I’m the only person in the comics-blogging universe who’s yet to see Green Lantern. Instead, I read some comics with Kyle Rayner in them. I’m not sure which would have made my attention drift further, but you can judge for yourself after the jump.
Looking back through the history of time itself, I noticed something about Green Lantern. Prior to what we can call “the Geoff Johns era,” currently in its fifteen thousandth year and still going strong, there aren’t really a lot of Green Lantern-focused crossover stories. It’s the same thing I noticed with Thor, although Thor at least had a story where he went insane and fantasized a warrior-woman telling him what to do. Green Lantern, in Hal or Kyle or John form, has mostly kept to his own. “Events” in the Green Lantern universe are usually confined to that little sphere of things, and nearly all of the big ones are far from forgotten, which only goes to show how much tedium abounds in the history of the character.
Sorry, hardcore Green Lantern fans, but it’s true. There’s no middle setting between the blah and the big-time. Plus, it’s only recently that there’s been stuff like the Sinestro Corps War; before that, aside from things like Emerald Twilight, there was precious little to go on for this here column. I was stuck looking for books that had, if not Green Lantern as their force, Green Lantern as a tie-in title. It came down to two. One was “The Final Night,” where Hal Jordan (in the throes of Parallaxdom) sacrificed his life to reignite the dead sun; and this, “The Siege of the Zi Charam,” about which I knew this much: “It is called ‘The Siege of the Zi Charam.'”
Our stars: The New Titans (AKA the Teen Titans, but I guess some of them got a little too old); Green Lantern, alias Kyle Rayner; Damage, some 90s guy who I think is Atom-Smasher now (or maybe that’s Nuklon, I have no clue); the Darkstars, which is where Donna Troy spent a bunch of the 1990s as part of DC’s perpetual campaign of not knowing what to do with her but not being willing to get rid of her either. Impulse and Supergirl hover at the fringes, too. It’s an all-star cast of characters DC didn’t quite have any clue what to do with or how to properly hype. I typed the preceding sentence, read it back to myself, and then realized that it didn’t narrow it down even slightly.
From what I can infer, the Titans worked for the government at this point, which is why Sarge Steel told them to go fix a gravity well near Jupiter. On the second page of New Titans #124 — that is, the second page of “The Siege of the Zi Charam,” period — someone (I think it’s Arsenal) asks why the Justice League isn’t doing this. Sarge Steel’s response, more or less, is to just shut up and go with it. And so the tone of our tale is set!
There is, theoretically, a plot to be described in telling readers about the story. Really, there is. It’s the same damn plot that went into half the crossovers of the 90s. Things come from space and threaten people (or space) for whatever reason. You’ve never seen these things before and you’ll never see them again. Heroes go to fight them, some of whom are captured so that the focus of the story can tighten a bit and only cover those who are breaking the captured ones out. Some sort of justification for the whole thing is provided, the aliens needing something or wanting something unique to humanity or our universe. Then there’s a bash-up and things go back to normal, everyone going home and going back to whatever it was superheroes did in the 90s.
So the aliens in “The Zi Charam” want to eat us. Well, okay, not us. Everything. Rather, everyone. That’s both motivation and characterization. The superheroes go to space and fight them for five issues. Other aliens want to kill the cannibal aliens, but of course the heroes do not support the idea of genocide. Then they go home and fix the gravity well, and Jupiter escapes unscathed. The unspoken sixth part of this story is when you go on with your life and forget everything that ever happened in these five issues. I told a friend that I was writing about this story and they mentioned that I might be the first person on the Internet to bother.
It’s a complaint that I feel like I voice every single column: “ugh, this totally forgotten comic book is so totally forgettable!” The logic is sound, of course, but the complaint is a bit broken-record. At the same time, though, there’s a semi-relevant hook keeping “Zi Charam” relevant, at least in a sideways kind of way. I feel the same way when I think about “Zi Charam” that I do about the upcoming DC soft-reset in September, although it took me a little bit to figure out why (beyond “boredom”). Reading through the 52 god-damn solicitations for September’s new number-ones, I felt my eyes glazing over at the sheer amount of the books whose sole purpose for existing seemed to be mere existence as an end unto itself. “Characters you’ve heard of, and they’re doing stuff.” What stuff they’re doing, well, there’s not so much of an idea there, but things will pick up, right?
That’s not really enough for me to get my teeth into. Looking at those solicitations, I just saw something like fifty “Zi Charam”s — what I wanted to see was stuff that looked good, or, failing that, at least semi-entertainingly bad. Instead, it’s just stuff that’s there. It’ll fill some spots on the schedule, it’ll earn some guys some paychecks (but probably not any royalties), and in ten years it’ll be a blip in the history of comics, if even that much. “Zi Charam” isn’t exceptional in bringing up this point, which is, well, exactly the point. We can talk forever about the great comics (like, say, in Multiversity’s Friday Recommendations columns!) or the bad comics (like, say, nearly every comics opinion on the internet), but they’re a small, small minority compared to the flavorless stuff, the bland product, the superheroes fighting guys you’ve never heard of in space just because.
