Comic book review: Green Lantern # 34- Stop thinking Soldier, and get back to the killing fields

Writer: Robert Venditti
Artists: Billy Tan & Rob Hunter
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 6th August 2014

This isn’t a particularly great book, but it had one moment of interest. That moment being when the stand-in for the rule of uniformed, governmental authority, Hal Jordan, questions the legitimacy and existence of both himself and the organisation that he works for.

'I just got done fighting a war against who knows how many worlds that think the Green Lanterns are parasites. And here’s the thing: they might not be wrong.’

It’s a moment of doubt that’s quickly refuted by his brother, a brother who believes that we live to consume and that you shouldn’t think too much about whether war is right or wrong, you should just keep on fighting because of the families back home. It’s the old psychological warfare/propaganda tactic that the elite’s pump into the heads of every soldier. Every single soldier who has ever thought in any war is given the same line, do it for the children, do it for your family, do it to protect them from the evil that the enemy represents.

We don’t hear Jordan’s reply to his brother’s statist propaganda cliches, instead the book ends with that new threat. Is it the Russians? Well, it is in the real world isn’t it? There always has to be something new to fear. A new bogeyman for the eugenic elite’s to scare us with so they can continue to keep us enslaved. That’s how it works, that’s how it always works, and if there is nothing real to fear, they just invent something. The mainstream media plays along with it, as they are happy and willing partners in the control system of corporate/government slavery.

In this book the new threat is something to do with the return of the Black Lanterns. We see them mouthing something that sounds vaguely religious, and as we all know by now, the only religion allowable in the dying secular west of 2014 is an unquestioning devotion to government. And so the wheel of endless war continues, not just in comic books, but in the real world as well.

Leaving the statist war propaganda aside for a moment, I enjoyed the art in the book, the dialogue was a bit quip happy at the beginning with Hal Jordan sounded like a complete jerk, but there were light moments as well that were enjoyable to read.

This was a bridge book, there was a brief threat from a daft villain, then a chat on a hill, with a non-military man telling a soldier to get back to war, and to stop questioning what he is doing. That’s where it ends, with a new threat, and the military man preparing himself for more death and destruction. Will Hal Jordan continue to question his role? Let’s hope so, because that was by far and away the most interesting thing about this book.

Rating: 6.5/10