Comic review: Green Lantern #40- Corporate neo-liberal brainwashing 101

Writer: Robert Venditti
Artist: Billy Tan
Publisher: DC Comics
Date of publication: 4th March 2015


I couldn’t help but read this book as the corporate mainstream whore satanic system trying to make excuses for itself, it’s actions and the fact that the alternative media is destroying its credibility on an hourly basis.

What makes me say that? Just reading the book and seeing how the Green Lantern character (Hal Jordan) is acknowledging that the system that he represents is now seen as ‘Cops, and everywhere we go, people don’t want us.’

Soldiers are not ‘cops,’ they are not peacemakers, they are not flying around the world to save and help poor innocent victim/civilians. They are told that they are the heroes, but that is a lie. We know it is a lie, everybody knows it’s a lie, so let’s start pointing it out. Uniformed order followers of the state operate as the private mercenary army of powerful banking and corporate interests, the 1% that the Occupy movement has been talking about, and ridiculed for it’s truth telling in the corporate whore mainstream media.

Green Lantern #40 is the story of one individual order following soldier. He defends the system that he is a part of, leaving it in order to personally shoulder the blame for it’s recent abuses, all of which are characterised as ‘mistakes’ rather than anything that is inherently wrong with the system itself. He acknowledges that he is not to blame, but he is prepared to shoulder that blame in order to prop up a system that he has religious faith in.

Hal Jordan has deliberately turned himself into a villain in order to back up a discredited control system. The system itself will use this sacrifice to carry on with business as usual. He’s sacrificed himself, just like a good soldier would sacrifice himself for the benefit of his comrades on a battlefield. This is a standard technique used by control systems, and the best thing about it is that no coercion is required, as the indoctrinated individuals willingly sacrifice themselves for what they see as the greater good.

Green Lantern #40 is reflecting the religious faith system of mainstream western ideology. That faith system is an unquestioning belief in neo liberal capitalism, centralised, corporate statism and with an army of order following mercenary soldiers to back it up with violence. The act of sacrifice, of having faith in a system that is rotten to the core, is presented as a heroic thing for a soldier to do.

Sacrifice yourself to the gods of the corporations.

Sacrifice yourself to the gods of the banking sector.

Sacrifice yourself to the gods of the mainstream media.

Sacrifice yourself to neo-liberal crony capitalism.

Sacrifice yourself to wars based on lies.

That’s how it works, hundreds of thousands of Hal Jordan’s pumped up with false pride, indoctrinated, propagandised since birth, sacrificing themselves to the centralised control system, the borg collective hive mind that helps the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the entire planet enslaved…forever.


Rating: 4/10 (Subconscious mind-set of a neo liberal corporate slave)



*Lead Image on this review is the excellent movie cover variant front cover to Green Lantern #40 by Tony Harris

Comic review: Big Man Plans #1- It’s about a Dwarf stabbing people in the neck and face

Writers: Eric Powell and Tim Wiesch
Artist: Eric Powell
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 4th March 2015


Is it particularly clever or worthwhile to either read or write a comic book about a bullied Dwarf who spends his life stabbing people in the neck and/or face?

Umm, if you are the writer and people buy the book, and if you make ‘F**k you money’ out of it (this apparently is the only thing that drives writers Tim Wiesch and Eric Powell) then I guess it was worthwhile.

But what if you are the reader? I’m the reader, and I feel like I’ve just given my money to a couple of sociopaths. I feel like I’ve given money to people who want to get dirty, filthy rich not because they feel like the money can help anyone, but no, because they want to use the money to abuse people instead.

How did I get this impression?  I got it from writer Tim Wiesch in a page titled, ‘What the f**k just happened?’ The page describes the motivations (in his own words) behind the writing of Big Man Plans. Here’s a section of that article:

‘I really hope that a lot of people buy this thing because f**k-you money ain’t easy to come by…..and Eric and I have some big f*****g plans.’ (Tim Wiesch)

These plans involve replicating scenes from a serial killer movie and other stupid things that only a hipster douchebag or immature teenage boy from 1991 would find funny.

