Green Lantern Corps Brings Guy Gardner: Warrior Back

While the Green Lantern family of titles hadn't rebooted in quite the same way that most of DC's [...]

While the Green Lantern family of titles hadn't rebooted in quite the same way that most of DC's other books did after Flashpoint, and they (along with the Batman titles) were allowed to keep much of their history, that history was still shortened and altered, accounting for the fact that when heroes hadn't been around long enough to die, clearly Blackest Night played out a little differently, etc. One of the things that was widely assumed to be scrapped was Guy Gardner's turn as Warrior, the war-painted hero who drank from a mystical fountain and came to be aware that he was in fact descended of the last Vuldarians, a powerful but generally peaceful race who had been wiped out by war-crazed invaders.

As Warrior, Guy had a new set of powers, a new look and shed most of the readers who had been following his adventures as the only being in the universe with a yellow power ring. While Beau Smith, Mitch Byrd and company crafted a rich and generally interesting mythology and series of adventures for the character, it didn't connect with many readers and, when Geoff Johns came aboard the Green Lantern titles a decade ago to reinvent the franchise, Guy's history as Warrior (as well as his time with the yellow ring) weren't retconned away completely, but downplayed to near extinction. A follow-up miniseries that strove to tie up some of the loose ends left by the "Vuldarian alien" version of Guy only made things worse, with a confusing and unnecessary story compounded by poor characterization and ugly art. It didn't sell any better than the Warrior series had sold, but at least with Warrior, the readers who read it had actually kind of enjoyed it at the time. In any event, the image at top shows The Many Lives of Guy Gardner, as it appeared in this week's Green Lantern Corps #17. As Guy is tantalized and tortured by his past and what might have been, we can see the Warrior look pretty clearly, complete with weaponized hands in a combination and configuration that makes it pretty obvious the inspiration was drawn from the cover of Guy Gardner: Warrior #0, shown at left. Will we ever see evidence of any of the plot threads from this comic again? It's extremely unlikely, given the fact that DC's first two efforts at making them work have fallen flat, and there's not decades of history backing the property as there is with other frequent failures like Manhunter or Firestorm. So, why keep it in canon? Why preserve something that's basically just confusing, unrelated to the rest of the character's mythology and extraneous to what readers need to know about the character? It's not because some small number of readers liked the stories, surely; not only were they outnumbered by people who thought it was another stupid '90s stunt, but if "it makes the fans happy" were a reason to keep something around it's unlikely we'd be entering Year Three of the "Where the Hell is Donna Troy?" show soon. Is it just another attempt at reassuring fans that much of Green Lantern's history is intact, even though we've seen again and again that the New 52 has screwed up the GL continuity more than most? Hm. That one actually sounds right.

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