As promised, some of the pin-ups of Guy's finest moments included in Guy Gardner: Warrior #25, by Adam Hughes, Howard Porter, Gene Ha, and Dan Jurgens with Art Thibert. Told ya they were cool.
Green Lantern-Related Titles Round-Up (November 1994)
This month: Guy vs. Dementor! Kyle vs. a baby! Alan Scott vs. stress!
Guy Gardner: Warrior #25
Double-sized anniversary issue! And I'm glad that some of those extra pages are devoted to something completely unrelated to the rest of the issue but that we needed to see: Guy finally reacting to the death of his beloved Tora "Ice" Olafsdotter (which happened four months ago, but he's been kinda busy). Guy makes his way into the magical winterland or whatever where Ice grew up, which requires throwing around a bunch of old dudes in robes, and collapses in front of the memorial statue that Ice's mom made back in Justice League International #91.
Ice's mom hears Guy talking about how much Ice changed him, making it clear to her that this rug-colored meathead really loved her daughter. Despite the whole "throwing old dudes around" thing, she invites Guy to stay here for as long as he wants, but he has to leave pretty soon so he can get to, you know, the actual plot of this issue.
The story really gets going when Guy goes to a hospital to visit his supervillain brother Mace and high school sweetheart Heather, both of whom are coincidentally in comas (Mace after his fight with Guy in GG:W #19 and Heather after a booze-related car accident in school). Things take a sudden Cronenbergian turn when a gross head somehow grows out of Mace's chest -- it's Dementor, the buff demon we met in GG:W #22, and whose origin was linked to Guy's in GG:W #0. Dementor is here to invite Guy to come to his realm, Comaville, if he doesn't want his bro and ex to "end up like bologna in a meat grinder."
(I guess if you end up like bologna in a meat grinder in Comaville, you end up like bologna in a meat grinder in real life.)
Before Guy has a chance to smash his head against a wall (or ask Batman to punch him unconscious again), he's visited by the Phantom Stranger, one of those mystical DC Comics guys who show up whenever a hero needs to travel to another realm. Guy rather impolitely accepts the Stranger's help and enters Comaville, where a quite badass fight with Dementor immediately kicks off. During the fight, Dementor keeps calling Guy his "brother" because of their shared Vuldarian ancestry, and reveals that he's the one behind Guy's personality changes whenever he went into a coma (like when he became an asshole during Crisis or when he turned into a sweetheart in JLI).
(How come supervillains don't reference Bewitched anymore? Is it because anyone who remembers the show is unspeakably old?)
Dementor's gross attempt to absorb Guy's body backfires spectacularly when Guy bursts from inside his guts and destroys him, causing this entire realm to collapse. Mace, Heather, and Guy make it out before the whole place is destroyed -- but by the time Guy is back at the hospital, Mace has already been violently kidnapped by his employers at the shady government organization known as Quorum. At least Heather is finally awake after, uh, however long it's been since Guy Gardner went to high school.
The issue ends with Guy's rich cowboy friend Buck Wargo calling him to say he's got a bar-sized surprise for him, and then we get some pretty cool Guy pin-ups by various artists... which I'll show in another post, because burying them down here wouldn't do them justice.
R.E.B.E.L.S. '94 #1
Continued from GL #56, which ended with the space-stranded Kyle Rayner bumping into a big spaceship belonging to L.E.G.I.O.N., the interstellar police force. In this issue, Kyle is taken into the ship and meets L.E.G.I.O.N.'s current leader, a green talking baby called Lyrl Dox (who happens to be Brainiac's grandson). Space Boss Baby tells Kyle he's arrested for "carrying an unregistered weapon" -- it probably didn't help that the first thing Kyle did in the ship was casually mention that he (thinks he) killed Hal Jordan, though at least he was smart enough to omit the part about blowing up a planet at the same time.
Lyrl tells Kyle he'd gladly let him go and send him to Earth, if only he could get rid of some nasty terrorists who are going around murdering innocent space cops. Kyle volunteers to go after the "terrorists"... unaware that they include Lyrl's dad, Vril Dox II, who was L.E.G.I.O.N.'s leader before his evil baby usurped the post. Vril, an "end justifies the means" bastard, intentionally crashes his ship under an alien village, knowing that Lyrl will order all the aliens wiped out to get to them. As Vril predicted, Kyle turns against L.E.G.I.O.N. when he sees this, in completely shock that cops can do bad things. Is that even legal??
Kyle meets up with the real L.E.G.I.O.N.naires at the site of the massacre, and seeing the big crater makes him understand why Hal tried to bring back Coast City (apparently Kyle had never imagined a big crater before). It sure looks like we're gonna get an extended crossover event about Kyle helping Vril and his friends take down the genocidal baby... until one of Vril's "friends," Strata, tells Kyle about the whole village gambit. Vril points Kyle in Earth's direction, and Kyle thanks him with a punch (which unfortunately did not send him into a coma and turn him into a sweetheart).
As Kyle leaves for Earth, Vril says they didn't need him anyway, because "his stomach's weak." Yeah, he's clearly not prepared for the kind of spicy food they eat here in space. He'd be on the space toilet the whole time.
Darkstars #25
John Stewart and Donna Troy finally meet up and double-finally help end that sloooooow plotline about Darkstar Colos being framed by his corrupt boss, Jeddigar. Jeddigar sends some Darkstars to fight some other Darkstars, but then all the Darkstars get together to fight him. Donna leads the charge because, well, she's pretty cool.
The issue ends with Colos chasing Jeddigar into a portal, but then the whole place blows up and John announces that Colos must be dead. Oh no! If only there was a portal or something he could have escaped through! Anyway, the issue also includes a mention of a "renegade Lantern on the prowl" and I'm honestly not sure if that's about the one who tried to restart the universe or the one who blew up a planet. Oh, and oddly enough, there's a reference to the following comic...
The New Titans #115
Most of this issue is about Changeling, who's been sorta-evil for the past issues, going full evil and hunting down the other Titans so he can bring them over to Raven, the one who's been making people evil (she's also evil now, if that wasn't clear). However, there's also an epilogue about Kyle arriving on Earth after his space adventure and going straight for an alley. That dude loves alleys.
Kyle is so tired that he never noticed the weird helix-shaped thing that tagged along with him last issue, which has followed him all the way to Earth, where it morphs into "mystery villain in a cloak" form. The weird helix thing/mystery villain, in turn, hasn't noticed that a little blue alien guy called Jarras Minion is following it/him in a spaceship, because the helix somehow destroyed Jarras' planet (this is what was referenced in Darkstars). I'm now imagining a planet full of Dreamworks Minions blowing up and smiling serenely.
So, to recap, while lost in the vastness of space, Kyle: 1) got spotted and followed by a mystery villain, 2) ran into a former GL, 3) bumped into L.E.G.I.O.N., then The Group Formerly Known As L.E.G.I.O.N., 4) got followed by a little blue guy following the mystery villain. Small universe!
Damage #7
This one's about Damage going on trial because he blew up part of Atlanta in the previous issue (as if superheroes aren't constantly blowing up part of Atlanta, c'mon). There's a scene where some scientists are studying the limits of his Atlanta-destroying powers, and Damage thinks he's gonna lose control and blow everything up again, but then a cool blond guy a teaches him some relaxation exercises that calm him down, likely saving everyone in the building.
What's that got to do with Green Lantern? That's what I was wondering (along with "why did I write down this issue for the GL blog?"), until it's revealed that the blond guy is Alan Scott.
While we're here, I might as well mention that Coast City's destruction is brought up during the trial, along with Metropolis' near destruction during the "Cadmus-LexCorp war," which makes sense because the one narrating this issue is actually Superman's Co-Worker, Ron Troupe.
In the end, Damage is banned from Atlanta and sentenced to... appear in the New Titans comic, basically. I guess that's kind of like doing community service for young heroes, which would explain why Kyle is about to join that team too (planet Oa was at least twice the size of Atlanta).
NEXT: More Titans! More Damage! And I find out why I wrote down an issue of Deathstroke, the Hunted (???).
A demented ad for the double-sized Guy Gardner: Warrior #25 by Mitch Byrd and Dan Davis, which I'll cover in the next Green Lantern-Related Titles Round-Up post. Get hype.
Kyle is in space. Kyle is in spa-a-ace. Whatcha doin’ out there man?
Kyle "Last of the Green Lanterns" Rayner was left in the literal middle of the universe after the destruction of planet Oa in GL #0, and now he has to figure out how to get back home. He walks into a space bar to ask for directions, but some people (well, aliens) there don't take kindly to his types around here. First, a furry creature punches Kyle for being talked to by his favorite space prostitute.
Kyle uses the ring to deal with jealous Chewbacca there, but that only attracts the attention of another guy who looks like a Predator but with worse manners. During the bar brawl that breaks out, Kyle doesn't exactly need help (see the cover, although his ring-generated muscles are much greener than what's shown there), but he gets it it anyway from a cloaked local who turns out to be... a Green Lantern?! Her name is Adara and, after the fight, she invites Kyle to talk at her favorite moons-watching spot.
Adara clarifies that she used to be a GL, but her ring died like all the others when Hal Jordan pulled a Parallax. Kyle looks weirdly smug when he confirms that he's the last one left.
"Yup! All your friends are probably dead!"
Adara tells him that she was in space when her ring stopped working and the only reason she survived is that space pirates took her hostage. She admits she isn't sure why she bothered escaping them, since being a GL was her whole life. Kyle is like "oh, hey, I also lost the thing that gave meaning to my life" (meaning Alex) and they bond over their shared misery. For some reason, Kyle decides it's a good idea to hit on her at this point by showing her a ring-generated puppy and some flowers. Even more bafflingly, this works, and they start making out on the green couch he also generated.
The next morning, Kyle wakes up to find no Adara, no GL costume... and no ring. Looks like whatever they did left Kyle so exhausted that he didn't even feel his body hitting the ground after she stole his ring and the couch evaporated.
Kyle Losing His Ring Counter: 2
After looking "everywhere" for Adara, Kyle ends up drowning his sorrows at that space bar where he met her. The giant bug-looking barman there is actually a pretty cool dude and, as they talk about how females be crazy, he offers him a drink by the enticing name of "two moons phizz." Hearing the words "two moons" makes Kyle realize there's one place he hadn't looked for Adara in: that double-moon gazing spot where they hooked up.
Adara is indeed there, crying. She says she tried to use the ring to help people, but it didn't work for her and she almost got herself killed. Kyle tries telling her that her life doesn't have to be over because she can't be a GL anymore, and even invites her to come with him, but she tells him to just take the ring and go. As he's doing what she asked, Kyle hears a gun blast coming from behind, and his reaction makes it clear that she did think her life was over.
So, Kyle goes back to roaming the cosmos, feeling extra shitty this time, not just because of Adara but because he's worried he'll die of old age before finding his way back to Earth. Then he bumps into a big spaceship with the L.E.G.I.O.N. logo. But those are good guys, right? SPOILERS: not anymore.
TO BE CONTINUED! IN ANOTHER COMIC!
Plotline-Watch:
The issue starts with Darkseid watching Kyle and calling him "a new star illuminating the [DC] universe" while Deesad pesters him like a neglected pet. Darkseid will appear again in coming issues, which makes sense since Ron Marz had at this point recently finished writing a miniseries starring his most famous ripoff, Thanos.
When I first read this issue I kinda wondered if Adara had shown up before, even if it was on a crowd scene with 57 other GLs. The DC wiki claims she hadn't, but she will make a couple of post-mortem appearances. I like to think her legacy also lived on in a different way through Kyle's predilection for green-skinned ladies.
I'd also wondered if these two L.E.G.I.O.N. members recapping the events of R.E.B.E.L.S. #0 (in which a despot baby takes over the organization and the protagonists are hunted as criminals) had appeared before, and they had! They are Davroth, who had actually appeared in this comic before when Hal Jordan was still sane, and Gigantus, who is called that because he comes from a planet where everyone else is really tiny.
I was confused by the fact that Kyle was able to talk to Adara and the barman (barbug?) when he was powerless, since I figured the ring had been translating their alien languages for him, but at the end of the issue he complains that "hardly anybody [in outer space] understands English," which implies some of them do. Why they'd know English out there, I don't know. Maybe they get SNL reruns? That's how I learned.
This issue is quite a dramatic way of showing that the ring only works for Kyle. Like Adara says: "You... this ring... you're it." I'm taking this as a way of telling older readers not to get their hopes up about the ring going to John Stewart or Guy Gardner or maybe a time-displaced version of that Earth GL who was a cowboy. You're stuck with this Kyle kid, so learn to love him!
DC went all in on Elseworlds in 1994, not only making them the theme of their annuals (just like "aliens suck up people's spines" was the theme the year before) but also continuing to publish standalone specials showing DC heroes in situations that couldn't or shouldn't exist. And by DC heroes, I mean "mostly Batman." Several of those stories feature alternate versions of Green Lantern characters, so I feel compelled to round them up here and talk a bit about each, even if they have zero impact on the main continuity or are, you know, kinda stupid.
I already wrote about Hal Jordan's appearance as a shovel-themed freedom fighter called "The Gravedigger" in the 1994 Superman annuals, but that bizarre idea was actually pretty tame compared to the crazy shit going on in other GL-related stories, so strap in:
Batman: In Darkest Night
This one-shot starts with a page right out of Batman: Year One, with Bruce Wayne slumping on a chair as he asks his dad's bust for ideas on how to intimidate criminals more efficiently. However, the bat that was scheduled to break through Bruce's window is spooked away by some sort of green meteorite, and Bruce is instead confronted by a projection of a bald purple guy telling him he's "been chosen."
"Yes, father. I shall become a bald purple guy."
That bald purple guy, of course, is Green Lantern Abin Sur, who in this reality chooses Bruce to be his successor instead of Hal Jordan, for undisclosed reasons (maybe Hal was on the toilet and Abin didn't wanna embarrass him). Bruce's first mission as Green Lantern is to stop the Red Hood gang, which he does so efficiently that no one falls into any vats of chemicals or turns into a homicidal clown.
"I'm going to become the Sane Law-Abiding Person."
Next, the Guardians of the Universe send this untrained rookie to planet Korugar because the veteran GL there, Sinestro, has misused his power to make himself world dictator. Fortunately, Sinestro is kind of a chump in this reality, as signaled by the fact that he doesn't wear a pencil mustache, and Bruce deposes him within a couple of pages. Just like in the regular DC Universe, Sinestro is vanished into the anti-matter universe and gains a yellow power ring there. I don't remember regular DCU Sinestro ever using that ring to look up the guy who killed Bruce Wayne's parents and merging their minds together, though...
Naturally, this causes Sinestro to go insane (I'd argue he was already insane if he thought "I'm gonna merge my mind with some random criminal's" was a good idea) and he starts wearing a fancy purple suit. You know, like some sort of homicidal clown. He also starts referring to himself in the plural and regularly argues with his split personality, so he's like an amalgam between Sinestro, the Joker, and Two-Face. I'm gonna call him Jokernestro (Jokernestwo would be too much).
After being easily defeated by Bat-Lantern during their first fight (again: chump), Jokernestro decides he needs some "help." So, he turns a prostitute named Selina Kyle into some sort of cosmic dominatrix named Star Sapphire, and District Attorney Harvey Dent into an Eclipso-like villain called Binary Star. Wait, so there are two versions of Two-Face in this comic? I guess that's on brand for the character.
These two are defeated within a page, because there's no character more overpowered in all of the multiverse than a Green Lantern who is also a Batman. So, Jokernestro tries something else: he manufactures a crisis in another planet within Sector 2814, causing the Guardians to order Bruce to go deal with it. Bruce refuses, because he doesn't wanna abandon Earth with Jokernestro on the loose, and the Guardians are so pissed that they not only send four existing GLs to capture him (Kilowog, Arisia, Tomar Re, and Katma Tui) but they recruit three new ones from Earth: a Kansas farmboy, an Amazon princess, and a police scientist currently in the process of being bathed by chemicals.
While Bruce fights the other GLs, Jokernestro and his cronies infiltrate the Lantern-Cave to leave him a trap, but they run into the all-new Super Lantern, Wonder Lantern, and Flash Lantern there. During the ensuing confrontation, Alfred dies while sending a message to Bruce via his power battery, spurring Bruce to end the fight with the four GLs by simply snatching their rings away with his superior will. Uh-oh, I think I know where this is going...
By the time Bruce reaches the Lantern-Cave, Jokernestro has fled into space like the little bitch he is. Bruce decides to follow him, leaving Earth, and his cave, under the care of the three new GLs (let's call them Green Leaguers). When Tomar Re asks the Guardians if they should chase Bruce, they say no, "all proceeds as planned."
So, they planned for Jokernestro to murder Bruce's manservant and then escape into space in order to force their most powerful Green Lantern to roam the vastness of the cosmos, possibly forever? Solid plan! THE END. (Except for the time Bat-Lantern showed up in the Countdown: Arena miniseries, but that's outside the scope of this blog and thus someone else's problem.)
Green Lantern Annual #3
This one's set in a timeline in which the Third Reich won World War II thanks to a yellow power ring that Heinrich Himmler got by sacrificing twelve fellow Nazis to a demon. In the present (well, the '90s' present), Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner are high-ranking Nazis...
...while Oliver Queen and John Stewart are part of the forest-dwelling anti-fascist resistance, "the hooded Lanterns of the Green" (there's gotta be a snappier name for that). Just when Oliver is naming John as the new leader of the Lanterns, confusingly named "the Green Arrow," someone shoots Ollie in the head -- it's Guy and his gang of merry Nazis. John escapes the ambush and hides with his lover, a high society lady named Carol Ferris, who happens to be Hal's ex. I think we can rule out her being racist after this scene, though.
Meanwhile, Hal starts hearing mysterious voices in his head that guide him into an alley, where he meets Abin Strauss, a former Nazi officer and the current owner of Himmler's satanic yellow ring. We learn that Himmler was seduced by a sorceress named Karelia (that booby lady honoring Hal and Guy in the panels above), so Abin killed him before he could give her the ring out of pure horniness. Abin has protected the ring since then, but now he's old and tired, so he selects Hal to be the new Yellow (White Power?) Lantern.
Karelia, who has usurped and perverted the International Socialist party with her booby magic, sends Guy and his soldiers to retrieve the ring, but Hal doesn't wanna hand it over and kicks their butts. Karelia is like "fine, I'll just make another ring," which turns out to be a green one because the rebels she sacrificed to create it just happened to be wearing green, I guess.
Okay, so Guy is now "Green Lantern" and also an irredeemable Nazi in this comic, which was published on purpose by DC Comics. Maybe Hal will do better? Let's check in on him for a moment...
Oh. I don't know what "schwarze" means, but I think I can guess.
The voices in Hal's head encourage him to use the power of the ring to get Carol "on her knees" and make her love him again, but he resists them and flies away -- he may be a crazy, misogynistic racist, but he's no crazy, misogynistic rapist. So far. Three panels after Hal leaves John and Carol alone, Guy bursts in and arrests them for "racial pollution" anyway. Both get dressed up in S&M gear (a running theme in DC Elseworlds, it seems) and get pinned to giant swastikas so Guy can torture them by shooting green arrows their way.
That's when Hal drops by and starts fighting Guy, not because he's racist but because he thinks Karelia has corrupted him and "the dream" (the dream of being racist). Hal defeats Guy, but then Karelia reveals her true form: she's the demon who gave Himmler the yellow ring 50 years ago! Karelia is completely immune to the power of the rings -- but not, as it happens, to a single green arrow shot by John, which causes this ancient, all-powerful demonic entity to blow up.
With Karelia dead, Hal urges Guy to give up "the dream" and bury the hatchet. Guy replies by burying that green arrow inside Hal, killing him. While Guy is distracted harassing Carol, John takes the yellow ring from Hal's dead hand and puts it on, becoming... Green Lantern?
But the... yellow ring... SS logo... John's mustache... Okay, you know what, sure, why not. It would actually be weirder if this comic started making sense now.
As John fights Guy, the voices in the yellow ring start telling him to give up and bow to whitey -- but then they're overtaken by Hal's voice, which tells John he just has to "believe." This pep talk gives John the confidence he needed to defeat Guy, a formidable villain who has now had his ass kicked three times in one comic. As a result, the green energy from Guy's ring flows into John's yellow one, finally turning it into a proper Green Lantern ring! Well, except for the small fact that it still has Nazi ghosts inside it, as John freely admits.
But, at least those ghosts aren't so chatty anymore (John says "the whispers have been silenced") and the comic ends with John declaring the beginning of a new, non-racist age as he turns the Nazi symbol in a big eagle statue into a Green Lantern one. THE END. (Nazi-ghost-powered John Stewart was not invited to appear in Countdown: Arena, for some reason.)
Flash Annual #7
For the sake of completionism, I gotta mention Hal's brief appearance in the Elseworlds Flash annual, which is set in a timeline in which Wally West was crippled while he was Kid Flash and grew up to direct a movie about his dead mentor, Barry Allen. Other than a Justice League group shot, Hal only appears to say that he's hated Wally since he was a kid.
This is just not a good year for Hal Jordan representation, huh.
L.E.G.I.O.N. Annual #5
And finally, my favorite of the 1994 annuals, specifically because of the ridiculous "Elseworld Rejects" shorts on the back. I talked about the Superman-related ones at the appropriate blog, but there are two Green Lantern ones too: an "Emerald Twilight" parody where the L.E.G.I.O.N. kill Sinestro and become, well, the L.E.G.I.O.N....
(I would have gone with P.A.R.A.L.L.E.G.I.O.N.)
...and a parody of the classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 (the very special drug issue) replacing Speedy the smackhead with a super-smart drug-addicted alien toddler.
(I hope little Lyrl Dox is shooting up heroin and not homeless person spinal fluid like his grandad, Brainiac.)
You may see these absurd gags as foreshadowing for the Green Lantern/L.E.G.I.O.N. crossover we're about to reach in the regular continuity, though the group has gone through a bit of a forced rebrand by now...
NEXT: A post about the guy this blog is supposed to be about! Karl Raiden or something?
Green Lantern-Related Titles Round-Up (October 1994)
This month: Guy gets a new look/origin/species! Kyle doesn't join the Titans (yet)! John meets someone's grandpa!!!
Guy Gardner: Warrior #0
This issue is one big info dump, but that's okay, because that's what #0 issues are for. The gist of that info is: GUY GARDNER IS AN ALIEN... 's distant descendant. This is revealed to him by that diamond-shaped gizmo he got at the end of GG:W #23, which opens up in the middle of his living room and starts projecting a replay of the events of that issue, with some new scenes that must have gotten Men in Black'd out of Guy's memory.
FLASHBACK TIME: We see Guy drinking the fabled "Water of the Warriors" in GG:W #23 again, only this time, an armored dude called Cardone appears in front of him and takes him to a virtual arena where he's forced to fight a big lizard dude. In the middle of the fight, Guy starts having convulsions and his body starts morphing... sorry, morphin' rather painfully. Once the body horror sequence is over, Guy suddenly looks like he tattooed a tribal rug to his body, a shocking new look that Zero Hour #0 already spoiled for us.
Guy uses his unexplained new ability to morph his arms into weapons (also shown during ZH) to defeat the lizard dude, plus other nasty-looking fellows. Cardone declares that he's passed the test and stops this simulation, because it's backstory exposition time. Cardone explains that a loooong time ago, there was a race of capital "W" Warriors called the Vuldarians, who were devoted to protecting innocent worlds from being conquered by evil empires. They were able to do this due to their legendary Warrior ethos, and also the fact that they could morph their arms into weapons.
But then, one of those empires, the Tormocks, conquered and slaughtered them. The surviving Vuldarians went around the universe sharing their Warrior science with backwater species and, in return, taking samples from their mightiest fighters. The goal was to find a species they could merge with all this genetic knowledge in order to create a race of perfect Warriors to face the Tormocks... which sounds a lot like eugenics. But, you know, for good!
One day, the Vuldarians reached Earth and found out they were "anatomically compatible" with us (cue porno grooves). Unfortunately, the first attempt to produce a human/Vuldarian hybrid was sabotaged by a jealous shaman, resulting in a hideous critter who sure looks a lot like that dream monster from GG:W #22...
The Vuldarians realized that creating a successful merger between the races would take many centuries -- so many that they were all long dead by the time it finally happened. That "successful merger," as you might have guessed, was one Guy J. Gardner. In fact, his genetic "Warrior's instinct" is what led him to become a phys ed teacher, a social worker, and then a superhero. Guy doesn't take this revelation too well. He just hates retcons.
Cardone decides to delete this memory from Guy's mind and limit his power levels until the day he's ready to accept his true heritage. That day seems to be today, since, back in his living room, Guy reacts by simply saying "Aww, man... no way!" instead of throwing another shit fit. And with that, Guy reaches his final form for this series and will stop changing costumes/powers every two issues.
The way this whole "power quest" storyline was handled was obviously very improvised (and partly motivated by editors misunderstanding the point of mid-'90s Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers mania), but now that all the setup is out of the way, this book can finally focus on what it does best: Guy and pals kicking butts. Go Go Guy Gardner!
The New Titans #0
Kyle Rayner doesn't join the New Titans in this issue, nor does Mirage use her mirage power to turn into him, as the cover falsely promises, but he does show up at the end for exactly one panel. Most of the issue is about this Kyle-less new incarnation of the team fighting some super terrorists at the World Trade Center, which almost results in Damage blowing up the Twin Towers by losing control of his exploding powers. Or, as Terra puts it: by "blowing his wad."
Then, on the last page, we see what appears to be a DNA helix (an evil DNA helix) loitering in space right near the big ball of green energy that used to be planet Oa. The helix notices Kyle flying out of there (in GL #0) and decides to hitch a ride to Earth with him. Any GL fans who bought this comic based on seeing about 1/3rd of Kyle on the cover couldn't say they were totally cheated after that.
My guess is they wanted to have Kyle join the team in this issue but couldn't do it since he was in space, so they threw this scene in there to tease the fact that he will join in the near future. I feel like no one talks about that anymore, by the way. Kyle Rayner was in the (No Longer Teen) Titans! Granted, this was not the greatest or most popular or most attractively drawn Titans era ever, and the only iconic character in the team is almost unrecognizable (Beast Boy in his gritty "Dark Changeling" phase), but still. Kyle Rayner was a Titan! They should put him in the cartoon, is what I'm getting at.
Darkstars #0
All-New Darkstar John Stewart is on an urgent mission to confront Jeddigar, the corrupt leader of the Darkstars. So, naturally, he stops for several hours in Darkstar Colos' home planet, Zamba, so that Colos can recap his entire origin to his estranged grandfather. He also recaps all the events of this series so far and its crossovers, including Zero Hour. I'm not sure how reliable Colos' memory is, though, since he remembers Hal Jordan's hair being black.
(Also, Guy is wearing his short-lived yellow armor when he should be wearing his short-lived red armor.)
Upon hearing that whole story, Colos' grandpa is like "Cool. You're still banned from this planet and family, though" (because all violence is forbidden in Zamba, even violence against crazy people trying to reboot the universe). Colos pretends he isn't crying inside and tells John they can resume their mission to stop Jeddigar, asking "What are we waiting for?" You! They were waiting for you, dude.
Justice League Quarterly #16
This issue is all about General Glory (you know, that guy who's like Captain America meets Captain Marvel/Shazam), so of course his #1 fan Guy Gardner plays a role in it. After the General has a heart attack in his elderly Joe Jones identity, Guy visits him at the hospital and brings along some comics from his extensive General Glory comic book collection, the big nerd.
Guy is asked to leave because visiting hours are over (and because he's Guy), so Joe is left alone in that hospital room with a cop who just got crippled taking a bullet for a kid. Joe tries to raise the cop's spirits by reading him stories from the comics Guy brought, which have absolutely nothing to do with his predicament: a Jack Kirby-style Golden Age story, a Curt Swan-style Silver Age story by the real Curt Swan, a gritty '80s Frank Miller pastiche, and an EXTREMELY '90s Rob Liefeld-style slugfest (yes, they did a '90s parody during the actual '90s). Three of these stories feature the General's sidekick, Ernie the Battling Boy, whose fashion sense is the in-universe explanation for Guy's classic bowl cut hairdo.
