When I started getting ready to launch It Takes A Villain, my column about comics told from super-villains' point-of-view, the Green Lantern mythos presented a particular problem. While gathering the names of villain-led titles, I found two titles that seemed likely candidates from DC's New 52: Sinestro and Red Lanterns. Now, I knew enough about DC's continuity to know that Sinestro is a villain, but I really didn't know anything about the Red Lanterns. I read a few issues of Red Lanterns, and still couldn't tell whether or not they were super-villains. They were dicks, that was for sure. And it confused the hell out of me that someone thought it a great selling point to fill a comic with super-powered guys who constantly vomit blood. And all they really seemed to do was beat the crap out of each other on some desolate planet while their leader had a lot of angry thoughts about dead people. But were they villains? What the hell were they? Was it worth reading more of this strange, bloody-vomit-drenched comic or did they just not fit in It Takes A Villain?
A friend was kind enough to loan me a pile of his Green Lantern trades so I could learn more about DC's cosmic rainbow of confusion, the first of which is Green Lantern: Rebirth, the comic that brought Hal Jordan back as the company's premiere Green Lantern and whose huge retcon redeemed Jordan of his past actions.
It's a good comic, but it's also indicative of one of the many things I find frustrating about DC. So much of Green Lantern: Rebirth's drama hinges on history I don't know. And it seems particularly silly for a comic book company to make its stories so heavily continuity-dependent when that company tends to rewrite that continuity every few years.
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