Well, that’s made me feel great guys. Thanks for that Tim. Now I know that your life goals are to get rich, and to use and abuse people. What can I say? Have you ever thought about getting involved in politics?  I’m not very impressed with that mindset at all. It’s not clever, it’s not funny, it’s just depressing, deeply, deeply depressing.

Rant over, so what is this book all about then? It’s about a little man, a Dwarf. We follow his life as a young little man. His Dad is nice. His Mother isn’t. She leaves him, and the family. Dad drinks heavily, then dies in a barn fire. Young little man and his sister are taken away by social services. Sister goes to a nice home because she is pretty. Young little man gets beaten up and abused in care homes because he is a Dwarf. From there he tries to join the army, fails, and is taken into a special unit where he is broken down and stripped of his humanity, and then sent down Vietnamese tunnels (and why are comic books in 2015 still talking about Vietnam when they should be talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria?) where his job is to stab people in the face, murdering people for the banks and corporations that operate under the corporate fiction known as the USA.

After his legalised murder unit is disbanded, an older little man comes home to the US where he gets into bar-fights and stabs people in the neck, but it’s okay because the guy he stabs in the neck has a swastica on his forehead. The book concludes with the Dwarf wielding a hammer and looking to hurt more people because his childhood sucked and because the army turned him into a secondary psychopath.

Okay, so what am I supposed to say about all of this? Am I supposed to go…………Cooooooooooool maaaaaaaaaan????????????? Come on. Come off it. What the Hell????

I can’t even be bothered to properly finish off this review. I feel gross even writing about this book. Okay, so it has some truth in it. It shows that abused people become abusers, and that the US army is the perfect place for psychopaths, that they deliberately manufacture psychopaths in order to carry out legalised butchery. Okay, that’s real, that exists, but we already know about that, and I’m going to repeat myself here…WHY THE HELL IS IT STILL SET IN VIETNAM??????

That’s it, end of review.

Unpleasant book. Yuck, yuck, yuck. If you want to do yuck in 2015 please set it in Iraq, at least then we can get something new and contemporary out of it.


Rating: 3/10 (Although I hate the book I do admire Eric Powell’s artistic abilities)

Comic Review: Green Lantern #39- Questioning American Exceptionalism

Writer: Robert Venditti
Artist: Billy Tan
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 4th February 2015



Green Lantern #39 is a fascinating book because it offers comic book readers a much-needed insight into the current neo-liberal world-view consensus known as ‘American exceptionalism.’

There's always a new threat used to justify US imperialism

The term is a short-hand phrase, commonly used to describe the belief (in US mainstream circles at least) that America is unique in world history, that their empire is a force for good in the world, unlike all of the other empires that have preceded it. The belief in American exceptionalism is a belief that American foreign policy/imperialism is based on issues to do with morality, freedom and human rights rather than reasons of naked corporate/banking self interest dictated by a tiny number of ‘elite’ families.

The Green Lanterns are the American military, and the Guardians are the US political leaders. The Guardians (Politicians) know best, and the Lanterns (Military/Police) unquestioningly follow their orders. The comic book narratives of our post 9/11 times have been simple. A dictator alien threatens galactic peace, and the Lanterns (or Avengers, or substitute any other group in contemporary comic books) are sent in to restore order. After lots of ‘cool’ battle scenes, a misdirection or two, the characters learning something about themselves etc, the threat is defeated, and order is restored. There is no bigger picture; no secret agendas are going on behind the scenes. That’s how these books are structured, that is how these stories unfold, not just in DC comics, but in just about every mainstream comic book available today.

US comic books back-up the mainstream corporate media consensus by supporting a world-view where the US military fly around the world saving people from evil dictators and spreading peace and democracy wherever they go.  The problem of course, is that this version of reality is a lie and in this age of Internet and whistleblower information and revelation the lies are becoming increasing self-evident.

