap opera because it might be friendly to new readers, I think I might be suffering from a bit of disappointment hysteria).

So I cracked the book expecting more of the same weird action and musing about rage and tits… and make no mistake, some of that stuff is still here. But Soule has wrapped the whole thing up in a pretty believable and relatable tale about an undercover cop who’s in too deep and losing his moral compass fast.

Granted, it is a pretty believable and relatable tale that includes a talking cat, but what the hell.

Atrocitus and Dex-starr are floating in deep space, with Guy Gardner having ripped the ring from Atrocitus’s finger in an attempt to murder him in a prior issue. Having survived, the pair go on a hunt for a replacement red ring, while Guy, now rocking the red spandex and leading the Red Lanterns, prepares the crew to take a spaceship to leave Ysmault. While the rest of the Lanterns are busy, Guy takes off into orbit and uses his hidden and severely depleted green ring to contact Hal Jordan and request immediate extraction, as he has found murder to be a more acceptable solution to every problem with every passing day. Hal promises to send Blue Lantern Saint Walker to pull him out and purge the red energy from him, while meanwhile Atrocitus and Dex-starr follow the trail of red energy to a planet where a local criminal overlord has captured The Butcher – the avatar of Red Lantern energy that looks like a regular old bull after months of experimental hormone therapy. Dex-starr engages the goons while Atrocitus absorbs the avatar, becoming half man, half bull, possibly in an attempt to cast a wider net of perversion than the traditional chemotherapy submissive S&M demographic. Anyhoo, while this is happening, Guy sneaks off to make another call to Hal, only to be told that he can’t be extracted as promised, and to find that this time, his conversation was overheard.

What really worked for me in this issue – possibly the first thing in any issue of Red Lanterns that has really worked for me – was the depiction of Guy working undercover. After years and years of the Rainbow Corps and giant galactic spectral threats, it is easy to forget that the Green Lantern Corps was originally conceived as basically space cops. Your basic Green Lantern was pretty much just a beat cop patrolling his sector, but it makes a lot of sense for any police force to have an undercover investigatory division (or at least special missions asking for more detective work). And while the story of the undercover cop being corrupted by his assignment is as old as the first season of Miami Vice, Soule was clever to use that framework in a situation where being undercover means that Guy is being exposed to forces that can literally corrupt him.

Further, as a long-time Guy Gardner fan (part of my retirement fund will be my copy of the first-print issue of “One punch!”), it is interesting to see him pushed into a place where he thinks his own behavior is over the line. If the Green Lanterns were space cops, then Guy Gardner was always the cop who would write you up for going two over the limit, and then taze your scrotum if you complained about it. So seeing Guy in a place where the things he’s done are too much even for him is interesting. And having Hal leave him in that place is an exciting tease; I want to see Guy desperate, and this issue sets that up nicely.

Also interesting to me was how Guy, dropped into the apparent leadership of the Red Lanterns, engaged with certain members of the team. But arranging for the spaceship to be a moving base, Guy has clearly earned the good opinions of at least a couple of members of the crew. And yet we learn by the end of the issue that Atrocitus is on his way back with a to-do list that includes ripping Guy’s face off, and yet probably just assumes that the rest of the team will fall back in under his leadership. Soule sets up a situation where we might well see Atrocitus return to Ymsault only to face a vote of no confidence, and that seems like it could be pretty interesting.

On the negative side: why the fuck is Dex-starr talking? Dex-starr has never talked. Not since his first appearance in Final Crisis five years ago. And a large part of his appeal, at least for me, was that Dex-starr was just a cat. An evil cat, but just a cat nonetheless. And I recognize that there are certain storytelling challenges that occur when you choose to work with a character who can’t speak, but them’s the breaks, chief… and frankly, having Dex-Starr speak is unnecessary, because Soule also makes the choice to have the cat able to project plasma sculptures. Which means that Soule could have had the cat always show what he’s thinking (and he does that once in this issue) rather than resorting to having a talking cat, but then again, what do I know? “Show Don’t Tell” might not be a rule of storytelling in graphic sequential literature. But what I do know is that the minute Dex-Starr opened his tuna hole, it made the character a little less special to me. Now, that’s just one guy’s opinion, but I can’t imagine Dex-Starr became a fan favorite because of his flawless diction.

I hate reviewing comics that have pencils by more than one person, because it’s hard to address the different styles as they switch from page to page. But the styles here are generally consistent: we’ve got decent art, if not the greatest I’ve ever seen. The panel layouts are pretty simple to follow and straightforward, and the storytelling is generally pretty clear… except during Vitti’s depiction of Atrocitus’s attack and subsequent absorption of Butcher. As that sequence opens, Vitti gives us a few panels of extreme long shots of the people holding Butcher captive before we see any of their faces. This implies that these characters are unimportant, and it reduces the feeling of stakes in the subsequent battle. And after Atrocitus absorbs Butcher and takes his revenge on his captors, Vitti again goes to extreme longshot, outside the building, so it took me a couple of readings to understand that Atrocitus drowned the kidnappers in blood puke. Drowning someone in blood puke is visceral. It’s disgusting. It’s a terrible way to go. Why would you want to diminish that with distance? Why pull away from a river of blood puke? Well actually, I can think of a few reasons to keep your distance from blood puke – I’ve read The Hot Zone – but it sanitizes the horror and minimizes how violent Atrocitus really was in the scene.

Red Lanterns #23 isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a perfect book. If I wanted a story featuring a talking cat, I would rent The Cat From Outer Space and then answer the subsequent questions from local law enforcement about that choice. But its core is a very familiar undercover cop story, featuring a familiar character being pushed to, and past, his limits. And Soule plants the seeds for future stories that won’t necessarily just feature Atrocitus battling Guy Gardner, but might introduce a war for the leadership of the Red Lanterns, and the sight of Atrocitus learning that just because someone’s driven by anger doesn’t mean they like being treated like a bitch.

This issue does something that no issue of Red Lanterns has done yet: make me want to read more Red Lanterns. It was my biggest surprise of the week. Give it a shot.