Green Lantern: Brother’s Keeper

Well, my library had another Green Lantern book. I love Green Lantern, so why not read more, right? Well, this one wasn’t very interestingly apparently.

This issue starts off with a big commentary about how it contains a plot arc revolving around Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s work apprentice being attacked by bigots who hate him for being homosexual. Apparently, the pair of issues presented here caused quite a stir among the gay community, and paralleled a real life attack. Unfortunately, I’m a little late on the band wagon, so I was not quite as exited as the rest of the authors when they wrote it.

Anyway, after the author’s hyping this up in the prologue, it starts with a story about… A mind controller causing havoc in the middle of the city and possessing a couple of Lanterns? This has nothing to do with the commentary in the beginning! After Brainwave gets bored, he runs off and laughs at everybody, because he has more important things to do. He Doesn’t do anything for the rest of the book, even though he beat the stuffing out of Earth’s Green Lanterns and ran off laughing at them because he was bored.

Anyhoo, the rest of the book is about the assault of Kyle Rayner’s apprentice. While Kyle and his green girlfriend (Captain Kirk would be proud) Jade are out of town seeing Kyle’s mom and going to his high school reunion (an amusing string of events by the way.) After this, Jade receives a phone call telling her that Kyle’s assistant, Terry Berg, has been nearly beaten to death. Apparently he was caught kissing his boyfriend outside of a dance hall, and some jerks decided to beat him up over it. Kyle gets pissed off and beats the stuffing out of them, hunts them down, and they all go to jail. Not surprising, since your average street thug doesn’t stand a chance and against a FREAKING GREEN LANTERN!

Anyway, the rest of the issue is spent by Kyle sulking over how he wasn’t able to protect his friend, him getting pissed off, and leaving Earth with Jade for a while. Plot doesn’t have many twists in it, and doesn’t seem very epic for a Green Lantern story. Also, it’s kind of preachy. In the end there’s some more commentary about the backlash the story received. I’d enjoy the message it portrayed a bit more if the story was more interesting. Genreally though, the story’s main hook was that it was more controversial a few years ago. Didn’t excite me nearly as much as another Green Lantern book I found at the library….

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