Ring Of Fire: Red Lanterns #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains immediate, thoughtless, prejudicial spoilers. It is even possible that the story has already been ruined for you. So you might as well keep reading.

If you’ve been a comic book fon for the past couple of years, particularly if you’ve been one who followed Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern saga from the Sinestro Corps War through the Blackest Night event of 2010, you are going to cream your pants over the first seven pages of Red Lanterns #1. Peter Milligan NAILS everything fun and cool about the Red Lantern Corps, so much so that at one point I stopped what I was doing and I told Amanda, “You know what? Red Lanterns has the opening I’ve liked best of any of DC’s New 52 so far.”

“That’s great, Rob,” she said, “But I’d appreciate it if you’d put the comic book away until after we’re done having sex.”

But I digress… actually, I don’t, because that seven page opener is as much a non-sequiter as the above joke was. It has next to nothing to do with the remainder of the story that follows, and frankly? If you’re one of those ephemeral “new readers” that the New 52 is supposed to be reaching, I’m guessing you’ll quit somewhere during those seven pages and never read the book again.

Because if you don’t already know the characters, their backgrounds and motivations, what you’re seeing as an introduction to the Red Lantern Corps is an angry kitty in a red jumpsuit who bites some space dicks (The aliens in question being dicks, not ACTUAL, dangling space wangs. And the aliens themselves aren’t actually penises, they’re DICKS. Oh, forget it.), and his owner, who appears to be Mike Tyson if he ate too many carrots and tore his own lips off to give his teeth room to reproduce in his own mouth. And you’ll close the book, say something like, “Huh. those comics people DO eat mushrooms,” and go back and read Harry Potter again.

Which is a shame, because there’s a lot to like in this book beyond the opening. Milligan lays the groundwork for a new direction for the Red Lantern Corps – if the Green Lanterns are the universe’s police? Then the Red Lanterns will be its Guardian Angels, assuming someone were to be apeshit crazy enough to give Curtis Sliwa access to lethal weapons. We meet the person who I presume will become the Red Lantern of Sector 2814. And we meet other key members of the Red Lantern Corps, like Bleez (“Yup. Mushrooms.”), a bat girl with big jugs who says things like:

Teaser for Red Lanterns #3 Cover of Bleez, so you don't need to sticky up your copy

ATR… ATROC… CITUS… NGGG… WA… NE… GGGG…

I’m guessing that if you fuck her really well, she whispers Shakesperian sonnets in perfect iambic pentameter, but in her own semi-articulate way, the above grunt was part of a call to turn on Atrocitus (Lipless Mike Tyson if you’re new to the book), which is a nice way to set up tension in the immediate future.

And if you’re gonna tune into a comic about bloodshed, vengeance and bat chicks with big tits, Ed Benes is the man you want on art. His stuff was the best part about Brad Meltzer’s run on Justice League of America a couple years ago – yeah, the first couple of issues were nothing but Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman looking at pictures of superheroes, but thanks to Ed, they were GOOD LOOKING pictures of super heroes – and his stuff is excellent for this kind of book, too. In a book about a team of weird-looking aliens, you need a man who can sell you on the details, and Benes’s art is fine-lined and sharp, which really worked for me. Plus, he draws them bat hooters like nobody’s business.

Do I recommend this book? If you’ve been even remotely following Green Lantern since 2008 or so, I recommend it unhesitatingly – again, those first seven pages will hook you right in. If you haven’t? I’d still say to give it a shot, but have someone who knows DC Comics on speed dial. If you stick through it, I’m guessing you’ll be on board for issue 2 same as I am.

And if you’ve never read a DC Comic and all you took from this review was the phrase “bat hooters?” Yeah, give it a pass and check out J. H. Williams Batwoman. His bat hooters have nipples that make what Joel Schumacher did in Batman & Robin look like a seventh-grader with a flesh-toned crayola.