Written by Peter Milligan
Illustrated by Ed BenesA Red Lantern’s tale never has a happy ending, so brace yourself for the tragic tales of Skallox, Zillius Zox and Ratchet. Their violent destinies set the stage for their new life as seekers of bloody vengeance!
This is the most surprising book of the DCnU. Not surprising in terms of its quality; not surprising in terms of its characters; not surprising in terms of its popularity. It is surprising because it is not at all what was to be expected from a book about Atrocitus, Bleez and their cohorts.
However, it is not surprising in a good way. Click the cut for more.
This book is bad for all the reasons I didn’t expect going in.
Why I expected Red Lanterns to be a bad book:
– Characters with little to no development
– Because of the scattershot nature of the characters, there wouldn’t be much opportunity to craft meaningful stories, since everyone would be too busy puking napalm to have aspirations
– It woud be one of a million ‘anti-hero’ books where we’re supposed to be rooting for despicable characters.
Why Red Lanterns is actually a bad book:
– There are way more Hamlet-esque soliloquies than expected
– There is relatively little puking napalm
– It is a terrible pairing of writer, artist, and characters
How could anyone expect a book starring characters who are literally driven by rage to be so unbearably boring?
Almost nothing happens in this book, except Atrocitus talks to himself while Krona lies dead on a slab and he occasionally throws someone into the Blood Ocean. Beyond that, the largest plot so far, four issues in, is that Bleez may or may not be planning a coup to overthrow Atrocitus. Running second to that is the two Englishmen who are fighting over how to properly grieve their grandfather’s death.
How could this happen? How could a book with the potential to be just a bloody battle every issue be reduced to something that is so dull? Ed Benes doesn’t help matters much with his art; I’ve liked Benes’s work before, but here, since most of what he needs to draw are oversized teeth grimacing, his work just looks subpar.
This issues attempts to tell the origins of a few Red Lanterns and let me tell you, one is more un-exciting than the next. No one wants to read this book for anything other than why it was given a book in the first place: they wanted a book about Atrocitus fucking shit up. That’s it – that is why the first non-Green Lantern Corps was Red; people didn’t want St. Walker helping people, or Star Sapphires wearing skimpy costumes month in, month out, they wanted a book about one of the purest emotions, rage, and how someone totally unencumbered by rational thought would use their rage as a driving force in their lives.
Instead, Peter Milligan takes the concept to a place where thinking about rage is preferable to actual rage, and that is where this book lost me, big time. And I like Milligan as a writer; if anybody could do a good story based in chaotic rage, it is our boy Pete. But it seems to me that Milligan has no interest in tying this into the greater Green Lantern mythos, which is a mistake, nor giving the characters anything to do that is fun/exciting/interesting enough for readers to come back. Yes, at some point we need to know more about these characters, but origin stories for mindless drones wastes everyone’s time and money.
Well, thankfully, this will be the last issue wasting either of mine.
Final Verdict: 2.0 – Pass until a new creative team is given a chance to do this right