Since old Joe can't switch back into General Glory without dying from another heart attack, he decides to pass on his powers to the cop, and then… dies anyway? Wait, this is how General Glory dies?! This guy appeared in like 50 Justice League and Guy Gardner comics over the past three years, yet no one seems to have noticed his death in those series (to be fair, Guy had a lot on his mind at this point, including plenty of other deaths).
At least his successor kept his name alive, right? Nope! The DC wiki claims that the new General Glory, Donovan Wallace, only appeared in this issue before being killed off-panel in a mid-2000s Geoff Johns comic (the most dangerous time and place for a C-list DC character). What an undignified end for the DC Universe's most patriotic, if not most original, superhero.
Kyle Rayner fights Hal Jordan! And also, Kyle Rayner (bless his idiot heart) helps Hal Jordan. Hold on, didn't these two die when one got an arrow to the chest and then the Big Bang happened all around them? (The second simplest explanation of Zero Hour #0 you'll find this side of the Milky Way.) Nope, because Hal was able to use his dwindling Parallax powers to transport himself back into the timestream, and Kyle got dragged along because he happened to be right behind him. Now they're back on planet Oa, which is just how Hal left it in GL #50: littered with dead little blue people.
Hal wants to refuel his Parallax Powers with Oa's energy so he can go back to destroying and un-destroying the entire universe, but he soon finds out he can't do that without a GL ring to channel the power (I bet he regrets stepping on two rings over the past few months). Kyle is in full "take down the genocidal villain" mode and gives Hal a good beating, but Hal doesn't seem to be fighting back. At one point, one of Kyle's attacks leaves him next to Kilowog's skull (right where Guy Gardner left it in GG:W #20) and Hal has a meltdown about what he's done. Like, you know, turning one of his friends into a skull.
"Yeah, man, don't worry about it."
When Hal starts crying, Kyle stops punching and actually feels sorry for him, saying he didn't realize "all the pain you went through." Kyle opens up too and, after briefly recapping his origin, says that being GL seemed like a fun gig until his girlfriend Alex got fridge'd, and now he isn't so sure it's worth it. Hal muses that if he had the ring again, oh boy, he'd be so much at better at it this time around.
So, Kyle thinks for a second and just... gives him the ring.
Kyle: "No more chances." (four pages later) "Okay, one more chance."
Green Lantern is back, baby! And he's done trying to remake the universe! R-Right? Uh, no. The first thing Hal does after thanking Kyle for this chance is start drilling into Oa's core so he can absorb all of that green juice and "go back to fixing things." Kyle quickly realizes he fucked up and tries to reason with Hal to get the ring back, but Hal is back to acting like, well, someone who killed a bunch of his friends. In fact, when Kyle throws Kilowog's skull at him (it was the closest thing to a weapon he had at hand), Hal pulverizes it without shedding a tear. RIP, Kilowog's skull.
(Hal's got a point there, though.)
Now, our boy Kyle may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he's pretty resourceful without a ring. When a blast from Hal makes him fall down into the crypt where all the dead GLs are stored, Kyle hides in there, manages to surprise Hal by dropping a dead GL slab on him, and steals the ring back while he's pinned down. Hal doesn't care much, since he already refueled himself and is powerful enough to kick Kyle's ass again. Despite having the advantage, Hal tries to win Kyle over to his side by summoning a green version of Alex, who tells him that they can be together for real if he just lets Hal win.
Kyle tells Fake Green Alex that he'd do anything to bring her back... except this. He regretfully dissolves her with his ring, then says it's about time he did what that little blue guy told him to do when he gave him the ring: "what you must." And "what you must," apparently, is "destroy a whole planet so that Hal Jordan can't get even more powerful." Hal is like "You wouldn't!" But yes, he would.
Hal tries to stop him, but it's too late: Kyle overloads Oa's core and causes the planet to blow up. Kyle emerges from the explosion feeling strangely triumphant and determined for someone who gave up his ring mere pages ago, but destroying a planet to stop (and possibly kill?) a cosmic villain will do that to you. He promises he'll try to live up to the role of One True Green Lantern... if he can figure out how to get home before starving to death in the literal middle of the universe, anyway.
Kyle Losing His Ring Counter: 1
I'm going to count this as the first instance of Kyle losing his ring, even though he gave it up willingly, because he immediately regretted it and had to fight to get it back. The start of a grand DC Comics tradition!
Plotline-Watch:
Oa's destruction will have dramatic repercussions across the DC Universe... and beyond! I'll just say that if you liked the Amalgam comics, you have this issue to thank for it.
This has to be the shortest origin recap sequence among DC's Zero Month issues (whose entire purpose was recapping/rebooting origins). Superman got several pages across four issues, while Kyle only gets half a page... but that's understandable given that his actual origin only happened six issues ago.
Kyle tells Hal that "growing up, all the kids on my block wanted to be you." (He wanted to be Superman.) He might be fibbing there, since Kyle didn't even remember that "Green Lantern" was a thing in GL #51. Or, it's possible that he remembers his friends talking about GL but was so into Superman that he never bothered finding out what his costume looked like.
Upon giving Hal the ring, Kyle admits that this was "probably bound to happen sooner or later anyway." With that attitude, sure!
Hal is surprised that Kyle was able to surprise him by dropping that slab on him at the GL crypt, since the ring should have stopped the attack. So that's another way Kyle's ring is different from the old GL rings: no yellow weakness or 24-hour battery limit, but also no auto-defense system. We'll find out another difference next issue, and to be honest I'm not sure how it squares away with Hal using the ring in this one...
The dead GL in that slab was Hal's predecessor, Abin Sur, unless there's some other bald purple guy I don't know about. Poor Abin: not only was he used to pin down Hal, but Hal then throws the slab back at Kyle to attack him, causing it to break. They were practically playing ping pong with his corpse for a second there.
Blowing up Oa is easier than I would have imagined. Could Sinestro have done it at any of the points when he had a GL ring? I guess the lack of Guardians or dozens of GLs around to prevent it did help Kyle in this instance.
I may rag on Kyle for just giving his ring to a mass murderer who just tried to erase all of creation, but I do love the moment in this issue when he sits down with Hal and they start relating to each other. That brief respite for the insanity feels to me like the foundation for an eventual mentor-mentee relationship.
Zero Hour 30th Anniversary Special #1 (October 2024)
OH NO! A residual time vortex left over from Zero Hour has transported us from October 1994 to October 2024! Before a Linear Man comes to take us back to our proper time and/or shoot us with a giant gun, let's look at the Zero Hour 30th Anniversary special that came out this month, and absolutely nothing else. (Not because I don't wanna learn too much about the future to protect the integrity of the timestream, but just because it looks kinda depressing...)
The issue starts with the Kyle Rayner of 2024, who looks exactly like the '94 model, right down to being drawn by Darryl Banks. I'm gonna take this to mean that no dramatic events have happened in Green Lantern comics during the past 30 years and the status quo is pretty much the same.
The one difference seems to be that Kyle can't access Sector 2814 or Earth, for some reason, so he's stuck Green Lanterning in alien planets. He's in one of those planets when a portal opens in front of him and Wally "Flash" West (or a version of him, anyway) comes out, begging for Kyle's help with some sort of universe-destroying threat.
Wally pulls Kyle into the portal, which leads them to a reality where there's a big statue of Batman in front of Wayne Manor. Apparently, they've landed in Earth "Bruce Wayne Doesn't Give a Shit If Anyone Figures It Out." Wally says something about a "Crisis-level event" coming -- which is confirmed when two members of the Fatal Five (the 31st century supervillain team) show up, kill him, and peace out.
Yep, that's a Crisis alright.
In the next section (drawn by Kelley Jones), Kyle has a run-in with Gotham City's protector: Batgirl, who's kind of a gritty badass in this reality and gives Kyle a beatdown because she thinks he killed Wally. However, no amount of prep time can make Batgirl more powerful than a ring that can create anything you want, so Kyle easily traps her in a green bubble and flies her back to Wayne Manor to figure out what the hell's going on. There, they meet a version of Bruce Wayne who never recovered from that little "Bane" incident in 1993, meaning he's still crippled and depressed. But hey, on the upside, he now owns a cool sci-fi wheelchair and sports an even cooler beard.
Kyle ditches the belligerent Bat-people and heads to Metropolis to look for Superman. And sure enough, he finds Superman... 's grave, because, in this world, he never came back after Doomsday killed him. You might notice a pattern emerging here. (This section is drawn by Tom Grummett, who has some experience drawing dead Supes.)
Instead, Kyle meets Supergirl, who's wearing a very "Reign of the Supermen" black costume and immediately starts punching him. We learn that Batgirl called every hero she knows and told them that this green weirdo killed Flash and is probably to blame for the fact that reality seems to be collapsing around them. Supergirl is joined by Azrael, The Ray, and Wonder Woman -- a.k.a. Donna Troy, who, we're told, is someone Kyle once dated (uh, spoilers for post-1994 GL comics!). Donna has no idea who Kyle is, but at least her Lasso of Truth establishes that he's not some Flash-killing reality destroyer.
Obsidian, son of the Golden Age Green Lantern, joins the party. He tells everyone that he (somehow) used his shadow powers to peek across time and found out that other eras have been erased, from Viking times to the Middle Ages to the 1940s. This provides a convenient excuse for this section's artist, the legendary Jerry Ordway, to draw the Justice Society of America for the 1940th time.
The far-future has also been destroyed completely, except for exactly five baddies who escaped in a time bubble (the previously seen Fatal Five). At this point, Kyle should have said "Hey, that's just like in Zero Hour!" but he still doesn't understand what's going on. Thankfully, he gets a little nudge in the form of... oh shit, it's Hal Jordan as Parallax!!! (Please pretend you didn't see him on the cover.)
After seeing Parallax, Kyle finally starts putting things together: looks like this is the "perfect world" Hal wanted to create in Zero Hour, where Coast City was never destroyed... but all the other '90s calamities still happened to the other heroes, because screw those guys. Now this universe is decaying, but Hal thinks he can keep it going if Kyle hands over his GL ring. Kyle doesn't wanna, so it's Lantern vs. Lantern time (as drawn by Paul Pelletier, who'd be great on a storyline featuring GLs fighting GLs, hypothetically speaking).
Hal sics his new lackeys, the Fatal Five, on Kyle. More '90s heroes show up to help: Connor "Green Arrow" Hawke, Jack "Starman" Knight (who I really hope is being used with James Robinson's blessing; presumably Tony Harris is okay with it, since he has a pinup in this issue), and Guy "Guy Gardner" Gardner (in his red armor, which probably hasn't been seen in non-flashback form since the '90s).
Meanwhile, Supergirl reluctantly visits her asshole ex, Lex, to ask him how to stop their universe from decaying (I wish they'd used his long-haired Lex Luthor Jr. look, but I guess that was ruled out because it ended right before Zero Hour). Lex confirms what Parallax is saying: they have to give him Kyle's ring.
So, Supergirl joins Hal's side, while Donna sticks by Kyle and other heroes stand around wondering what to do. Soon enough, Hal manages to get his hands on Kyle's ring, something he claims would be "next to impossible for most." Yeah, Kyle losing his ring to a villain? When has that ever happened?
Now that he has double the power, Hal saves this universe by... screwing Kyle's. As in, he takes all that entropy that's eating this reality and channels it to the regular DCU via the portal that brought Kyle here. The heroes aren't sure how they feel about that, but Kyle argues that their universe is less important than his multiverse because it's smaller. Also, that unimportant universe has a name now: Splinterverse! Not to be confused with the Earth where everyone is a martial artist rat.
(Also also, Howard Porter is the artist now!)
You might wonder where Linear Men, the time police, are during this whole mess. The answer is "trapped in a cube." Turns out Waverider found out about this Splinterverse at some point and traveled here to deal with it, but Hal imprisoned him in said cube. Luckily, Wavey's found by the Legion of Super-Heroes' Invisible Kid, who stowed away in the Fatal Five's time bubble by... being invisible. Before he's freed by Invisible Kid, Waverider delivers some (Dan Jurgens and Brett Breeding-drawn!) exposition that reveals the precise moment when the Splinterverse was created: the part at the end of Zero Hour #0 when he slipped the heroes back into the timestream, at which point Hal sneakily dispatched "a splinter aspect of himself" to create a smaller-scale version of his "perfect world."
Waverider helps convince the conflicted heroes that it's worth it to let their little universe die so that trillions more people can live. Even Guy Gardner, who was initially going "screw you, I'm saving myself" and punched Kyle, begrudgingly stands down. With Starman and Obsidian's assistance, Kyle is able to get his ring back from Hal, causing the entropy to flood back into the Splinterverse. Kyle is convinced that there must be some way to save this place, but Waverider is like "nope" and drags him back to the DCU as the Splinterverse is erased. The only thing that remains of it is a nice necklace that Wonder Donna gave Kyle to remember her by.
Kyle is mighty pissed at Waverider for not even trying to save the Splinterverse, but at least they're back home and it's all over... or is it? The special ends with the revelation that something Kyle did in this issue somehow freed some sort of big, yellow space bug. Wonder what that's about. Looking forward to reading the resolution to that cliffhanger in 30 more years!
As a '90s kid, I am physically incapable of disliking this special, which was aimed squarely at me. The 14-year-old Kyle/Donna shipper in me especially appreciates the focus on those two, with Kyle even mentioning that he doesn't really understand why she was suddenly written out of his life (the answer is "because John Byrne").
However, I think there are several missed opportunities here:
The Splinterverse doesn't look a whole lot like the "perfect world" Hal wanted to create in Zero Hour. Coast City is there, but it only appears for a few panels and doesn't really play any role in the story. Everyone else is kinda angry and miserable, or pretty much the same as in the DCU. It would have been interesting to see if the utopia Hal had promised, where no tragedies happen and one needs to grow old or die, would have been sustainable over time.
I really hoped the female Time Trapper from the end of ZH #0 would be addressed, but nope. Dan Jurgens has said that he intended that to be the alternate timeline Batgirl who died in ZH, which I find a really intriguing idea. On that note, the Batgirl in this issue is clearly not the one who died in ZH, not just because, well, she's alive, but also because she acts like a totally different character and makes no reference to anything in ZH.
