Comic review: Green Lantern Corps #40- Chipping away at the wall

Writer: Van Jensen
Artist: Bernard Chang
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 11th March 2015


The core narrative ideology in this book was a strangely American amalgamation of new age nonsense, a belief in the intrinsic moral goodness of those in (the right sort of) military uniform and US foreign policy exceptionalism.

It was very weird, simplistic and unconvincing, and dressed up in light versus darkness new age religion stuff that doesn’t really empower anybody other than those already in positions of socio-economic superiority. Do you know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of the Barack Obama 2008 election campaign. A sleek, and award winning, marketing campaign where slogans and clichés replaced any actual concrete ideas that were going to change the structural foundations of the system that he was supposedly fighting against.

The subsequent, and so-called ‘disappointing’ presidency of Barack Obama came as no surprise to anybody actually paying attention and digging a bit deeper than his surface appeal. From the very beginning you could see through his rhetoric as the sleek advertising campaign that it actually was. People didn’t see it, not because it wasn’t there, but because they refused to see what was starring at them in the face all along.

This is not hindsight speaking, it’s taking words like ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ and actually dissecting the reality behind them. A cursory look at Obama’s voting record before he became President (Supporting wars, supporting banks and corporations over people) would tell you that there was nothing to his words at all. The only thing you were buying if you invested in him was the illusion of change, not actual change itself. Perhaps that’s what people want? Real change is difficult. It means taking personal responsibility, and to actually do things for yourself rather than relying on the nice looking black man on your television set.

Change is possible, but it’s going to take a lot more effort on your behalf than lazily giving away your power to some bloke in a suit. Perhaps people don’t really want change? Perhaps they just want nice words over substance? Most people are not fooled because they are fools. They are fooled because they want to be fooled.

That’s how I felt after reading Green Lantern Corps #40. It was talking about ‘light and darkness,’ talking about ‘love’ talking about ‘morals’ but when you actually dissected it, when you got past the nice words, what did you actually have?

You had a group of US military personal (The Green Lanterns Corps) interfering in the affairs of other countries (planets) to protect civilians from a bunch of cartoon villains called ‘The Shadow Empire.’ The US military personal (Green Lanterns) were the good guys, and the Shadow Empire (a confused mash-up of what could loosely be called ‘terrorists’) were two-dimensional black-hat baddies who didn’t even pretend to care about the civilians at all.

How does that work in the real world? I’ve never seen any real life villain going around calling himself a villain, have you? What kind of villain wants to enslave the people and make them suffer, because that appeared to be the goal of the villains in this book?

I’ll tell you what kind of villain does that. It’s a villain in a uniform who is working for an Empire, but this ‘villain’ will be propagandised so much by the Empire he is serving that he won’t even see himself as a villain at all. How would he see himself then? He would see himself as a Green Lantern, a brave moral hero who is doing his job in order to protect poor innocent civilians from the mythical ‘forces of darkness’ that he has been told are the villains, yet doesn’t properly understand. That is real evil. It is evil dressed up as good. That’s how it works in the world, it’s how it always works, but not in contemporary mainstream comic books.

The evil in this comic is childish evil, it’s evil for a child’s cartoon on a Saturday morning, and it fails to fully comprehend how evil actually manifests itself in the real world. It’s dressed up with Obama/ New age Bull-crap public relations buzz words and slogans, then packaged as meaningful, as spiritually enlightened when in reality it’s a shin deep paddling pool for toddlers.

Green Lantern Corps #40 is a highly illustrative and useful text, not because it’s being purposefully deceptive, but because it believes in it’s own lies and shallowness. The only deception going on here is at a cultural level. Writer Van Jensen is not a disinformation agent, but a victim of the disinformation himself.

The lies, the wilful acceptance of them and an acceptance of new age/neo-liberal public relations nothingness has become the dominant cultural wall of our times. The wall is immense, but cracks are starting to appear. I do these reviews not to criticise the narrative structural techniques, art, panel-layout or character portrayals presented in contemporary comic books, but to slowly chip away at that wall.

Each review is a swing of hammer on chisel, my strange and solitary attempt to damage that wall. Often times I swing and miss, other times I get a good old wallop on it. Hopefully I managed to do some damage here.

Rating: 4/10 (A useful example of the neo-liberal/faux spiritual orthodoxy that is the dominant culturally programmed mind-set of these post 9/11 times)