The Fifth Element

"Spirit?  Oh well, it's dazzlingly obvious then.  The spirit's role's always unpredictable, you know that.  It exists to galvanize and revitalize the elements around it.  Here's a boy whose hatred of authority is such that he even rebels against us.  I think he's here to test you to your limits, Gideon, that's what I think.  He's here to shake you to the core."  Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

Taste the Rainbow

Geoff Johns' run on Green Lantern is done.  My first thought is, FINALLY.  Even those of us who loved his run and have defended Johns against the slings and arrows must concede that GL has been truly awful ever since Blackest Night, with the exception of the first few issues of The Nu 52.

In his final issue, Johns all but acknowledges that fact.  Green Lantern 20 is a real-time act of revisionist history, with Johns celebrating the defining features of his run by literally bringing almost all of them back for an encore.  The first thing we see is a future keeper of the Book of Oa using five pages to recap Rebirth, The Sinestro Corps War, the War of Light, and Blackest Night as more or less the complete story of Hal Jordan's time as a Green Lantern.  There is no mention of War of the Green Lanterns or The Rise of the Third Army, which is appropriate, since those things never existed and I never wasted real currency on them.

The rest of the issue proceeds around a flimsy, insignificant plot device--there's an all-powerful threat! he's really bad!--to get the band back together.  The Green Lanterns attack.  The Red Lanterns spit fire.  Kyle Rayner shows up with the rest of the Care Bear Crew, because God forbid Kyle Rayner ever get to do anything that isn't incredibly stupid and pointless.  Our old friend Parallax shows up.  Hal Jordan brings back the Black Lanterns and Nekron (no, really), saves the day, and gets rebirthed again.  It's best you don't ask about that last thing.

But let's go back to those first five pages.  Those who accuse Geoff Johns of being obsessed with the past are laughing their asses off and/or breaking things right now, but, like, I'm not sure that summary is entirely incorrect.  My impression is that with the exception of a couple amazing Alan Moore one offs and Emerald Twilight, there weren't any classic Green Lantern stories prior to Johns's run.  Whatever its faults, Johns's run did expand the GL universe and expand the possibilities open to future writers.

Especially with Sinestro.  When I read old GL comics, Sinestro is a fairly generic creepy, slimy villain type with no identity.  If Johns' run has one unequivocal triumph, it's that he gave Sinestro depth.  Johns took a simple concept--if green rings require overcoming fear, yellow rings require its mastery--and used it to inform every aspect of Sinestro's character and history.  In Johns's world, Sinestro's evil came from a desire to use fear to provide the universe order and stability (Sinestro as neocon?).  Johns let this motivation make Sinestro seem alternately nobly misguided and insane.  He took the old notion of Sinestro as tragic hero undone by his need to preserve order to heights never before imagined.  Johns got Sinestro and used him to drive his entire run.  When future writers approach Green Lantern, they'll have a villain worthy of a Justice Leaguer to play with.

Finally, Green Lantern 20 reminds us that most of Johns's run was big, dumb fun, but it was fun.  Parts of Johns's multicolored Lantern saga (Sinestro Corps War) were better written than others (Blackest Night), but the stakes were always high and the action was always beautifully drawn.  All comics writers rely on their artists, but one wonders how we'd look at Johns's GL run if he had had to work with average artists instead of geniuses like Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, and Doug Mahnke. To Johns's credit, he put those guys in situations where they could draw huge space action scenes in primary colors, and they knocked it out of the park.  If a reader could buy into the story just enough to care, Green Lantern delivered the best action on the shelves.

I'll always owe Geoff Johns a debt, because his Green Lantern was the first book that got me going to the comics shop weekly.  Since then, I've encountered scores of better books and better sagas, but Johns's GL was the gateway drug.  Judging by the sales numbers, other people felt the same way I did.  No one should mistake Johns's run with art, but he delivered the cheap, pulpy, grade B thrills comics used to be known for by the truckload.

My Dreams v. The Dark Knight Returns

This was my dream last night:

Somehow, the Joker seemed to be killing people in the dream realm. I, as batman, could only get to where he was causing a ruckus through dreams, as could my father. Once we got there we found that the Joker had done some diabolical shit and gotten away, but he had left clues and the cure for the Joker Virus in an old car. He also left clear instructions that the only way to get to the second part of the adventure was to play through the Batman video game on the PS3 in the beater. One of the things you could do in the video game was gain a bunch of different weapons through mastering the hammer throw, including a Green Lantern ring.

Apparently I did what I needed to do, because it flashed forward to the second part, which was entirely nautically based. The Joker was terrifying people on the beaches along the coast, because he had gained Aquaman-like powers. I/Batman managed to catch him at one point by firing a grappling line horizontally, hitting a big pier, and pulling myself through the water at high speed, grabbing him on the way by. The Joker wasn't too put out by this, though, because somehow he lassoed me when I got on the pier so I couldn't get away. I was above him, but he was climbing up towards me and it was clear he could easily overpower me, but that wasn't his plan.

His plan turned out to be, there was a cruise ship right by the pier with a bunch of people with high powered rifles. When I thought it couldn't get any worse, it turned out he had planned the whole thing so that a giant submarine breached and smashed up the pier and the cruise ship. The waves/tide pushed everybody into a canal, which was lined with more dudes with high powered rifles. I remember calculating that there was like a one percent chance that someone could swim by those riflemen without getting shot at such close range, and sure enough I did get shot twice, because I wasn't batman any more, just Bryan. 

But I did survive to advance to part 3 of the dream, where people started getting washed up in this Mad Max-type setting, except it was on the beach. All of a sudden this dervish of light and evil started charging around the beach looking for stuff to kill. I tried to hide behind some old tires in the garage, but the dervish found me. Turns out it was the spirit of the Joker, and he was unkillable and all powerful. He rode me around and extended his tendrils trying to latch on to humans, from whom he could draw power to reincarnate stuff. He did that for a while and it looked like it would be really bad.

Luckily, somehow we ended up on an elevator. As the elevator rose, it revealed a cat and Russell, the bassett hound. the cat turned into Batman and Russell turned into Superman. Superman flew out, grabbed the Joker, snapped his neck, and threw him to the bottom of a pool, so that the real Aquaman could handle him.

Your move, Mr. Nolan.

Hog: a Metal Awakening

There's a long version and a short version of this post.

The long version: Done correctly, metal makes all other forms of music look trite and besides the point.  I can't think of another form of music that so effectively summons forces that are clearly beyond human control.  If that's a cliche, it's a cliche because it's 100 percent true.

Case in point: the homeboy Alec Ferrell is in a couple bands.  Last night, I went to see Hog, his metal outfit.  I try to avoid seeing my friends' bands for as long as possible, because nothing in the world is worse than a good friend and a good dude who is really proud of his really mediocre band.

Alec does not have that problem.

My god.

From the minute Hog got on stage, it was pretty clear that I listen to a lot of meaningless music, and that I need to cut that isht out, because I could spend that time listening to Hog.  As near as I can tell, their songwriting process is as follows:

1. Lead guitarist comes up with series of the coldest riffs you will ever here.
2. Lead guitarist tells the rest of Hog to memorize the riffs and play them as hard as you can.
3. The rest of Hog smiles, because, damnit, what's the point of playing if you can't rock as hard as possible?
4. They spend the next FOUR MONTHS perfecting each song into another version of the Ultimate Nature Machine.

Again, great metal is about tapping into some deeply primal stuff that we puny humans usually can't handle.  You may think that your sensitive singer songwriter, your jam band, your emcee, your dance music producer superstar, your 19th Century German composer, or whatever is tapping into something primal, but the best versions of all these archetypes are ultimately bound by human limitations.

Son, Hog is not human.  Hog is about that full-on Viking god isht.  Thunder.  Lightning.  Monsoons.  Asteroids smacking into the Earth, because the gods went all Ragnarok and sometimes a god's gotta break a planet or two to make an omelet.  Your wars?  Friend, your petty human wars are nothing to the gods, so they are nothing to Hog.  Come at Hog with a tank, and they will call down a f#$%ing glacier on your a$$.

The type of commitment needed to do what Hog does is staggering.  Again, FOUR MONTHS of practice before they play a song out, for a bunch of guys with day jobs.  To listen to Alec talk about effects and head units and arpeggios is to realize that you need to get more serious and passionate about your own creative endeavors, because there are dudes out here who do not trifle, not even for a second.

For the listener, all those sacrifices seem worth it.  Hog is powerful and Hog is sexy and your favorite band would never, ever agree to go on stage after Hog.

The short version: if you ever get the chance, go see Hog.  Don't worry if you don't like metal now, because you will like metal after you see them.