Green Lantern: Rebirth

COMIX & GRAPHIC NOVELS INDEX

Green Lantern: Rebirth (issues #1-5)
written by Geoff Johns
art by Ethan Van Sciver
published by DC Comics

There are times when it’s hard to find spiritual connections with whatever media that I am dealing with. Let’s face it, some things make it difficult to find God (maybe that’s the point) or at least don’t easily lend themselves to pointing to Christ. That is not the case with Green Lantern: Rebirth. Rebirth is literally the story of redemption.

First, let me tell you a story. There was once a hero named Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern, a member of an intergalactic police force called the Green Lantern Corps. In the DC universe (the home of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, and the Justice League), next to Superman, he was the hero most admired. For decades he was a beacon of light.

He knew no fear.

Then, a terrible tragedy struck. He was unable to prevent a villain from destroying his home city. This senseless tragedy drove him quite mad. He even took to calling himself Parallax and tried to re-write history to his will. Eventually, he ends up sacrificing himself in the comic book cross-over “event�, Final Night.

Since part of the super-hero credo says that dying means never having to say good-bye, Hal Jordan returned. His soul was merged, read: trapped inside, the “hero� called the Spectre, God’s spirit of vengeance.

[Look, a Green Lantern movie is in the works, so pay attention.]

This, by the way, is the trouble with comics: I have to explain nearly a decade’s worth of continuity in order for you to understand/appreciate this storyline. It makes it hard for new readers to jump aboard. However, that’s what this series is about: addressing the entire history of this character in order to give it a fresh start.

Two sentence review: Geoff Johns is in peak form and this makes me wish I had more money to spend on collecting the other books that he writes. The art is spectacular.

There are so many spiritual connections in this book it was hard to choose a focus. By one view of redemption, Hal Jordan starts off as a Christ figure. He sacrificed himself to save the cosmos (in Final Night) and then bore the brunt of God’s wrath (as the Spectre). And that’s before issue one even starts. Green Lantern: Rebirth is definitely one of those “event� books that explores the inner demons of the character and explores what really makes him a hero. Literally, the character’s inner demons as all of the Green Lantern’s, past and present, engage in a battle against the enemy within. An impurity of men’s souls that calls itself Parallax, the living fear. This corrupting nature brings with it a cycle of destruction, warping man’s sense of right and wrong, and spirals into a pattern of fear, violence, and death. This taint leaves men vulnerable to the Spectre (the embodiment of God’s wrath). The need to deal with this taint is one view of how redemption works.

You see, there is an inherent problem with that view of redemption. It is a very individualized view of how redemption works. In that view, the individual has to realize their taint and do something about it or face God’s retribution (and the Spectre is about retribution, not redemption). It leads to a shallow reason to seek redemption and find faith: they become about getting said individual’s own butt into heaven. There is a broader way to view redemption, also presented in this comic book.

Hal Jordan faces that very choice of redemption schemes, and basically goes through a re-thinking of his faith. He has the chance to get his butt into heaven (by going towards the light as he nears death). Instead, he is literally “born again.� Better put, he is made whole. He joins in God’s mission to be a blessing to the world. That is what redemption is all about.

Hal Jordan finds redemption in Green Lantern: Rebirth. He is restored, but that doesn’t mean that his sins have been forgotten. Explained? Yes. Forgotten? No. He has a lot to prove, to regain the trust (even the admiration) of his peers. However, being made whole again, he has the opportunity, a lifetime, to live and work out his newfound faith.

COMIX & GRAPHIC NOVELS INDEX

Identity Crisis

Comic Index

(Issues #1-7, available in trade paperback)
written by Brad Meltzer
art by Rags Morales
published by DC Comics

Identity Crisis was DC Comics 2004's big “event� comic, one that promised to have lasting effects ripple through the entire cast of the heroes of DC comics. [The DC Universe is home to Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern, and the Justice League (*sigh* the Super Friends, if you must).]

Murder mystery scribe, Brad Meltzer, opens the series with the words of Dr. Fate “Life is a mystery.� In this case, it is a murder mystery built around the conceit that someone is going after the significant others in the lives of the community of super-heroes. Tragedy befalls one of the few happy couples in comics. As the Elongated Man, the character who bears the brunt of the tragedy, says: “anyone who puts on a costume paints a bull’s-eye on his family’s chests.� Though extremely dramatic and an absorbing read, there is something about the story that leaves a pall over the work. I think it boils down to the fact that there are lines not worth crossing, taboos not worth breaking, memories not worth tainting; not even for the sake of a riveting read (see The Amazing Spider-Man).