I was gonna say that I'd hoped the Hal/Parallax in this issue would be the one that was left as a loose end at the end of Convergence, especially since Jurgens was also involved in that series. However, the DC wiki informs me that this version has actually appeared in other comics since then, as recently as 2023, and his further misadventures sound a bit confusing from the write-up there, so I can't really blame Jurgens and Ron Marz for looking at that and saying "You know, let's just make another one."
One thing I did like is that, on top of reuniting Kyle Rayner creators Ron Marz and Darryl Banks, this special also features so many classic '90s Superman artists -- in fact, my friend and @superman86to99 co-runner Don Sparrow had a lot to say about the art in this issue in that blog, so head there for more!
At last, our eternal September comes to a close with the climax of the Zero Hour event, and it's... a whole bunch of nothing. You know, because Hal "Not Green Lantern" Jordan destroyed the universe last issue and all. But then, out of the nothingness, a new universe starts emerging as Hal explains how the destruction of Coast City and his former bosses' refusal to let him recreate it led him to decide that the universe is all wrong and should be restarted from scratch. So that's what's he's doing. Talk about being the change you want to see in the world/universe.
Of course, not all of the heroes present appreciate the fact that Hal just murdered billions of people to create his "better world" -- or "worlds," since he floats the idea of giving the Justice Society their own where they can stay forever young. Hal also promises the alternate reality characters present, like Batgirl and Alpha Centurion, that they can have their own worlds restored instead of having to fade away at the end of the crossover like it usually happens.
What Hal doesn't know is that Waverider managed to pull a select group of heroes out of the timestream right before the old universe was erased, including Superman, Kyle "Yes Green Lantern" Rayner, Damage (who doesn't know why he's there, since he's just a kid who makes stuff explode), and Green Arrow (who doesn't want to be there, since he hates "this cosmic stuff"). The heroes try to stop Hal and end up having to fight not just his lackey Extant but also Alpha Centurion and Batgirl, who only wants to live.
(Glad to see Centurion is sticking by his "100" theme even in this time of great stress.)
Unsurprisingly, the side with the guy powerful enough to destroy an entire universe is winning the fight. Hal's practically a god! But not the God, which means that there's still one DCU character capable of kicking his ass: The Spectre, who also survived the destruction of the universe because he's The Spectre. While the royally pissed-off Speccy keeps Hal occupied, Waverider instructs the heroes to absorb the energy of the nascent universe and then channel it into Damage. Hal figures out what Waverider is planning to do and tries to kill Damage, but Batgirl switches sides again to save the kid, at the cost of her own life....
...which is particularly tragic because it looked like Hal was gonna miss.
Green Arrow, who had bonded with Batgirl even when they were on different sides, shoots an arrow straight into Hal's chest as Kyle holds him down, so I guess that's why Waverider brought those two along. The Spectre says "only one task remains" and pumps even more energy into Damage, who generates the mother of all explosions -- as in, the actual Big Bang. And that's why Waverider brought him along.
Without Hal manipulating events, the universe is recreated as it had been before, more or less. The heroes (plus Extant, but he bails pretty soon) watch from outside the timestream as history unfolds until the nanosecond right before Hal destroyed the universe, at which point Waverider slips all of them back into their present... with some slight differences, like Guy Gardner suddenly sporting some funky body paint instead of his Warrior armor.
Everyone who died from holes in reality and such is alive again, but we're told that others are still dead, like Wally West (spoilers: no he isn't), Hal and Kyle (spoilers: no they aren't), or the JSA's Hourman and the Atom (spoilers: okay, yes they are... improbably, to this day). The alternate reality characters, like Alpha Centurion, have faded away as customary. On the other hand, amid all that death, Power Girl finally gave birth to a little boy, who I'm sure will grow up to be hugely relevant to the DC Universe and not end up being forgotten within two years!
The crossover ends with Green Arrow shaking his fist at the heavens about what happened to his best friend, the Linear Men exploring the mysteries of this new/old universe, and an intriguing shot of a female Time Trapper... which apparently never paid off. (All I can find is that a female Trapper was teased in the new continuity but never actually appeared, and now The Time Trapper is Doomsday?!)
This re-read hasn't diminished my impression that this series kicks ass. My one big complaint is that they kinda fumbled Extant, a tragic figure reduced to a pretty one-dimensional villain. He's a hero who was driven mad by watching his own future self killing his beloved partner, Dove. It would have been cool if this last issue had revealed that his motivation was bringing Dove back to life and untangling that whole time loop mess, even if it meant killing billions (as opposed to "he wanted a world to rule"). Then again, this is a pretty packed series, so it's possible Dan Jurgens wanted to do something like that and simply didn't have space. Or time.
But we always have time for more commentary from Don Sparrow, so keep on reading!
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
We open with the cover, and it’s important to remember this issue in context. While blank covers are commonplace nowadays (a great way to get original art from a creator at a convention) they were completely unheard of at the time of publication, so this was a very nervy, risky thing to drop on a newsstand, and really stood out.
Inside the book, we start from the blank slate we already saw in the last few pages of the crossover issues. As the story gets started in earnest, the splash is a tad confusing, as Parallax appears gigantic in that first splash, but then is normal sized only a few panels later. The image of Hal’s face lit by the creation he’s trying to build, while he scolds Batgirl, completely in control freak mode, is a good one, showing his placid expression.
The only thing scarier than a villain with this level of power is a villain with this level of power who can’t wipe an empty smile off his face—there’s a lot of that in this issue.
Speaking of facial expressions, Guy Gardner runs the gamut here, remaining so consistent since the last issue, showing both anger and shock in remarkably believable ways. When Guy Gardner is the voice or reason, you know something has gone terribly wrong.
Once the battle begins, the image of Parallax attacking Ray, Captain Atom, Superman AND Donna Troy with his back turned is pretty boss.
The emergence of the screaming Spectre on page 13 is a stunner, and I love the fun this art team has with his cape. There’s something fitting about Waverider literally thanking God, since Spectre was established to be the Judeo-Christian God’s angel of wrath at this time. It’s pretty nuts that Parallax lasts as long as he does against Spectre, even seemingly damaging him on page 16. But unlike Spectre, the power Hal absorbed from the Central Power Battery when he went nuts is finite, so he’s burning fuel this whole fight.
There are a couple instances in this story where the level of damage from an attack seems unclear to the reader. The first is when Batgirl sacrifices her life to save Damage (as Max pointed out, it looked like Damage had cleared left of his blast). As her stomach is blasted, we see—and hear—her Batgirl uniform being torn away, but still see her belly-button, making me think this wound isn’t that dangerous, but it’s apparently lethal. Ditto a page later when Hal takes Ollie’s arrow to the chest—all we are shown is the very tip puncturing Parallax’s armour, but we aren’t shown how deeply the arrow went in, so it doesn’t seem like that’s what would have killed him, at least the first time I read it.
The history of the new Earth as the heroes try to come to grips with what just happened is super interesting—I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dinosaur drawn more realistically than the apatosaurus on page 23.
Lastly, I absolutely adore that pull-out timeline poster, something I would look back on again and again. I loved the conceit of time not being fixed by dates, but by terms like “ten years ago”, etc. Jurgens and Ordway are excellent enough artists to make all these corny mid-90s designs look cool, even truly awful characters like Manhunter and Fate.
Reviewing this series has been a fun reappraisal. I’ll admit, I love the art so much that I was willing to overlook some of the criticisms (the mistreatment of the JSA, Hal as mass murderer) that are actually fairly valid. But overall, I appreciated it as an effort to clean up Crisis-related continuity, and provide a jumping on point for new readers.
SPEEDING BULLETS:
I was pretty unfamiliar with Green Arrow at this point in my reading, so his jaded, world-weary sarcasm in this issue greatly informed my understanding of the character. It would be years later when I’d read the original (relatively brief) famous run by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams of Green Lantern/Green Arrow that I’d understand Hawkman’s reference to Oliver’s “optimistic liberal philosophy”. “Maybe it died with the rest of the universe” is an all-time cool line. [Max: I'm also a fan of Hal's "weren't you the one who always told me to get involved?"]
Less cool: eternal square Superman chiding Captain Atom for being counter-productive for pointing out that they failed in protecting all of reality. It’s in character, it’s a tad on the dorky side.
Alpha-Centurion having zero misgivings about siding with Parallax pretty much explains my lack of affection for this character. It would be one thing if he’d said “I’m torn, but it seems we have no choice…” but nope, he’s all in—“I stand with him 100 percent”.
Triumph being ineffectual and indecisive on page 11 pretty much sums up this guy’s sad arc. [Max: I wonder if Triumph was there because he was meant to join Batgirl and Alpha Centurion's side, but then someone at the JLA office said "No, this guy's sticking around! He's for real! We'll be doing Triumph stories for decades!"]
Once again, Green Arrow gets a laugh-line with his muttered “Jeez, they’ve forgotten that we’re even here!” as 60 foot tall Spectre and Parallax throw down.
I know I’m commenting too much here, but “Emerald Hypocrite” is an appropriately Biblical sounding epithet from Spectre, that has always stuck in my mind.
I always find it interesting when writers come back to ideas they’ve used before. I can think of a handful of different times when Ron Marz used the idea of destroying something, or defeating something not by removing its power, but by overloading it with power (perhaps Max, who is doing exhaustive research on the GL comics of this era can cosign on that one). [Max: Co-signed! See here for evidence.] Two different occasions, Chuck Dixon had “password” as the ironic computer password needed to advance the story. And here we see a scene playing out with Waverider filtering energy blasts into Damage in a way that recalls the same writer, Dan Jurgens, having the Eradicator absorbing and channeling the energy being shot at him by Cyborg Superman, saving the real Kal-El in the process in Superman #82. [Max: Co-signed on this one too. This moment always reminded me of that Eradicator scene.]
Had Parallax’s blast hit Damage, would it have been that different? Wouldn’t he have just exploded and started the Big Bang anyway?
I do like that the Spectre, as narrative emissary of God’s will, was involved in that last stage of restarting time—makes me feel like his involvement somehow makes this reset official, feeling like it was intended to happen, and not just the handful of heroes left doing exactly what Hal had wanted, and making their own reality.
I thought of this issue, and the moment Waverider expresses that Extant will ultimately defeat himself as I read JSA #15 in the year 2000, and had to chuckle. Have a nice flight, Hank.
Love the non-answer from Waverider when Superman asks very clearly “Is Hal dead, or not?” Which part is he saying yes to?
Read the room, Power Girl. Also, in JLE #50, Power Girl made out with Hal once—no sorrowful reaction at his heel turn and apparent death? (Yes, I know most of Gerard Jones’ ideas were bad, but this was still present day continuity.) [Max: Hal did give her crap for becoming pregnant soon after declining to have sex with him as one of his last official JLE acts, so I can understand PG here.]
Yeah, I have no idea what to make of that female Time Trapper, either. Just based on the wavy hair, and lack of other female time travel characters, I figured it was Liri Lee, but it was apparently Lori Morning in a possible future? [Max: Was that ever made clear? The DC wiki is kinda vague about it. I also THINK I remember an interview with Jurgens saying he intended that woman to be Batgirl, but can't find it right now, and obviously that went nowhere.]
Missed an issue? Looking for an old storyline? Check out our new chronological issue index!
In this issue: Superman gets punched! The real villain is revealed! And, oh yeah, EVERYONE DIES.
We open with Supergirl, Steel, Alternate Timeline Batgirl, and a distraught Guy Gardner coming out of a big hole in reality in what used to be Coast City. Guy is muttering something about how he "just saw the woman I loved die" (which, if you're following @greenlantern94to04, you also just saw in the latest post about Guy Gardner: Warrior #24). More of these "entropy fissures" pop up all around and one of them gobbles up Steel, despite Guy's efforts. It's been a humbling day for the once obnoxiously arrogant Guyster.
While Guy curses Extant for causing all this, Extant is like "The hell is causing all this?" Turns out he's not the one opening all those fissures. That's when the mysterious glowing green figure from the end of last issue shows up and demonstrates that Extant isn't the top dog here (although you could still use a word for "canine" to describe him in this page). The Actual Big Bad chastises Extant for "forgetting who's in charge here" and acting like he's the villain of this comic just because he's all over the covers, ads, preview blurbs, and, you know, the comic itself. Until now, anyway.
The mystery villain's next stop is the 30th century, or at least the tiny Pocket (Earth) of it that still survives. The Time Trapper has stashed a few Legion of Super-Heroes members (including his own past selves, Cosmic Boy and Cosmic... Man?) in there to prevent them from being eaten by entropy, but they end up fading into nothingness anyway. Then, TTT is easily taken down by the mystery character again -- yep, it was him who did that at the start of ZH #4 (the first issue), not Extant. In fact, TTT even does the exact same pose while being blasted just to make it clear that it's by the same guy.
(And also because Dan Jurgens drew six books this month and deserved a little break here.)
Back in the 20th century, everyone born in the past or future starts disappearing as their eras of origin are deleted from history. That means Impulse (30th century), Booster Gold (25th), and the old folks at the Justice Society (early 20th). Before being wiped out, however, Jay "First And Apparently Only Surviving Flash" Garrick manages to convince his old friend The Spectre that they've finally reached the part of the crossover where he decides to get involved. (I only said decides, though; he'll actually do it next issue.)
As time gets erased, Metron takes Superman and a few others outside of it: meaning, to Vanishing Point. The heroes need someone who can easily ride the waves of time, so it's too bad that Waverider died last issue. Luckily, they still have his alternate human version Matthew Ryder, so they just turn him all Waverider-y using convenient comic book science. (It's kinda funny that no one asks for Matthew's opinion on this; he's just like "Oooh, I don't know about thi-- whelp, guess I'm Waverider now!")
In the present, the rapidly declining number of surviving heroes (Batman, RIP... ped apart by a time hole) fight Extant with the help of Waverider 2... and NO help from Wonder Woman, since she's busy delivering Power Girl's baby. At one point, Extant tries to de-age The Atom into primordial goop, but Waverider 2 stops that process when Atom is merely at 18 years old (ironic, considering The Other Atom died from being aged into bones back in ZH #3 (the second issue)).
Just when the heroes are about to defeat Extant, someone punches Superman himself into the ground. Everyone looks in shock as we learn that it's none other than...
Freakin' Psi-- I mean, Hal Jordan! Wait, isn't Hal a good guy? Nice, he can help bring down the mystery villain! The day is saved!
Wait, no. Hal is the mystery villain. He's taken the name Parallax and decided that the universe needs to be restarted from zero to correct injustices like the destruction of Coast City. Oliver Queen / Green Arrow can't believe that his old friend Hal is the one who just wiped away 99.999999...% of all of humanity across history, but Hal says that yep, it's him alright -- and proves it by wiping out the rest now. Everything fades to white.
As he fades away too, Hal says: "Who knows? Maybe one universe... one world -- won't be enough." But right now, there's no universe and no worlds. Just nothing. THE END. OF EVERYTHING.
Except this post, because there's more from Don Sparrow!
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
Probably the best cover of the series as some of DC’s most recognizable heroes disintegrate into the widening wave of nothingness. Having so little of the image inked in pure blacks was very rare for the time and gives the cover a distinguishing look on the shelves.
Inside the issue, the art keeps up the excellent standard of quality with a stunning shot of Supergirl soaring into action.
Guy Gardner is among the characters most consistently drawn in this book, so he feels like a real person. The shot of him lit from below as he watches Steel disappear is particularly well rendered.
I love Jurgens’ use of long tall panels, and the one of the Greatest Generation Flash huffing his way from New York City is a good one and gives a real sense of his effort. On the next page, the Spectre hissing through clenched teeth is one of the best images I’ve ever seen of the character (second only, perhaps, to his holy cries in issue #7 of the original Crisis—like this page, inked by the incomparable Jerry Ordway). I really am trying to restrain myself from commenting on each page, but it’s hard with the art being this good throughout. Page 18 is almost all highlights, with Batgirl jumping into the fray (in a pose reminiscent, to me at least, of her Million Dollar Debut in Detective Comics #359) and a great shot of Green Arrow taking aim at Extant (though his inner monologue could use an edit).
[Max: DC, please incorporate Don's addition to the next printing.]
The new and improved Waverider’s sudden appearance is a great visual, but nothing compares to a couple pages later where we see who has the power to KO Superman. Designed by perhaps my favourite Green Lantern artist Darryl Banks, Parallax Hal Jordan’s costume has always been a favourite of mine (in spite of its '90s hallmarks like the giant shoulder armour), and it’s never looked better than here (though for some reason, this Hal has lost his Reed Richards white hair at the temples). Just so we fully understand he’s a villain, he defies not only all of DC’s heroes, but the late great Jim Croce himself by not only tugging on, but—get this--stepping on Superman’s cape. Nihilo sanctum estne, Hal Jordan?
I know from the comments we’re getting that there’s still a lot of bad feelings out there for this mini-series. Maybe knowing the continuity changes that came later to explain this all away made it more palatable but I have to tip my hat to what a huge swing it is revealing the villain this way, especially keeping him under wraps for months as Kyle established himself as the new Green Lantern. And the art goes an incredibly long way. Honestly, apart from Bryan Hitch’s work on The Authority 5 years later, it’s hard to think of any non-fully painted comic that had such dynamic realism.
SPEEDING BULLETS:
The Steel/Supergirl/Batgirl/Gardner team up came immediately from a needlessly cruel set up by Extant, where they were forced to see the active destruction of Coast City as they chased Extant through time as he toyed with them over in Guy Gardner: Warrior #24. Most tragic of all, Guy temporarily lost his eyebrows in the battle. [Max: NoOoOoOoOoOoO!]
There’s a sense of diminishing returns in big event comics when characters die. It’s impactful when one or two big names fall in a story, but sometimes as very popular characters die (in this case, Steel, Jay Garrick and no less than BATMAN) as a reader you start to realize—oh, none of this matters, they’re gonna do a reset, there’s no way they’d leave characters this financially important stay dead for long. [Max: At least Jay got a good arc. Batman is kind of an ineffective chump in this series... and as a Superman loyalist, I approve of that narrative choice.]
The whole storyline of Power Girl’s labour is hilariously out of place here. Purportedly she went to NYC to help, but all she really accomplished was taking one of the big guns (Wonder Woman) out of the arsenal (confirmed by both Impulse and Booster saying there are more important things to worry about). I’m also a bit confused as to why she has to deliver on the ground. She’s clearly on some kind of shiny, gurney-like thing on page 8, but Wonder Woman’s elevated knee (and Captain Atom looking down on them) seems to show she’s on the floor. But why? Also, Wonder Woman comes from an island with exactly one childbirth in the last two thousand years or so—why is she pulling rank on Captain Atom for delivering PG’s baby?
Batman seems uncharacteristically broken up about Impulse “dying”, especially since they just met. [Max: I know I just called him a chump, but I think Batman can be forgiven for still being sensitive about teenage sidekicks dying in front of him.]
We get more of that weird pattern in this story, of a character (Geo-Force) boldly declaring they want to do something about the crisis, and then being told, no, “wait until we’re organized” (by Hawkman). For a quickly developing disaster, we’re losing quite a lot of space with those kinds of exchanges, though I suppose they have them in order to get more characters into speaking parts.
Metron looks so consistent throughout, he must be based off photo reference of an actor. Who do you guys think? Jeremy Irons is close.
I kinda love the running theme of Wonder Woman snapping at ineffectual Justice Leaguers, first Captain Atom, then a shell-shocked and barely bandaged Aquaman. [Max: Reading the Spanish version as a kid, I was never clear on whether she was telling him to get a doctor for Power Girl or himself, on account of the whole "just got his hand eaten by piranhas" thing. It's a bit clearer in English.]
In my first (hundred) readings of this issue, I kinda glossed over the foreshadowing between Metron and Atom about how they’ll solve their “Waverider is definitely dead” problem, but it’s not exactly subtle on a closer reading.
They really just had no idea what to do with Atom at this point. Having tried turning him into a sword and sorcery guy, they now throw “he’s a teenager” at the wall to see if it sticks. At least this is the last time they’ll make fundamental changes to his mythology in a Crisis book. [Max: I'm very curious about the Teen Titans series that spun out of the Teen Atom thing, though, mainly because Jurgens/Pérez and Jurgens/Rapmund are both such great art combos. I'll read it once we get there!]
Missed an issue? Looking for an old storyline? Check out our new chronological issue index!
Green Lantern-Related Titles Round-Up (September 1994)
This month: Zero Hour! ZERO HOUR! ZERO HOUR!
Guy Gardner: Warrior #24
This issue is wild, man. As seen in Zero Hour, Guy Gardner (who suddenly has the ability to grow handguns out of his arms) has decided that the current crisis afflicting the DC Universe is the perfect opportunity to go back in time and undo the destruction of Coast City, thus preventing his frenemy Hal Jordan from going insane and turning into a full-on enemy. We start with Guy having already assembled an unlikely team for that mission: Supergirl, Steel, and an alternate-timeline Batgirl who still has her spine intact. I'm pretty sure the rationale behind these selections is "the writer of this comic likes 'em" (I know Beau Smith is a big Supergirl guy especially).
(Note that Guy and Steel are supposed to be old college buddies, but that isn't acknowledged in this issue beyond Guy saying "reminds me of..." when Steel makes a football-related comment.)
Anyway, Guy and pals are at that monument the superheroes built in what used to be Coast City, when a time vortex opens and sends them to the past, just as Guy wanted. Unfortunately, the vortex overshoots it a bit and they all end up in dinosaur times. There, they run into... well, dinosaurs, but also Extant, the guy who is totally the main villain behind Zero Hour and not just a decoy one.
By the way, here are all the names Guy calls Extant in this issue: Ex-Lax, Timex, Extinct, Ex-Man (don't wanna speculate about what Guy, a macho dude in the '90s, might have meant by that last one).
Extant makes the heroes go through a bunch of different time periods -- and art styles, since this issue has five different artists. First up is the old west (drawn by Phil Jimenez), where the Guy Gang teams up with an assortment of DC western characters to take on Extant and his posse of mind-controlled gunslingers. Two notable events here are: 1) Guy turning his arms into the "Toastmaster" guns that Steel designed, and 2) Supergirl shapeshifting into Extant to try to trick him into thinking she's his future self, but it doesn't really work out and we get this panel:
Next, Extant briefly sends them to the far future (drawn by future superstar Howard Porter), leading to cameos by the Space Ranger and a time-displaced Lady Blackhawk, who joins the Guy Gang. The time rollercoaster then sends them to Coast City's relatively recent past (fittingly drawn by Mike Parobeck), where Guy not only sees Hal Jordan in his prime but also... himself, looking like a well-adjusted adult and hanging out with his precognitive ex-girlfriend Kari Limbo.
Being close to his own past self causes Guy to freak out and lose control of his still-undefined new powers. Hal assumes that this shapeshifting weirdo must be a supervillain who wants to "destroy Coast City" and tries to take him down with one punch™.
(I like how Hal's whole vibe in these retroactive appearances is "if anyone ever tries to destroy Coast City I'm gonna LOSE MY SHIT.")
Another time vortex opens, this time sending Guy alone to the day Coast City was destroyed in a Superman comic (drawn by Jackson Guice, the artist in another Superman comic, but close enough). Guy once again bumps into Kari, who finally realizes that he was the shapeshifting weirdo who ruined their date that day years ago. Extant appears and makes Guy watch as the city explodes, killing Kari and millions of others. Then everything fades to white and...
...you guessed it, TO BE CONTINUED IN ZERO HOUR!
Darkstars #24
New Darkstar Donna Troy has been sent on a mission to arrest cosmic murderer Hal Jordan before he does anything else crazy, like trying to restart the universe or something. Donna and her new teammates follow a huge Green Lantern-related energy signature and find not Hal, but a time-displaced Entropy/Krona, the ancient Guardian who accidentally created the DC Multiverse and went crazy. What is it about GL characters and poor mental health?
Oh yeah, that GL up there is Abin Sur, Hal's long-dead predecessor, who pops up in the middle of the fight due to the ongoing time wackiness. Donna considers telling Abin that he shouldn't give his ring to any dudes named Hal because they'll eventually kill the GL Corps, but then she's like "wait, no, that's dumb" upon realizing that trying to change history would be wildly irresponsible, not to mention dangerous (see: the GG:W issue up there).
Once the time-lost characters have been sucked into a black hole and returned to their respective times, a Superman hologram appears in front of everyone and asks them to come over to the Zero Hour series and help out with the time crisis (but only Donna ends up going). Meanwhile, John Stewart makes his debut as a Darkstar...
...and makes sure to mention right away that he's no longer a GL or a Guardian, just in case anyone was worried about his sanity. John tells Darkstar Colos that his sham trial last issue was indeed a sham trial and the guy running the Darkstars is corrupt, so they should probably do something about that. Unfortunately, they don't have time for that, since everything fades to white at the end of the issue (again).
So, for Donna anyway, this will be CONTINUED IN ZERO HOUR!
Justice League America #92, Justice League Task Force #16, and Justice League International #68
Young Hal also appears in the "Return of the Hero" storyline, which introduces the Justice League's forgotten founder, Triumph. The first part reveals that Triumph was actually the one who first brought Hal, Barry "Flash" Allen, Black Canary, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter (plus guest star Superman) together as a team to fight an alien invasion, though he was kind of a dick about it.
That first adventure ended with Triumph using his magnetic powers to stop the aliens, which somehow "trapped him out of phase with the timestream" and caused everyone to forget him. Now, thanks to Zero Hour, he's back and wants to lead the current Justice League against the also-returned aliens, but they're like "nah."
After a lot of drama and in-fighting, the JL does agree to join Triumph against the aliens. In the end, it turns out that the aliens only wanted to talk but didn't know how, so they expressed themselves via superhero fight scenes. One of the ways in which they try to communicate with Triumph in the last chapter is by turning into Hal:
Yep, that's Phil Jimenez again; dude was pretty busy this month.
Anyway, once Triumph learns to work on his interpersonal skills and gets through to the aliens, they instantly go away and the day is saved. The League welcomes Triumph (back) into the team, and then... everything fades to white. NOT TO BE CONTINUED IN ZERO HOUR, BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS CEASED TO EXIST!
(Note: Some GL-related Elseworld annuals also came out this month, but they'll go in another post since this one was getting too long. Get ready for Nazi Hal vs. Nazi Guy!)
Zero Hour continues! The action ramps up as a central character dies, the Team Titans go bad, and everyone else is like "No, it's spelled Teen Titans. What? That's a different comic? Okay, I don't know who they are. Bummer, though."
As seen at the end of last issue, Superman and the heroes he gathered in New York have run into a little problem: a whole-ass future city just materialized over NY and is about to cause the equivalent of several 9/11s. It doesn't help that they have to put up with The Ray, who's kind of a turd in this comic -- I'm just glad Superboy isn't the most insufferable teenage character for once (though he does make an effort later on, when he hits on Anima and says the words "Babe alert!").
The heroes solve the crashing cities conundrum by creating a Boom Tube portal and shooting lasers at it until it's big enough to suck up an entire city. Hooray for science!
But the celebration doesn't last long, because this is when they find out that their friends at the Justice Society are now older or dead, having been artificially aged (or de-artificially de-aged?) by the villainous Extant. The only JSAer who was spared from the geriatric effect was Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern, but he decides to quit superheroing anyway and gives his ring to Kyle Rayner, the Current Age Green Lantern. Jay Garrick, the original Flash, calls it quits too and dramatically tears the lightning bolt logo from his chest (but doesn't give it to Impulse, even though he's right there).
The rest of the heroes decide to split up to handle the "time's eating itself" issue from both ends: Superman, Metron, and one group go to the 30th century to try to stop the entropy wave there, and Waverider and another group go do the same thing in the distant past. In both cases, their efforts are hindered by members of the Team Titans, who were introduced a few years ago as a large group of superpowered resistance fighters from the futuristic year 2001. However, their already convoluted origin gets even more confusing when Extant reveals he secretly formed the team and placed them in the present as sleeper agents, waiting for this moment. (Side note: Is this the only DC crossover where ALL the villains are heroes turned bad?)
