Red Lanterns #38 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Landry Q. Walker
Art By: J. Calafiore, Gabe Eltaeb
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: January 28, 2015

The Crazies

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

It's time to get our rage on as we see what Guy Gardner is doing with himself in a post GODHEAD
world........ That seems like a little much.  How about what Guy Gardner is doing while the events of GODHEAD are still fresh in his mind...... Yeah, I like that better.  I'm really excited going into this issue because I've been wanting to see Lanterns on Earth for awhile now and to have it be a Red Lantern, well it should be interesting.  Let's dive into this issue and see if Guy can have himself a vacation like Hal seems to be doing or if he'll have a meaningful talk with Ice like Kyle Rayner had with Carol Ferris............ Yeah, he'll probably just jump into another adventure just like John Stewart did.  Hopefully he's gotten over that whole mopey phase that he's had lately and can quit being such a sad bastard all the time........... Let's check it out.



Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Guy Gardner teamed up with some kind of military unit trying to clean up the aftermath of what Atrocitus did to the Earth........ but I guess he somehow found the time to go have a couple beers with Hal back in Green Lantern #38..... priorities and all.  Now dig this, somehow even though all the rings were cleaned up and we no longer have a gigantic populace of angry Americans with red rings running around, people are still feeling the affects of the rage.  I'm not kidding, one of the bigger cities hit with Atrocitus's rings are still acting like they were in the flick The Crazies and one after another Guy has the military unit bring him one of the affected people and he uses his ring like The Judge did and probes their mind trying to find the source of their.........crazy rage.

After he probes a bunch of people, Guy realizes that they all have the same thing in their minds that are driving their rage and he traces this rage to a refugee camp where he finds that after all the supplies were gone, they just dumped the injured and sick into the basement and sealed the door.  Just a great big basement full of bodies piled on top of one another and it was this act and the rage that these abandoned people felt that caused a sort of mass rage in people's psyche.

In the end, after hearing more and more about how bad Guy feels about how he's gotten people he's cared about killed for the greater good, it looks like he simply gives up and gives himself to the crazed people on the street so they have someone to focus their rage on.  Which actually seemed like a really brave and decent thing to do if not a little suicidal, but if Guy was willing to sacrifice himself in order to cure a city of it's virus like rage....... Well it's a half decently noble thing to do......kinda and I guess I could get behind it.  We find out though, that Guy knew if the people raged enough against his jerk off face, that eventually the rage would burn them up and instead of saving everyone with his actions, he allowed them to burn up so that he could contain the rage and save everyone else who wasn't infected................. Yeah, he pulled a Constantine.  So I guess we're not done with mopey Guy Gardner yet, especially since he just let a ton of people die.

That's it for this issue of Red Lanterns and Landry Walker's first attempt at writing a rage lantern.  The biggest problem with this story is, it isn't that interesting.  It continues Guy Gardner's mopey streak and by the time the story was over I realized that I was way more interested in how Guy Gardner ended up working with a military unit.  How did that happen?  The world was just bombarded with red rings that drove everyone crazy, so why would the military trust a hobo looking dude with the same jewelry?  That's the story I want to see.  Like in the Amazo Virus story, we have a outbreak scenario where people (except for the crazies) are keeping off the streets and if the problem wasn't contained the military was going to bomb the area......... Which for people who dig the Amazo Virus story, you might like it.  Now combine that with the awesome more internal stories that we've been getting in Constantine and you have this issue of Red Lanterns......... and somehow it doesn't really work.  J. Calafiore was awesome on art like normal, it's just I hope that for the last two issues of Red Lanterns, we can get Guy Gardner back in form and we can end this series on a high note.

Bits and Pieces:

Now that GODHEAD is over and we can get back to business with our Lantern books, I was really excited to see where Landry Walker was going to take us with our final issues to this series.  All we got though was the continuation of Guy Gardner's "woe is me" attitude and a story that felt a little off.

6.5/10