Comic review: Red Lantern #35- Hailing from the shining beacon of democracy and freedom that is Dubai

Godhead arc: Act 1, Part 5

Writer: Charles (Holiday in Dubai) Soule
Artist: J. Calafiore
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 22nd October 2014

This review is sponsored by the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhnUgAaea4M


Writer Charles’s Soule takes the baton for this fifth part of the Godhead series, immediately drops it, slowly walks back to pick it up, and then concludes his lap with an embarrassed jog.

It starts badly when the narrative begins in Dubai, portrayed as a paradise of flesh, fun, beer and sun. The reality behind Dubai can be summed up in the following four paragraphs (I’ll leave a link to the article at the end of this review).

Our heroes chilling in Dubai

‘Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time.

Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.

If you go there with your eyes open – as I did earlier this year – the truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the country's hereditary ruler.

It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying.’

Like I said before, it’s a bad start. The narrative then goes straight into ‘America F*** Yeah’ World Police inanity, with the superheroes talking about the evil dictatorship of fictional neighbours ‘Qurac’ (sounds a lot like Iraq, doesn’t it?). They of course have no sense of irony that they themselves are currently residing in a country owned and controlled by a self proclaimed, unelected monarch.

Dubai, where money buys an escape from reality

The heroes then proceed to invade Qurac (again, very familiar) to stop the western unfriendly dictator (as it appears they are perfectly happy with the Dubai dictator) but are stopped by the New Gods who are after their rings. The New Gods hang around for five minutes, get a call on their galactic mobiles and then bugger off again to do more important things in the universe. They leave a battered Quracci dictator behind them, whom I presume will be summarily executed by the Green Lantern Kangaroo court, much in line with current US foreign policy.

What the Hell was this?

I’ll tell you what it was. It was a filler book with the usual US World Police absence of reality mindset from writer Charles Soule. All the book achieves is to half-heartedly put the Red Lantern characters into the Godhead arc. That’s it. A stupid book, inconsequential story and a complete waste of my time.

The Green Lantern Godhead arc has been fantastic so far, so one book out of four being absolutely awful isn’t that bad going really. The arc continues in Sinestro #6 next week, and as it’s written by Cullen Bunn, and not the purposefully ignorant and phoning it in Charles Soule I’ll be looking forward to reading it and forgetting that Red Lantern #35 even existed at all.

Rating: 2/10 

Click on link below for the truth about Dubai.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-morally-bankrupt-dictatorship-built-by-slave-labour-1828754.html