While delivering all that exposition, the ever-efficient Extant also tries to kill Donna "Suddenly A Darkstar" Troy with a chronal blast. Kyle Rayner gets in the way and saves her (classic Kyle), in the process dropping and completely forgetting that GL ring Alan Scott entrusted him with a few pages ago (also classic Kyle).
Kyle survives this scene, but not everyone else does. Since Waverider is made out of chronal energy, Extant manages to "absorb" all of him and gain his powers, killing him in the process. And that's why Extant had Waverider's golden skin and firey hair last issue, you see: from his perspective, he'd already killed him and stolen his powers/look, and then he traveled in time and used those powers to punk the JSA. That's exactly the sort of twist I like to see in a time travel story.
Meanwhile, Superman and the other heroes currently visiting the 30th century have defeated or captured the mind-controlled Titan Teamsters. According to the narration, Extant's masterful years-long gambit bought him less than two hours of distraction.
With those little rascals out of the way, Metron figures out a way to close the hole that's eating reality: throwing his Mobius chair at it and having Captain Atom blow it up with his quantum energy. This works, because comics. Oh, and then Guy Gardner grows a gun out of his arm, to his shock (and also the shock of Guy Gardner: Warrior writer Beau Smith, since Guy was only supposed to be able to morph ancient weapons). COMICS!!!
Unfortunately, there's only one Mobius chair and two entropy waves. Not only is the one in the distant past still going strong, but the issue ends with a mystery character single-handedly restarting the 30th century wave and saying something about how this universe will soon stop existing. Also, he has glowing green energy and seems very interested in that GL ring Kyle misplaced... until he isn't.
Huh. Who could that possibly be?
NEXT ISSUE: THE END OF EVERYTHING! (Except this series, which still has one more issue left after that.)
Newsletter-Watch:
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And if you just love clicking things, click "Keep reading" to see Don Sparrow's commentary for this issue:
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
We start with the cover, and it’s another head-scratcher. It does feature the blank (and increasing) whiteness that represents entropy but otherwise isn’t a real attention grabber. Yes, it features Superboy, Nightwing and Supergirl, but other than that, it’s not a lot of marquee names for the time—even Donna Troy, an otherwise recognizable character, is a Darkstar, virtually an unknown look at this time.
Inside we’re greeted immediately by the aftermath of the one-sided battle with Extant taking out the legendary JSA completely on his own. The two page splash that follows is pretty dynamic, though the scene ends abruptly. One little art thing I’d like to point out is how well the shape is defined on Extant’s cape straps, just with a few lines, adding verisimilitude to the otherwise cosmic goings on.
On the next page we’re introduced by name to Legionnaire Emerald Dragon, who I’d seen in the backgrounds of previous issues and wondered who he was. It’s a terrific design, so I felt something like disappointment to learn that this character isn’t really a new concept—it’s just an alternate costume and codename for Jo Nah, far better known as Ultra Boy, the character with all of Superman’s powers, just one at a time.
As the defeated JSA return to the present, there’s some very striking imagery, reminiscent of the elderly wizened mourners at the funeral in the video for Crash Test Dummes’ “Superman’s Song”.
Starman in particular looks poignant, with the relative silliness of his golden age costume contrasting with the weight of age. The image of Jay tearing the lightning bolt off his tunic is a powerful image (confirming something I’d always wondered about—whether the lightning bolt is flat or pointed at the bottom, which to my eye looks pointed—what do you think?), as is the image of both Jay and Alan walking away with dramatic lightning behind them. The placement of the next generation, with Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and Impulse looking on is a great detail as well.
A few pages later, Power Girl’s mystical pregnancy goes into labour, and while we mentioned her looking matronly in the last issue, this one really takes the cake, as famous hottie Karen Starr looks for all the world like Mary Worth here.
The sequence of Hank Hall absorbing Waverider’s chronal energy is well-drawn and seems painful. On the next page we have what I would seem our panel of the week, which is an all-time great drawing of Superman, presiding over the Team Titans members he’s managed to mop up. With Jerry Ordway handling inks, all the faces have a realism rarely seen in comics, but this panel is a real standout among standouts—this is exactly what I imagine Superman really looks like. A page or so later, there’s a similarly stunning portrait of Wonder Woman with Geo-Force. Then on page 21, there’s a pleasing, silver-age-y image of Batman and Robin punching in tandem, which gives Batman '66 vibes.
Lastly, Guy Gardner’s expression as he ponders the possibilities presented by a history that’s in flux is a nice piece of drawing.
[Max: Ironic that Superman's death deeply impacted Waverider ("You are nothing less than a miracle"), and Waverider's death doesn't even merit a "No!" from Superman.]
SPEEDING BULLETS:
As discussed in the comments section on the Tumblr version of this site last issue, I remain a little confused as to how Extant, whether his powers are nuclear (as they seemed to be in the Armageddon 2001 storyline) or now time-based (as we’d imagine from him apparently being a duplicate of Waverider) is able to mess with Dr. Fate, whose powers are magical. [Max: There's also a mystical element thrown in there, since Hawk and Dove were agents of the Lords of Chaos and Order and now he has both their powers.]
While the flowery prose informs us that the heroes’ “silence screams respect”, it does seem weird to me that Alan Scott and Jay Garrick just peace out in the middle of a legitimate crisis. Fine, retire from superheroics officially, but in that precise moment, their super-abilities still could have come in handy. [Max: Agreed about Alan, who isn't even old and just sorta quits the crossover, but it's teased that Jay ran off to do something that will have a huge impact in the next issues...]
There’s a strange quirk in this book that I notice more and more as it goes on—characters shouting that they need to get organized. In almost every issue, someone wants to jump into action, and then a different character admonishes them, saying they shouldn’t or they need to make a plan. But they very rarely do make a plan, so these exchanges come off a little hollow.
Team Titans are presented here as such nothingburgers that they don’t even get any character names shared; all we get is just a blanket “Team Titans”. But I’m sure they’ll fare well once this storyline is over. [Max: Oh yeah, all except two are unceremoniously vanished from existence between panels in this issue. For anyone wondering, I read the final issue of the Team Titans series and nope, it doesn't explain squat about what the hell is happening to them. In fact, like half the issue is about the Titans West, who had barely appeared in that series before.]
What comic was Dr. Mist in at this time? The hero with the same name as a deodorant brand had a few little appearances in this series, and I knew next to nothing about him. I remembered him vaguely appearing in Justice League International in the late '80s, but a quick trip to the DC wiki tells me these appearances are to set up one of the many short-lived and largely forgotten post-Zero-Hour titles, namely Primal Force.
While this entire series seems to cement a certain character as a villain, there are a lot of voices in this issue and those to come who espouse similar points of view. Guy Gardner wanting to take advantage to “fix” things sounds a lot like someone else. [Max: No, see, that's totally different because Guy... whoops, we ran out of space! Until next time!]
Missed an issue? Looking for an old storyline? Check out our new chronological issue index!
Our eternal September continues as we reach Zero Hour #3 (the second issue), a.k.a. "The One With All The Elder Abuse." Putting Old Flash crying over Old Hourman's body on the cover was not false advertisement -- any '90s kids who bought this issue hoping to see some grandpas getting their asses kicked absolutely got their money's worth.
As seen in ZH #4 (the first issue), Superman has asked every spandex wearer in the DC Universe to gather outside the United Nations building so they can tackle the ongoing time crisis, but he's running late because he stopped to see his parents (all four of them) in Superman #93. Superman is further delayed when he hears screams coming from Keystone City, which turn out to come from a super-fast, video game-addicted child from the future fighting time-displaced dinosaurs.
Superman recruits "Don't Call Me Kid Flash!" here (a.k.a. Impulse) and reaches New York to meet the gathered heroes, including but not limited to: the Justice Leagues (including everyone's favorite founding member, Triumph), the Super-Family, the Bat-Family (including an able-bodied Batgirl), the New Teen Titans, the Team Titans, a few time-lost Legion of Super-Heroes members, the new Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner), the new Darkstar (Donna Troy), a newly armored Guy Gardner, a newly unkempt and one-handed Aquaman, our old pal Agent Liberty (who's probably very thankful to be invited), and, of course, the protector of Metropolis: Alpha Centurion! (The rando with the orange helmet on the far left, who we'll learn more about in the next issue of Adventures.)
Oh, and that lady in the purple dress is Power Girl, who suddenly went from dressing like a sex goddess to wearing grandma clothes when her magical pregnant belly started showing.
The heroes quickly decide Superman should be their leader (even though Guy volunteered first), and he proposes trying to figure out where this mess even started. It turns out someone's way ahead of them: the Justice Society of America has already traveled to the time crisis' point of origin, Vanishing Point, aided by Waverider, the loose cannon among the DCU's time cops. Problem is, Waverider and the JSA's Hawkman and Hawkwoman got lost on their way to Vanishing Point and ended up in the latest issue of Hawkman, where all the various Hawkpeople get hit by "cosmic energy" and condensed into a single Hawkperson (a sequence I'm sharing mostly because it reminds me of Superman and the Eradicator getting hit by the kryptonite beam in "Reign of the Supermen").
Meanwhile, at Vanishing Point, the JSA meets the guy who seems to be behind the time crisis: Hank Hall, a former C-list hero who recently got a massive power upgrade and became the A-list villain known as Extant (well, "A-list for a single month in 1994," anyway). Extant has time-based powers, which is unfortunate for the JSA, who have been cheating time by looking young when they should all be in their 80s, considering they're old enough to have punched Hitler. Extant corrects that by turning all of them super old, instantly killing the Golden Age Atom in the process. Only the Golden Age Green Lantern is spared thanks to his power ring and remarkable blondness.
(No you're not, Hourman. You also die one page later.)
Anyway, RIP the JSA. Thank you for your service; off you go into "elderly supporting character" status for several years. Back in New York, the time anomalies are getting more chaotic and threaten to destroy entire cities. Speaking of destroyed cities, one interesting moment is when the heroes learn that a young, non-crazy Hal Jordan seemingly died last issue and Guy Gardner wonders if that means present-day, yes-crazy Hal is dead too, and whether they could use the time anomalies to save Coast City and prevent Hal's downfall. That's... a pretty good idea, actually. Maybe Guy should have been the leader instead of Superman after all.
Waverider eventually remembers he left the old geezers back at Vanishing Point and goes to check in on them, but he's too late to save them from getting Extant'd. The issue ends with Extant pulling out his mask to reveal that he's... another Waverider?! How?! Why?! I legitimately don't remember anything about that plotline, so we'll have to find out together next issue. TO BE CONTINUED IN ZERO HOUR #2 (THE THIRD ISSUE)!
But first: a word from resident art expert Don Sparrow! Several words, actually...
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
As with last issue, with this art team, both of them giants in my eyes, it’s hard to narrow down the best panels, because there’s not a bad one in the book. So I’ll do my best not to just select each and every panel as a highlight! We start with the cover, and it’s kind of a jumble. The art is great, but, almost every issue of the original Crisis on Infinite Earths had an iconic, eye catching cover—here’s there’s just a lot going on. It’s certainly representative of the story within, but to me doesn’t make it feel like a must-read as you pass it on the shelf.
The first splash is a great one, an emotional Jay Garrick clutching the uniform of still another (apparently) dead Flash. On the very next page turn, we get a two page spread of the JSA, and it’s a stunner.
Though they’re all just standing around, the fact that they each have such distinct features and body types is a real feat—plus with Ordway’s DC work kicking off with these characters in the unfortunately monogrammed All Star Squadron, it’s always neat to see him work on WWII characters. I’m especially entranced by the way Jurgens and Ordway render Hawman’s helmet. The thatchy, mottled texture really gives a sense of how it would really look and feel. In more recent years, they tend to depict Hawkman’s helmet as shiny, golden metallic, but this stiff, feathery look really makes it seem organic and solid. Awesome stuff.
A recurring theme in this mini-series is the introduction of a new generation of heroes, and they’re helped out a lot by how great the art is—some of these characters, and their extremely 90’s looking designs will look far better here than they ever will in their own pages. I read that Impulse’s first official appearance was in Flash #91, but his appearance in this issue was the first time I’d seen him, and with a design this simple and attractive, it’s hard to make Bart Allen look anything but cool. Jurgens and Ordway’s natural realism still manages to convey some of the cartooniness that most defined Impulse, particular as he grins on page 5, phasing through a wall.
[Max: As a kid, as cool as Impulse looks here and in his early Flash appearances, it always bugged me that he looks older than he will in his solo series and Young Justice. My headcanon was that the accelerated aging mentioned in his origin was unstable and made him older for a while before settling on his real age.]
Page 8 has the showstopper panel, as the collected heroes rain down on the plaza in front of the United Nations building. Booster Gold’s armour is probably the most glaring example of what I mentioned before—in these hands Booster’s costume is dynamic and functional—a far cry from how ugly the same costume will look in the upcoming “Extreme Justice” era. Wonder Woman and Maxima look particularly great here, but it’s generally a great showcase for the characters who DC was pushing at the time. Page 10 has a great panel for me personally, as I was (and remain) a huge Captain Marvel fan, so seeing the Big Red Cheese interact with Big Blue is a thrill.
The arrival of the new Hawkman is a cool moment, and as truly awful as his own comic became around this time (so, so bad!), this costume design was one of the very best looks for Hawkman, in my opinion, though I admit owning the Total Justice action figure with that look helped.
On the whole, this might be the least eventful issue of Zero Hour—apart from the editorially mandated wiping of the decks for the JSA, not a ton happens to move the story forward. But it sure looked pretty!
SPEEDING BULLETS:
Granted, a woman in the late stages of pregnancy isn’t supposed to look particularly dynamic, even if that woman is a superhero, but Power Girl looks pretty matronly throughout Zero Hour. The lavender sweatshirt doesn’t help, I suppose. We’ll get into it in subsequent issues, but Power Girl’s magical pregnancy is one of my very favourite Bad Ideas that Went Nowhere™ of this era, and perhaps all time.
I’ll admit, I had to reconsult old issues around this time to remember why Despero was responding to a summons from the Justice League (his body was possessed by L-Ron, the robotic assistant to Maxwell Lord, who was more or less a throwaway L. Ron Hubbard joke from the Bwah-ha-ha era of Justice League, who inexplicably survived several writer changes).
It’s small wonder I love this event so much—apart from the Super-team members writing and drawing it, it’s a very Superman-centric storyline. I have to admit, I get a small thrill out of Superman being chosen as leader with Batman just standing there looking on in silence.
Another instance where I had to look up old issues to understand what was going on was the short aside with space Hawkman (Katar Hol) merging with Earth Hawkman and Hawkwoman (Carter and Shiera Hall) and the weird giant Hawkgod, but the summary we’re shown is pretty much exactly what happened in the Hawkman books at the time. All the many different Hawkmen would eventually pave the way for Geoff Johns’ excellent conceptual revamping of the character, explaining that the character was cursed to be reborn again and again.
The ever-likeable Kyle Rayner winning over Guy Gardner by treating him with respect is a great moment (and a funny use of font size). [Max: Guy mostly behaves himself during this series, especially considering Ice just died. I wonder if they already told him and he's taking it remarkably well or if they decided to wait until the universal emergency was over.]
I went through Justice League stories from around this time, and I couldn’t find any reference to Maxima’s costume flickering of phasing—was this just a tossed-off line, or does someone else remember this coming up in a book other than this? [Max: I've skimmed through the issues, making careful note of Maxima's suit, and found no instances of this.]
I kinda like Ray Palmer and Guy Gardner being close enough friends to conspire together. [Max: Ray didn't seem very fond of Guy during Jurgens' JLA -- in fact, wasn't he so disappointed in seeing Guy fighting Superman that he mystically summoned a fascist alternate timeline JLA dreamworld? I kinda suspect Jurgens had Guy talking to him here because he'd be easier to fit into the panel than a regular-sized hero.]
While I’m an ardent defender of Zero Hour, I know a lot of JSA fans hate it, and from that perspective, it’s easy to see why—they really do go out like punks while fighting Extant, and it’s hard to watch.
Missed an issue? Looking for an old storyline? Check out our new chronological issue index!
It's... CRISIS TIME! Listen, we're not in the habit of covering every issue of every crossover event Superman appears in, but we're making an exception for this one because: 1) Superman plays a prominent role (as do the characters in my other blog), 2) it's by two of the most iconic creators from this era, Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway, and 3) we just like this comic a whole lot. Still, we'll do our best to keep these posts shorter than usual so we don't spend forever in September 1994.
Fittingly for a series that begins at #4 and counts backwards, this issue starts at very end -- as in the literal end of time, when all that exists is the entropy crushing the universe (and Doomsday, but looks like he was too busy being crushed by entropy to appear in this comic). We see The Time Trapper, a hugely powerful villain with a control over time, being easily taken down by a mystery character who says he's going to "make things right."
(That's what you get for being an old villain in a comic where a new one needs to be established as a badass, TTT.)
Next, we see weird time-related things happening all over the DCU: Batgirl shows up in Gotham City with her spine intact, Dick Grayson is back to wearing green undies, Hawkman is now multiple Hawkmen, Flash is suddenly in the far future (historically, not a very good time for a Flash to be during a crisis), etc.
Superman's frenemies the Linear Men, the time police, notice that something is erasing time, starting at the end and moving backwards, as if God had said "screw it, let's start over" and was holding the backspace key on the universe. Linear Men Waverider and Hunter are sent to the 64th century to find out what's going on and, once there, they run into Flash -- and also a big wave of entropy eating the universe. Flash attempts to stop the wave of mutilation by just running really fast at it (which is how he solves most of his problems in his own comic), but the wave just eats him too.
A Flash died? Oh, now it's a real crisis.
The Linear Men's next stop is 58th century Star City, whose hero is a time-displaced younger version of Green Lantern Hal Jordan (we know he's younger because he doesn't have greying hair, and also he isn't homicidally insane). Before he and Young Hal are eaten up by the entropy wave, Hunter yells at Waverider to look up the word "crisis" in their archives. Back at Vanishing Point, the Linear Men's HQ outside of time, Waverider basically reads the Wikipedia article for Crisis on Infinite Earths and becomes one of the few people in the current DCU to learn the forbidden knowledge that there used to be a multiverse that got wiped out, leaving a single existing universe. The "existing" part might not last much longer, though...
While all this Linear Men stuff happens, we see a repeat of the scene from Man of Steel #37 when Metron of the New Gods comes to see Superman about the time crisis. Together they go off into Green Lantern #55 to ask for new Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's help in producing a hologram of Superman that Metron can forward to the DCU's other heroes. Green Hologram Superman gives everyone a little speech and asks them to come together to figure out what to do about the whole "time is literally ending" issue.
Metron personally visits The Spectre to ask for his help, since he's one of the most powerful beings in the DCU (and did come in pretty handy during the previous crisis), but Speccy is only interested in fighting evil, not "natural disasters" -- even universe-ending ones.
Meanwhile, Waverider learns that time is also being erased from the beginning, not just the end, and goes to warn the geezers at the Justice Society about it, I guess since they're so old and at risk of being erased any moment. Plus, they have a Flash in their team, so he's probably the most endangered being in the DCU right now.
As Waverider shows the old Flash what happened to his young namesake (he doesn't take it well), we see that someone has invaded Vanishing Point: this comic's villain, Hal... I mean, Hall, Hank! that is, Hank Hall, formerly Hawk of Hawk & Dove and Monarch of Armageddon 2001, and currently known as Extant.
And he's totally working alone, with no more dramatic revelations about heroes-turned-villains to come, nope. TO BE CONTINUED!
Poll-Watch:
The results for our Zero Hour Batmen art poll are just in (okay, they were in a few weeks ago, but we hadn't made a post since then), and the winner by a pretty decisive margin is: Neal Adams Batman! Don Sparrow will get working on that artwork -- which reminds me we have a winner for Don's original Maxima art giveaway, too: our old pal Chris "Ace" Hendrix! Congrats to Chris and whichever wall in his home is about to be blessed with a Maxima! To take part in future giveaways (including the Neal Adams bat-art), you can become SUPporter via Patreon or our newsletter's "pay what you want" mode.
And speaking of Don, obviously he wasn't gonna miss the chance to gush about the art in this issue, so keep reading for that:
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
A short personal anecdote: With a September 1994 street date, the first issue came out on September 10th, and while I was reading the Superman books at this time, it was also summer, so I lost track a little bit of what was going on in comics. I knew from the in-house ads that Zero Hour would be big, and with the pedigree of Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway—1/2 of my personal Mount Rushmore of comics greats—it was a series I wanted to pick up. So imagine my shock, after a busy summer, when I stopped in a comic shop (a new one that had just opened up, called Amazing Stories) to see Zero Hour #4 on the shelf! Sure, it was a busy summer, but how could I have missed three whole issues already?! I asked the store clerk if he had any copies of issues 1-3, and he said he didn’t, and I certainly didn’t want to pick up the fourth issue without the other three. So I went to the other comic shop in my town, 8th Street Books, which in those days was much more my regular store (I would later work at Amazing Stories, but that’s a tale for another time) and they set me straight—I hadn’t missed ANY issues, this series was numbered counting down, from 4 to zero, on a weekly basis. I wonder if any other kids were as thrown with the unique numbering system!
We start now with the cover, and it’s perhaps a strange one. Sure, the presence of some of DCs biggest heroes, namely Superman and Batman let the reader know it’s a big issue, but having an empty mask as the focal point for a first issue is not the most intuitive choice, even if it’s an arresting image.
Shining a spotlight on the art in this series is a difficult task, because honestly, top to bottom, it’s gorgeous. I could easily fill up pages admiring this team, which to me is about as good as superhero comics get. Jerry Ordway, as regular readers know, is my favourite comic artist of all time, but his observed, photorealistic finishes over Dan Jurgens’ tight and dynamic layouts is just such a treat—every page looks like a poster. So in the interest of space, I’ll just focus on the absolute best images of all these amazing images. The first such amazing image is of the MIA Barbara Gordon Batgirl lassoing the Joker, in stunning rim lighting from the lightning in the skies. This version of Batgirl hadn’t been seen in costume since March 1988’s Batgirl Special, which was hailed at the time as the last Batgirl story, being released one week ahead of the tragic events in the Killing Joke one shot where the Joker’s actions left Barbara Gordon paraplegic. In the hands of this art team, the reader can really see what a great design this character is.
Ordway’s texture rendering is stunning throughout but the Wally West Flash’s shimmering costume (and determined expression) on page 10 are certainly worth singling out. The various echoes of Hawkman is a nice bit of showing off, as Jurgens gets to draw several eras of the character as well as alternates unfamiliar to me.
The “getting the band back together” sequence of heroes reacting to Superman’s holographic message has lots of great details, like the little glimpses and backgrounds (like Superboy being in Hawaii) and I love the subtle Justice League shield that makes up those panels.
The faces in this series are all so well drawn, they consistently look like real people, few more prominently than the world weary Green Arrow, who, with his pompadour and prominent forehead wrinkles, looks like Luke Perry in a van dyke. Just a page later, Jurgens and Ordway do a terrific job of keeping their own style, while blending the swirly, liney loose inks of Tom Mandrake, which defined the Spectre at this time. I love how throughout this series they draw the Spectre as though all his lines are hissed through clenched, angry teeth.
Lastly, the Pieta-like callback to Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 with Jay Garrick Flash holding the empty costume of Wally West is a great image, made all the more arresting by the minimalist colouring.
SPEEDING BULLETS:
It’s only natural that this storyline be compared to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, which had only taken place nine years previously, though that’s a lifetime in comics time. But honestly, from the jump, it improves on some of the mistakes Crisis made, classic though it was. The original Crisis focused on new characters it introduced. So readers had to deal with familiar beloved characters play second fiddle to relatively new (and to me, far less interesting) characters like Lady Quark, Harbinger and the loathsome Pariah. Yes, eventually household names like Flash, Supergirl and Superman took to the fore, but in those early issues, there was a looooooot of world building, from people in whom we had no investment, and little interest. Zero Hour wisely jumps in with some of their most recognizable characters—Darkseid, Batman & Robin, Joker etc—right off the bat. Even Waverider had already been established in the line-wide Armageddon 2001 storyline 3 years ago, so he was at least somewhat familiar to readers, and also had a much cooler name than The Monitor.
I dig the Joker revealing that he knew that Azrael Batman wasn’t the real Batman.
However, there is something downright hilarious about the World’s Greatest Detective™ deducing “helicopter!” when he sees a helicopter.
The bewildered Flash on page 10 to my eye resembled another beloved redhead, a young Ron Howard!
But, why is the Flash running around in the 64th century? Was that something happening in the Flash books at the time? [Max: Yeah, Flash #94 is about Wally fighting Abra Kadabra, and it ends with both of them being transported to Kadabra's original time due to Zero Hour's time shenanigans. Kadabra is also suddenly wearing his old costume -- he did NOT look like this in the Flash comics at this time. He was even uglier, believe it or not. Anyway, off you go to read Mark Waid's Flash, Don!]
I know we already saw it in Man of Steel #37, but there’s something satisfying about Batman and Superman acknowledging the "Knightfall" and "Doomsday" storylines.
I didn’t get this whole scene with Green Lantern Hal Jordan until years later when I read some early Broome/Kane GL comics. For some reason, the people of Star City in the 58th century would periodically abduct and mindwipe Hal Jordan to serve as their superhero—named Pol Manning—when crises would arise. When I first read it, I thought that the old guy was Pol Manning, being addressed by one of his council members. But no, he was referring to the title of Pol Manning, like James Bond or something. [Max: Whoa, I did not know that until know! I always assumed some future people randomly brought in Young Hal to fight the entropy wave. Side note: I like how Not-Pol Manning's facial hair continues the idea that the van dyke is a common look in Star City and that's why Green Arrow's secret identity isn't immediately obvious.]
There’s something a little amusing about all the different heroes speaking back to Superman’s projection, when we’re given no indication he can hear them back.
Not exactly a GODWATCH segment, but it’s interesting that God’s instrument of wrath, the Spectre appears to be hiding out in a Church. There’s also a part of me that likes that a ‘New God’ like Metron can be so summarily dismissed by someone as legitimately godlike as the Spectre.
It’s a clever bit of writing that we don’t see what Waverider sees as he plays back images from the Crisis on Infinite Earths, since it’s still a bit vague just what all happened in the present continuity, and what is remembered. By seeing only Waverider’s reaction, they aren’t nailed down with any details that might be contradicted by present-day continuity.
Some good misdirection by showing Extant at the end of the book, which makes the reader believe that was him at the beginning of the issue, dispatching the Time Trapper. [Max: What do you mean, "misdirection"? He's the villain of the book, right?]
Missed an issue? Looking for an old storyline? Check out our new chronological issue index!
Zero Hour is here, and so is Green Lantern! A different, much older Green Lantern, despite him looking about as young and buff as Kyle (we're in the '90s DCU, where even graphic designers and aging businesspeople have six packs). But first: the conclusion of Kyle Rayner's fight with Major Force, the nuclear-powered government agent who murdered Kyle's girlfriend Alex last issue. When we left them, Kyle's power ring had just flaked on the "power" part and the fight was going predictably poorly for him.
Before killing Kyle, though, Major Force asks him to clear something up: what the hell is that green rock his bosses found in the alley where Kyle got his ring in GL #50? Kyle, of course, has no clue -- but when his ring gets close to the rock, it causes it to morph into a sort of lantern. A lantern that is green. Suddenly, the ring has power again and Kyle quickly turns the tables on MF.
When MF makes it clear that no amount of green torture will make him rat out his bosses, Kyle is like "okay fine, I'll just kill you then." He seems willing to do it, too, but then some cops show up to arrest MF and they end up saving his life. Naturally, they also have some questions for Kyle about that body they found stuff in a nearby fridge, but Kyle wants to be alone right now and just flies away.
Poor Kyle doesn't even get a minute to mourn Alex before noticing that some dude in a green cape broke into his apartment and is just standing in his living room. Understandably, Kyle is no mood to deal with that nonsense right now.