“An era can said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.�
-Arthur Miller (quoted in issue #7 of Identity Crisis)

As comic book afficionados were well aware, event comics are cross-over series with ramifications that spread through the other titles of the comic book company. Whereas once they were harmless marketing ploys–used as excuses to have a majority of the heroes gather together in one place--the big events took increasingly darker turns. These events were punctuated by death, as the medium entered this age of realism. Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Final Night, each brought their share of deaths, sometimes to beloved characters. Granted, this being comic books, it depended on what your definition of “dead� is, but for the most part, (for death to have any meaning) many of the characters have remained dead.

There’s nothing like the reality of death to make one examine their lives, especially their pasts. “Even godless physicists can appreciate the past.� (The Atom). Identity Crisis, in a fit of fanboy mania, re-visits the more innocent age of comics in order to reveal that they weren’t so innocent. Our heroes have their silver age morality is questioned.

You see, part of this era of being real and dark involves the deconstruction of the myth of the iconic hero. We love heroes, but we hate the example they set so we have to prove that they are no better than us. We seem to constantly compare ourselves to one another, as if we are trying to find a kind of redemption by trying to find our self-worth through others. Not wanting to have to live up to too high an ideal, this leads to an obsession with proving that our heroes have feet of clay.

In a nutshell, Identity Crisis is a well-plotted series developed from an oddly gratuitous feeling circumstance. The storyline, with its pot boiler whodunnit trappings, is thick with implications because of the series of escalations: grand fight scenes; one-time silly villains deepened and darkened; friendships betrayed; and a slow unraveling of the tapestry of the vanguard fighting team, the Justice League. It is filled with cool scenes and powerful images, if not a cohesive unifying thread. For such a cornerstone series, it can’t resolve the emotional issues at play. Its rushed resolution ends up feeling like the 30 minute sitcom wrap up of a “very special episode�.

The conclusion, at first pass, proves oddly unsatisfying and anti-climatic. That is, until you realize that at its core, Identity Crisis is a story about relationships and our desperate need for them. Identity Crisis ends up offering a better answer than Dr. Fate’s bit of wisdom. Life is about relationships; the deeply personal nature of, and the ties that bind, relationships. Parent and child. (Ex) wife and (ex) husband. Colleagues. We were created as relational beings. We are defined by relationships and we are vulnerable through them. It sounds weak, codependent in therapy parlance, but we aren’t meant to be alone.

A human being is defined by who loves them. Loved by God, we have our identity; defined by that relationship we find our self-worth. Love is risk, but we’re wired to be a part of a community. In that way we are fulfilled.

One could forgive the flaws to make the meticulously constructed mystery work. The series both highlights and humanizes the heroes of the DC universe while at the same time exposing their flaws in a deeply personal story. However, that doesn’t negate the solution to the heroes’ identity crisis. It could be best summed up with this quote from Doc Childre: "Our true identity is to love without fear or insecurity. Our higher potential finds us when we set our course in that direction. The power of love and compassion transforms insecurity."

Comic Index

The Amazing Spider-Man

Comix Index

“Sins Past� (issues #509-514)
written by J. Michael Straczynski
art by Mike Deodato
published by Marvel Comics


If you are unfamiliar with modern day comic books, you need to realize that these aren’t your father’s “funny books.� It’s high time that we started reviewing comic books since they have been the source material for many of our most popular movies and televison shows. Despite their decreased sales numbers, comic books still impact our culture (though, in Japan, the number one market on the planet, comic books have significantly higher sales and cultural impact).

It’s important to remember what got us hooked on comics in the first place: Larger than life heroes and villains in action/adventure serials; simple morality plays where good was good and bad was bad. These days, good isn’t as good as it seems and bad is a lot worse than it once was, but we still have to muddle through.

You see, the typical age of American comic book readers is 20+ , not 8+ like they were back in the day. Fanboys have grown up alongside the medium. Thus, the books have become increasingly sophisticated. Unfortunately, “sophisticated� usually means darker and harsher. This rush to insert realism has had the analogous effect of retroactively robbing us longtime fans of the medium of our fond memories of childhood.

