Emerald Dawn: The New Green Lantern // Comics History 101

Last year in Comics History 101, Hal Jordan destroyed the Green Lantern Corps in a break from sanity. You can catch up on that here. However, not all would be lost with Hal’s destruction of the Green Lantern corps and the theft of their power. As mentioned back then, the last Guardian Ganthet was able to escape his fate of death, taking a single ring with him to Earth with the intent of finding a human who could be Green Lantern once more.

That man was Kyle Rayner.

Despite having shown up in Green Lantern 47 as a tease, Kyle Rayner was officially named in Green Lantern 51, with his first appearance on the cover. Kyle was a brand new character, made fresh to be the new Green Lantern with zero ties to the DCU at large. This gave writer Ron Marz a chance to craft a new piece of DC Comics entirely from whole cloth. What he would come up with is admittedly compelling.

Unlike the stereotypical image of macho manliness Hal Jordan or Guy Gardner, writer Ron Marz would take the Spider-Man angle and make Kyle Rayner into an everyman who had real life problems. He wasn’t the overly heroic type, but would not hesitate before leaping into trouble to fight the bad guys. Instead of being a test pilot or making “hero” his job, Kyle was a graphic designer working in Los Angeles with his girlfriend Alex DeWitt, who herself was a photographer. Alex was also a pretty “average” person, with a fantastic reaction to Kyle showing off the ring.

Kyle would make his heroic premier that issue against the armored villain Ohm. The book would use narration to show Kyle learning the job as he fights, a wonderful bit of character depth and story work from Marz. The end of the issue would also have Kyle Rayner reveal a new costume, designed by himself at the urging from Alex. Keen eyed readers would also notice that Kyle’s ring no longer has the weaknesses most fans would be familiar with: yellow.

Nope, not anymore. 24 hour time limit? Also done with. In fact, Kyle didn’t even get a lantern from Ganthet. The core part of the Green Lantern, aside from the ring, was a power battery shaped like a lantern that he had to recharge with. Combine that with a new costume…

...and you have a completely different character with a legacy name. It is a far more drastic change than anything DC had done at the time, and it could have been disastrous. DC would do something similar with the character of Doctor Fate in a few months, and it would become so hated by fans that it would rapidly become undone a few years later.

Going from left to right, there was an attempt to make Doctor Fate into a 90s-tastic anti-hero. He would be stabbed in the back a few years later, and no one would mourn his loss.

Luckily, Green Lantern didn’t crash and burn with this new character. By making Kyle an everyman with little heroic experience or even experience with the superpowered, the average reader with little or no experience in the DC Universe was given a window on the ground floor. Kyle Rayner knew who Superman and the Justice League were, sure. However, who was this big yellow Mongul guy who was flying in with the intent of breaking Kyle under his heel?

For those who had been reading Green Lantern prior to issue 50, or were more familiar with the DCU as a whole, would recognize Mongul. Most recently, the evil war-mongering creature was instrumental in destroying Coast City, the home city of the former Green Lantern Hal Jordan, and assisted the Cyborg Superman in nearly destroying the world. Hal had just put a major beatdown on Mongul in the world engine that was Coast City, and Mongul had escaped maximum security prison in order to get revenge. Luckily, Kyle would get a helping hand against this monster.

However, the Government has taken more than a small interest in the reports of this new Green Lantern. Thanks to Alex selling photos of the new Lantern, the mysterious federal agency has a name to look up and chooses to send thug Major Force after him.

Issue 54 shows Kyle once more adventuring and beginning to get a handle on his new role in the DCU… and arguably the biggest misstep of the storyline. Kyle leaves Alex to go investigate some strange time antics in downtown Los Angeles that will tie in with the upcoming Zero Hour event, and encounters a ton of really cool stuff that only can happen in comics. However, while this happens, Alex is visited by Major Force. Being the thug with power that he is, Alex is abused and tortured by Major Force for information on who this new Green Lantern is. When Kyle comes home, he finds Alex stuffed into the refrigerator.

As I mentioned, this is perhaps the biggest problem in the comic. Rather than go with a damsel in distress, which I admit is cliche, Ron Marz chose to kill off Alex in one of the most brutal methods in comic history. Not only did this inspire fellow creator Gail Simone to make the protest and observation website “Women in Refrigerators”, but it has become the ur-example of getting rid of a romantic interest as a plot device. As such, it has perhaps aged the worst of any aspect in this comic, and feels like a massive missed opportunity with regard to Alex.

True to form, Kyle gets his revenge against Major Force by recharging his ring off a power battery that Major Force unwittingly brought with him. However, emotionally distraught with his evening, Kyle is caught off guard by fellow hero Sentinel. Alan Scott, formerly the Golden Age Green Lantern tries to provide Kyle advice, and context for Kyle as well in respect to the ring he’s become the owner of. 

The art is truly wonderful, and whomever did these pages deserves a lot of praise. Unfortunately, the comic credits four different pencilers and inkers, with zero page credits. The final issue of this story ends with Kyle vowing to do better, that he loves and misses Alex, and won’t let her memory down… only to run right into Superman and Jack Kirby character Metron. They’re here to drag him into the 1994 event, Zero Hour. This page is left off of most collections, and the editors are right to do so: it distracts from the touching ending, and just feels incredibly distracting.

Kyle’s introduction is actually really wonderful, and just about timeless. Ron Marz and his crew of artists really made some comic magic by using the Spider-Man formula of character creation, and the book’s coming tales would actually build up a wonderful sense of legacy. The upcoming Zero issue would have Kyle being forced to destroy the Green Lantern homeworld to prevent it from being mis-used, a wonderful message that there is no going back. A time travel mistake would have Kyle sent back in time to when Hal Jordan was still Green Lantern, eventually resulting in Hal being dragged to the present in another story showing how the legacy of Green Lantern has evolved.

And hey, Alex would later show up in 2009’s Blackest Night as the Black Lantern Fridge.

Honestly, Alex’s unfortunate fate aside, this story is fantastic. This is a perfect way to reboot or refresh a character, to create a hard division between what came before and what comes after. Books like Green Lantern under Ron Marz would help contribute to the legacy of the DC Universe, but would also draw in new readers by making new characters or crafting interesting angles on existing ones. 

Really, it’s just a shame that DC seems genuinely afraid of committing to legacy these days, thanks to things like the DC reboot in 2011 or the continual resurrection of Silver Age heroes at the expense of their modern counterparts.