Kyle produces a Cable-from-the-X-Men-sized gun and threatens the home invader. However, the guy turns out to have a power ring of his own and is much better at using it than Kyle, based on the fact that Kyle ends up pinned to the wall by a giant skeleton hand within like a second. Once Kyle has agreed to hear him out (not like he had much choice at the moment), the man introduces himself as Alan Scott and says he's also Green Lantern. Or was, anyway.
This whole "multiple Green Lanterns" thing is confusing to Kyle, so Alan tells him about the Green Lantern Corps, Hal Jordan, and how Hal Jordan went crazy and destroyed the Green Lantern Corps. He even projects some cool splash pages with his ring, maybe because he knows visual aids are appreciated when you have ADHD like Kyle.
(I like how Alan projected that image of himself tied up and looking like that, which I don't remember from that issue.)
Alan says he's here because he knows he'll eventually have to go up against Hal again (his first attempt wasn't too successful, as seen above) and he thinks Kyle, as the last of the Green Lantern Corps, should be there to help. Kyle was just saying he didn't even want to be GL anymore after he failed to prevent his girlfriend's death, but then he remembers how Alex was always trying to get him to be more responsible. After Alan has left and Kyle finally gets some time alone, he decides to continue Green Lanterning, as scared and out-of-his-depth as he is, because that's what Alex would want him to do now that he has that power ring. In other words: with great power rings there must come great responsibility (rings).
Just then, Kyle runs into his new pal Superman and a guy in a floating hi-tech chair, Metron, who say they need his help. Despite being so depressed, Kyle is still polite enough to compliment Metron's "cool chair." Anyway: IT'S ZERO HOUR TIME, BABY!
Plotline-Watch:
That "cool chair" scene continues in Zero Hour #4 (the first issue), in which we find out why Superman and Metron came to see Kyle: they need him to act as cameraman, basically, and project an image of Superman that Metron can redirect to "all of Earth's heroes" to ask for their help with the Crisis™ that's been causing all the time-related weirdness we've seen lately (like the futuristic city in last issue, the Nazi dinosaurs in Guy Gardner: Warrior, and all the Batmen in Superman: The Man of Steel #37). That green Superman projection would show up in several other DC titles from this month. So that was Kyle Rayner's first great contribution to the DC Universe: helping Superman butt into other comics.
Incidentally, Zero Hour's Dan Jurgens really nailed Kyle's crabface mask. Not all artists from this era did, as we'll see.
The cops who interrupt Kyle say they're from the Los Angeles Special Crimes Unit. I guess the one in Metropolis was so successful that they started franchising? We'd already seen Washington SCU in the Hawk & Dove series. I hope they're paying Maggie Sawyer some royalties.
Would Kyle have killed Major Force if the cops hadn't stopped him? We'll find out when there's a whole-ass crossover storyline devoted to answering that question ("Capital Punishment").
The reason why Alan Scott looks so spry for a World War II vet was revealed in Ron Marz' Green Lantern Corps Quarterly stories starring the character. Those stories also mentioned the title of "Sentinel," but Alan hasn't adopted that name yet, even though he says in this issue that he isn't currently calling himself Green Lantern either. So I guess he's just "Alan Scott" right now.
The DC Wiki claims that Alexander Luthor from Crisis on Infinite Earths appears in this issue, which doesn't sound that far-fetched since it's a Crisis-related crossover with cameos from like 50 characters (in Alan's flashback), but nope, he's not there. How did they get that impression? I think I know: it's Guy Gardner's fault (and his short-lived yellow armor's that kinda looks like Alex's).
So, to recap, in this issue Kyle: 1) defeats the guy who murdered his girlfriend hours earlier, 2) finds his GL battery and quickly learns how to use it, 3) learns about the GL Corps and the whole mess with Hal Jordan, 4) selflessly decides to continue being Green Lantern despite his original motivation (getting back together with Alex) no longer being applicable, and 5) immediately gets involved in a cosmic crisis. Pretty big day for Kyle! Let's hope he gets some time off after this.
Green Lantern-Related Titles Round-Up (August 1994)
This month: Guy gets new powers! John gets a new job! The Spectre gets belated news about Coast City!
Guy Gardner: Warrior #23
Continued from last issue, in which Guy joined his new pal Buck Wargo's expedition into the South American jungles to search for something called "the Water of the Warriors." After escaping the exploding bar from last issue's cliffhanger via a convenient trapdoor, we find out that Buck's crew isn't the only group searching for the Waters: there's also those dinosaur-riding Nazis we already saw, a gang of local mercenaries (who get killed off right away), and some guys in turbans with an army of zombies. Oh, and the turban guys also turn out to be shape-shifters and morph into big monsters. Morphin' was all the rage in the '90s, it seems.
Guy and his friends aren't doing too well against the monsters, but then they're rescued by yet another group called the Warrior Women of Nabba, who are like "Oh, the Water of the Warriors? Yeah, we have that, here you go" and just hand it to the shape-shifters in exchange for leaving Guy alone. The shape-shifter leader, who currently looks like a giant snake, drinks the Water right there, but instead of giving him cool powers like he expected it just makes him blow up.
The Warrior Women say they've been waiting "centuries" for Guy and even show him some temple art that sure looks a lot like him, but with weird markings on his face (as if Guy would ever sport something so "fruity"). Before they can explain what's going on, they're ambushed by the Dino-Nazis and Guy falls into a pit, where he meets an alien-looking fellow who calls him the "promised one." Guy finally reaches the Water and drinks it, despite the foul smell.
(TMI, Guy.)
At first, nothing seems to change... but, when he's punched into a wall by a shape-shifter who had infiltrated Buck's crew as their sexy guide lady, Guy emerges wearing some sort of red armor and seems a lot stronger. Just when it looks like this issue's bonkers-ass plot is settling down, the skies turn all weird and all the dinosaurs and Nazis start fading out, which Buck identifies as "a time-rip ... takin' everything that don't belong." Sure, why not.
As you might have guessed, TO BE CONTINUED IN ZERO HOUR!
Darkstars #23
Another issue of John Stewart being zipped around the universe without knowing why! This time, that pushy Controller who kidnapped John two issues ago takes him to a bar in some shithole planet so he can talk to a mercenary who claims that the guy running the Darkstars, Jeddigar, just let him and his buddies enslave a whole world. Side note: it's kind of jarring seeing John still in his Green Lantern duds four months after the Green Lantern Corps died, especially since no one's told him the Green Lantern Corps died.
The mercenary realizes he probably shouldn't tell random people that stuff and tries to kill John, but the Controller takes him away again before the fight can really get going (wouldn't want John doing anything actually exciting in this comic). Meanwhile, that Jeddigar guy is holding a sham trial for the Earth's Darkstar, Colos, just to get rid of him before Colos exposes his corrupt ass. Colos loses the sham trial (that's how sham trials work) and Jeddigar wastes no time introducing his replacement, Donna Troy. Her first mission: arresting Hal Jordan for crimes against the universe.
Good luck with that. TO BE CONTINUED IN ZERO HOUR, TOO!
Justice League America #91
Featuring Ice's funeral, which Guy failed to attend because he didn't even know she was dead, having been too busy being in a coma and going to South America in his own comic. The other League members briefly talk about who's gonna tell Guy the love of his life has died before moving on to the usual JLI banter.
As part of the funeral, Ice's mother makes a big ice statue of her, which we'll see in a heartbreaking GG:W scene once Zero Hour is over (have I mentioned Zero Hour is about to start?).
The Spectre #21
One of the fascinating things about storylines like "Death of Superman," "Knightfall," and "Emerald Twilight" to me is when a totally different series acknowledges them. We've seen Darkstars and Green Arrow reference "Emerald Twilight" so far and now it's The Spectre's turn -- though I guess this is technically a "Reign of the Supermen" reference, since it's about the title character finding out that millions of innocents were murdered in Coast City and he didn't notice, even though "avenging murders" is his whole deal.
The Spectre's priest buddy wonders if perhaps he just wasn't meant to avenge those murders, or if there's "a hidden agenda at work." This is interesting to me given The Spectre's future association with Hal Jordan and his role in, you guessed it, Zero Hour. This is a weirdly DCU-connected issue in general (for what was usually a pretty insular title) due to the appearance of characters from series like Sandman, Suicide Squad, Firestorm, and Superman, which I wrote a bit more about at the '90s Superman blog. And speaking of which...
Adventures of Superman Annual #6 and Superboy Annual #1
This two-part Elseworlds story is basically Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven but with superheroes. One of those "Super Seven" is Hal Jordan, who in this timeline watched Coast City get obliterated by aliens and didn't turn genocidally insane. Instead, he did what any sane person in his situation would do: spend years protecting the bones of his friends from aliens, armed with nothing but a shovel. The other heroes convince Hal to dig up his GL ring and join the anti-alien resistance, but his shame over failing Coast City leads him to adopt a different costume and name ("The Gravedigger").
Hal spends most of the story being miserable and suicidal, but he does at least contribute to the resistance and doesn't murder a single one of his friends, so he's a paragon of mental health compared to "our" Hal. (I wrote more about these annuals at the Superman '86 to '99 Patreon and newsletter, if you're curious!)
Ah, this one. Everything's coming up Kyle Rayner! He's getting the hang of this "Green Lantern" thing, just defeated a Superman villain (with Superman's help, but still), and is finally back together with his smart, sexy, and responsible girlfriend Alex (who honestly seems better suited for being a superhero than him). The first pages of this issue go out of their way to make it clear to us that they are definitely having sex and it is very hot.
The next morning, as Kyle lays on Alex's bed (because they had sex), he sees something on TV about weird stuff like dinosaurs, conquistadors, and Elvis being sighted around LA. Alex convinces him to suit up (he's currently nude, on account of the sex) and go check it out. She declines to tag along and take pictures this time because it's her day off, but she promises she'll have a "surprise" for him when he gets back (I'm gonna go ahead and guess the surprise is more sex).
As Kyle flies off, he sees that a bunch of futuristic buildings have for some reason materialized right in the middle of the city, along with some very confused future pedestrians. Apparently, safety regulations are a lot more lax in the year 2088, because the buildings start crumbling when one of LA's customary earthquakes happens to hit. Kyle realizes pretty fast that he can't stop a quake with his ring, but he can brace the structures against it to minimize the damage.
Then, the future buildings and future people fade away. Another disaster averted by the New Green Lantern! The end.
Wait, there are still 9 more pages left in the comic? Huh. While all of that was happening with Kyle, Alex received a visit from a flower delivery guy. She figured they must be from Kyle (to thank her for all the sex), but when she looks at the card, she sees that it says "I'm going to kill you." Turns out the flower delivery guy is supervillain Major Force, who has been commissioned by a shady government agency to kill Kyle and steal his ring, in no particular order.
MF grabs Alex (who tries to resist with a kitchen knife, but he's invulnerable) and tells her to give up information about her superhero boyfriend. She pretends not to know what he's talking about, and without even giving her another chance to squeal, he just chokes her until she loses consciousness in her kitchen, then says "I'm hungry."
Later, Kyle comes back to Alex's home all giddy and eager to collect his surprise. He finds a note from her that says "Surprise for you in the fridge," although he notices that her handwriting looks funny (almost like some big goon with quantum-powered metal skin wrote it). Then he looks there and finds... the origin of the term "fridging."
That's about the most abrupt tonal change I can remember in a comic; Kyle is so distraught, even the art style changes (okay, that's because this issue has multiple artists). So, yes, Major Force killed Alex and stuffed her body in the fridge, and now he expects Kyle to just give up his ring and lay down as he gets killed too. Instead, Kyle throws the MFer through the wall and they start fighting in Alex's front yard. MF is amused to find out that the green energy from Kyle's ring can actually hurt him, but the amusement doesn't last when he's being bludgeoned by a green mallet.
Kyle is going to kill MF (we know because he says "I'm going to kill you now"), but then the mallet his ring created suddenly evaporates. After several issues of usage, Kyle's ring picked this moment to run out of energy (we know because he says "I'm... running out of energy"). We end the issue with Kyle saying "it's dead" as a pissed-off MF is about to hit him with a quantum punch. TO BE CONTINUED!
Character-Watch:
So long, Alex! You were too good for this comic, or at least this particular issue. Unlike 90% of recurring characters who die in superhero comics, she'll never be brought back to life. From now on, she'll only appear in flashbacks or when someone wants to mess with Kyle's head, like with that nasty "Black Lantern" zombie business. An alternate version of her will briefly appear in a sort of "Spider-Gwen" type situation, a scenario that I'm surprised hasn't been explored more given how much DC has embraced alternate timelines over the past decade. But hey, at least her death served to teach Kyle an important lesson: buy a fridge lock.
Plotline-Watch:
The time-related chaos is, of course, caused by the events of the Zero Hour crossover, which hasn't even started yet, but that's time travel for you.
Incidentally, I wonder how many readers assumed Alex would be brought back via time-related shenanigans at the end of the storyline, which would have been a cop-out but also made the whole thing a little less distasteful (then again, if that was the case I might be here saying how cool and transgressive it would have been if they'd just left Alex dead...).
It has always bugged me that the handwriting in the ridiculous "I'm going to kill you" note is very different from the one in the infamous "fridge" one. Did Major Force have one of the agents write it? Did he buy it pre-written at Hallmark? Also: how did he know Kyle had been promised a "surprise"? I guess we're meant to assume that's a coincidence, but it's possible Alex muttered "But... I promised Kyle... a surp--" off-panel before dying.
The shady government agent who flies Major Force to LA tells him to extract whatever information he can about that glowing green rock that was found in the alley where Kyle got his ring, but MF didn't even ask her about it. The guy is pretty bad at his job.
It's too bad that the nice future girl Kyle saved from the earthquake, who seemed very grateful to him before she faded back to the future, won't appear again when Kyle visits the 2090's. Maybe she could have given him that surprise he's still owed.
This was one heck of a time to find out that Kyle's ring does need to be recharged from time to time. We'll find out how next issue.
Did I mention Kyle and Alex were having sex? Because they were for sure having sex.
NEXT: Guest-starring Green Lantern (a different one)! Also, Zero Hour!
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