However, there are lines not worth crossing, taboos not worth breaking, memories not worth tainting, not even for the sake of a riveting tale. That is the feeling that I was left with after reading J. Michael Straczynski’s pivotal story arc, “Sins Past.� In this storyline, JMS retroactively taints our memory of an innocent love and time.

Most of what the average person knows of Spider-Man is from the movies. For those who have followed the comics from early on, Peter Parker–Spider-Man’s alter ego–had a true, pure love before Mary Jane Watson. Her name was Gwen Stacy. However, she was lost to him when he was unable to save her during a battle with the Green Goblin (the first Spider-Man movie plays on this tale by having MJ, in the Gwen Stacy role, being tossed from the bridge. In the comics, unlike the movie, Spider-Man is unable to save her).

In this storyline, JMS fills in a bit of a continuity gap in the comics, explaining why Gwen Stacy jetted off to Europe for a time. Apparently, she had an affair with Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, then went to Europe to have her babies, twins Gabriel and Sarah. The twins were raised believing Norman Osborn to be the saint who took them in and raised them while blaming Peter Parker, whom they believe to be their real father, for abandoning them. So, now grown up, they wish to kill Peter Parker and avenge their mother’s death, which they believe happened at his hands.

Yes, it is a complicated soap opera-esque story that is personal and engaging with flashes of his trademark sense of humor that characterized JMS’s Babylon 5.

At first I thought the spiritual connection that I was going to make was coming from the kids relationship with their father and their struggle against their own natures. They had been corrupted, due to their bodies’ fallen condition, by the blood of their father. Tainted by his sinful legacy, as it were. “The truth is in the blood,� Gabriel proclaims. The storyline paints an intriguing image of these lost, desperate souls attempting to find wholeness and salvation from death, by either embracing or rejecting their father. But that’s not the spiritual connection that I was left with.

After I was finished reading the story, I couldn’t help wondering about Gwen. In some ways, this changed my image of her. Hey, I grew up with these characters, so cut me some slack. In JMS’s hands, the reader is lead to feel Peter’s conflicted emotions, the sense of betrayal, the hurt, the tacit forgiveness and unquenchable love. It reminded me of the story of Jesus and the woman at the well as recounted by Michael Yaconelli in Messy Spirituality: “Looking at her long string of bad choices, many would consider her unredeemable, unsalvageable, unteachable, and beyond help. She hasn't just made a few mistakes; she has lived a lifetime of mistakes, enough to cause most to conclude her life is scarred beyond hope. She comes to the well at the middle of the day because respectable women come in the morning and she understands that she is no respectable woman.

“But Jesus respects her.

“Jesus doesn't see what everyone else sees.

“As far as Jesus is concerned, this woman is salvageable, teachable and redeemable. As far as Jesus is concerned, the woman with no future has a future; the woman with a string of failures is about to have the string broken. Jesus sees her present desire, which makes her past irrelevant.

“You don't suppose, do you, the same could be true for you and me? Our mistakes, our strings of failures, and what everyone else labels unredeemable may actually be redeemable? You don't suppose the mess we've made of our lives can be the place where we meet Jesus?�

We all have sins. Things in our past that we’ve done, or had done to us, to make us feel unworthy of ever being loved or clean again. But we can be loved where we are, in the middle of our messy lives. Loved, forgiven, and made whole. “The truth is in the blood.�

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Sin City

—Overview
—Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

It took Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Once Upon a Time in Mexico) Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill) and comic book legend, Frank Miller, to faithfully bring Sin City to life. [It was Frank Miller’s vision of Batman in his The Dark Knight Returns that ushered in the first series of Batman movies and his Batman: Year One on which the upcoming Batman Begins leans.] The movie didn’t stop at simply preserving the look of the comic book. Not contenting itself to be a translation from the graphic novel to the silver screen, it transliterated it (if you’ll allow me to use “transliterate� this way). The movie had the feel of simply using the comic book as the story boards and filming it as is (thus earning it’s full title: Frank Miller’s Sin City). There’s a double edged sword of dealing with material beloved by geeks (my term of affectionate for rabid fandom, of which I am a member). On the one hand, if a director stays too faithful to the material, then you go “what’s the point of seeing it if you didn’t do anything with it?� On the other hand, if the director goes with their own vision, reinterpreting or re-imagining the source material, they run the risk of the geek saying “they ruined it.� The key is capturing the spirit of the work without reproducing it, but since reproduction on this scale, in so unique a fashion, hasn’t been done, this movie is landmark.