So what happens when the US military/Green Lanterns are no longer seen as the protectors, as the good guys of the narrative? What happens when the lies propagandised through the corporate mainstream media disinformation system begin to break down and the US military are not viewed as defenders of liberty and freedom, but as harbingers of war, destruction, death and misery?

Hi John.

How do American comic books continue to spin the false narrative of US exceptionalism, of US morality, of the US defending democracy and freedom when the real world realities of the past decade lay waste to this lie? How do they get young men and women to sign up to the US military/Green Lantern Corps/Police forces when they are no longer heroes, but the villains of the story?

Green Lantern #39 has a problem. How to push the propagandistic mainstream line when this line is diametrically opposed to reality itself? It tries hard.

The book begins with the main hero protagonist (Green Lantern Hal Jordan) shown upholding the law and treating prisoners with humanity, but there’s tension with local law enforcement. They appreciate the help, but they don’t want the US World Police system that he represents, and he’s politely told to go on his way.

The Politicians

Jordan is then summoned to a meeting with his political masters (the Guardians) to receive his next orders. They outline their concerns, that the Green Lanterns (representing the US military) are becoming a bit unpopular in the galaxy. They are concerned that ‘anarchy’ is going to break out unless they are there to ‘Police’ the galaxy. That says everything that you need to know about the mind-set of contemporary comic book writers.

‘Anarchy’ to the mainstream means black masks, bricks through shop windows, riots and wanton destruction. The Police/Army/Green Lanterns/Batman/Spiderman are needed to stop humanity from destroying itself. Humanity is not to be trusted, and freedom is never on offer.

What does this say about their view of humanity? It says that comic book writers view humanity in a very suspicious, very paranoid, very evil light. This world-view sees people as inherently bad, they need to be policed, they need to be controlled, they can’t be trusted with true freedom, they need to be controlled like sheep with the threat of the sheepdog (Police) needed to keep them in line. The best way to shepherd and control the sheep/people of course is to is to herd them up, and stick them in a prison/pen.

That is the very definition of a scared liberal statist who fears humanity itself, and would rather live in a prison than be truly free. It’s the world-view of the coming New World Order, and it’s pervasive in the mainstream media today, a media that promotes fear, suspicion, and the police state as being the only thing that can protect us from ourselves.

The Soldiers/Cops.

Green Lantern #39 concludes with Soldier/Lantern Hal Jordan being given a new mission by his political masters. They recognise him as a trusted face, so they want him to ‘Help us reclaim the Corp’s good name.’ In other words, they want to use him as a public relations vehicle to sell their Galactic Police state to the DC universe. The most interesting thing about this book is that Jordan does not take the proposition at face value, and as the book concludes he thinks out loud to himself that he just might, ‘Do something crazy.'’

Will he really do something genuinely crazy in the context of a mainstream comic book? Will he challenge the very notion of authority to a centralised control system of political ‘experts’ that enforces their will on the people at the point of a gun, and with the threat of depravation of individual freedom and liberty?

Will Hal Jordan become an advocate for liberty, for anarchy, for freedom from the evils of statism and the New World Order Police state?

There’s a lot of questioning going on here, and I’m glad that I purchased this book now, because I was on the verge of dropping it from my pull-list. What’s going to happen next? Is Jordan really going to put down his uniform and start thinking, and acting based on morality, and not the US exceptionalism and lies that have defined the past thirteen years on planet Earth?

This book can go one of two ways. It could introduce a new threat and carry on business as usual, or it could start to question things on a deeper level. What is it going to be? Where is it going to go? At the moment I’m unsure, but what I do know is that issue #40 is already a must buy book.

Rating; 8/10 (For all of the intellectual stimulation that it provided)


Click on link below for more details on ‘American Exceptionalism.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism