Explosive Hemorrhage: Red Lanterns #7 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review was written when the writer was extremely hung over. This has affected his mood, and his ability to remember if he has included spoilers or not. You have been warned.

Red Lanterns is one of the damnedest comics on the stands right now. Every issue I’ve read feels like it has some kind of underlying theme, some kind of Big Message it’s trying to impart. Issue one felt like it was hinting at the underlying motivations and effect of vigilante violence. The third issue teased themes of the effects of sexual violence. This issue intimates a greater examination of the vary nature of what it would mean to become suddenly superhuman. These are all admirable aspirations for a monthly comic book, and it would be exciting and interesting to read… if those themes weren’t buried in hamfisted storytelling that seemingly goes nowhere and gratuitous ass shots and brokeback poses. This book serves up more ass on a consistent basis than a back alley Chinese food place… in more ways than one.

This book follows three plotlines at once, the most exciting one being new Red Lantern Jack Moore battling Guy Gardner on the streets of… well, Earth. That’s what the caption says, so that’s what we’ll go with. It’s not a bad little fight as these things go; big, Lantern-bashing action is always welcome way to while away a couple of minutes. However, the storytelling in the fight is all over the damn place. There’s some interesting caption work detailing Moore struggling with his new superhuman station in life, but the entire resolution of the fight keys on the willingness to believe that Guy Gardner would rather save innocent bystanders – or do anything else – than fight. The whole point of the character of Guy Gardner is that he’d rather fight than do anything else. Watching Guy Gardner be altruistic is like watching a porn star dry dishes. It’s not what I signed on for.

And the visual storytelling in this fight sequence is just as dicey – there’s a scene where we’re told that Moore saved Guy from a car accident… but what we’re shown is some cars sitting there in what appears to be traffic with no indication of an actual collision. Another panel makes the absolute amateur mistake of switching the word balloons, making Guy look like the snarling, blood-spitting douchebag… well, more so than usual. The whole Goddamned thing just winds up feeling sloppy.

We also get scenes of Bleez and her team of renegade Red Lanterns capture and torture some former members of the Sinestro Corps in order to hunt down Sinestro and to show readers her ass. I counted four ass shots, three side-boob exposures and two brokeback poses to ensure ass-ogling… with one of each by the second page of the book. Look: I am a red-blooded American male, and I like leering at ass as much as the next man, but this book is approaching the level of self-parody. And it must be working – you’d be surprised how many people find this Web site by Googling for “Bleez Ass” – but we’re at the point where when I see Bleez, I stop seeing story, tension or character and start wondering is this is the month we find out if she has bat-shaped aureloe.

We also see Atrocitus on the hunt for the corpse of his former enemy Krona, but really: who gives a shit? Most of these story elements have been advancing since the very first issue, and just not going anywhere fast. One could argue that this is decompressed storytelling, but that implies it’s going somewhere, and I’m not convinced that it is. Seven issues with no resolution at all isn’t decompressed, it’s meandering. Part of that is the pure fact that Milligan’s chosen to split his monthly 20 pages between three parallel storylines, which will affect pacing no matter what you do… but the other part is based on some of the story choices. The main character of the book has spent several issues looking for a dead guy. Last time that kind of story was interesting was in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and at least that dead guy had a brick of gold bullion stuck up his ass.

No matter what’s going on with the story, the book looks good. Ed Benes draws extremely detailed, fine-lined drawings with realistic figures, provided your idea of realism includes surgically modified porn stars. Regardless, there almost isn’t a page in this book, or even a panel really, where you couldn’t turn it into a superhero poster. The downside to it is that the pictures are beautiful, but it can affect the storytelling. This happens in obvious ways, such as the aforementioned “fatal car accident” sequence, and in ways less obvious; when almost every picture looks like a girlie pinup, you start seeing dirty images everywhere. Such as this panel, where the caption says that Atrocitus is removing a “face-sucker”, but the eye, trained by the half-boner the Bleez cheesecake shots gave us, tells us that Atrocitus is ejaculating onto his own cheek:

Seven issues into this book, and after a spectacular first few pages in #1, I think I’ve finally tuned out completely. Either Milligan is implying, or I’m hopefully inferring, big ideas behind the scenes in this comic, but the slow, flawed storytelling means that those ideas (assuming I’m not imagining them) are checks that the story can’t just cash for me. And at this point, Benes’s blatant sexualized art is more distracting than engaging. I’m punting on this book.