For those not familiar with the film noir influenced comic books, this movie is a series of interconnected vignettes all taking place in Basin City, a sewer of a town that collects the dregs of humanity. A morally bankrupt town where men are men and women are dames, broads, or prostitutes. The movie does an admirable job covering a lot of ground, combining the tales found in the graphic novels Sin City, The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard, any one of which–Marv’s story especially–would have filled out an entire movie by themselves. Another snag the movie hits by being so slavishly faithful is that carefully crafted dialogue that a reader would easily suspend disbelief for occasionally sounds clunky or stilted to the ear when heard.

Robert Rodriguez, assuming he hasn’t made a lot of enemies over quitting the Directors Guild over wanting to make Frank Miller his co-director, should earn an Oscar nomination for the visual direction of the movie. It’s a black and white world–and a very wet one at that–with occasional bursts of color, usually blood or a yellow bastard. The individual sets, framed like a comic book panel, contributed to the unusual look of the movie

Being quite familiar with the source material, I don’t know the last time that I saw a movie so perfectly cast. Marv (played perfectly, every bit the lumbering personality, by Mickey Rourke, in the John Travolta in Pulp Fiction role of career resuscitation), Hardigan (Bruce Willis), and Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba, late of the television show Dark Angel and starring in the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, continues to increase her genre profile) were just as I imagined they would be. Even bit parts were filled out with such luminaries playing Kevin (Elijah Wood in a creepy performance), Jack Rafferty (Benicio Del Toro), Bob (Michael Madsen), and Manute (Michael Duncan Clark). Comic book geeks beware: Frank Miller, himself, plays the priest that has the unfortunate confrontation with Marv.

“Hell is waking up every G-damned day and not know why you’re here.� –Marv

“There’s wrong, there’s wrong, and there’s this.� –Hardigan

When churches are afraid to talk about sin, leave it to the movies. We all live in Sin City. Everyone has “that cold thing�, as both Marv and Dwight call it, inside them. That calls to them. There’s no judgment in Sin City because all the character know they are sinners so there’s no point in playing the sin game with one another.

Despite the existential worldview that the movies supposes to aim for, Christ can be found. Marv, the hapless goon, and Hardigan, broken-down, retired cop, were the models of Christ in, and the heart of, the movie. This will strike many as absurd, as the movie does not have anything positive to say about clergy. Even in an era of anti-heroes, even in Sin City, there is room for crazy notions such as caring for people, treating poor people the same as rich, and laying down one’s life for one’s friends. This even applies to the Ayn Rand inspired “hero� Dwight, because even he has a “Sir Lancelot/save the damsel in distress� quality to him.

Like Christ, they believed all people were equal. Sinners felt comfortable around them. Like Christ, they were ugly. For those who cling to the image of Christ with long, flowing locks and smooth (Caucasian) features, they might want to check out Isaiah 53:2-3. Like Christ, they liked to gather up people around them. Jesus lived with people, partied with them, ate with them, drank with them, and walked with them. He surrounded himself with women of base repute.

They were losers.

When the cause was just, they had no fear of action. Christ overturned tables and faced down demons. They saved (or avenged) the innocent. The villains, cowards that they are, prey on the weak, the vulnerable, and those people that no one cares about or will miss. Often, as one character points out, they beat up on women to make themselves feel like men. They were framed for crimes they didn’t commit, because “sometimes the truth doesn’t matter as it ought.� And they paid the price for those crimes.

Marv, Hardigan, and Dwight are hard-boiled heroes. Men in search of redemption, all face points where they have to “prove to your friends that you’re worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying,� thus being wounded for other’s transgressions.

This movie is not for the faint of heart, nor is the stylized film-making easily consumed. The twisted tales of rage and revenge provide brutal scenes of violence. The actual nudity is brief, the movie, with its endless parade of fishnet clad prostitutes, is sexually charged. Had Tarantino not been a part of things, the movie still has the sensibilities of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. An exercise in style that threatens to supplant substance, the movie is visually stunning and demands viewing. If nothing else, it reminds us that our spiritual journeys are relational, not propositional (a matter of following or reciting a formula). The characters live out their beliefs, showing that even in Sin City, love, in the form of self-sacrifice, can be found.

—Overview
—Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections