The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1933: Green Lantern #57, December 1994

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I think I've said before how much I love the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern. He just always seemed a much nicer, more relatable character than Hal Jordan. In a recent review of Green Lantern: Rebirth, I suggested that Hal would have been one of the kids that picked on me in high school, whereas Kyle is more likely to be one of the ones who was indifferent at worst, and friendly at best. I loved him in Morrison's JLA, and he's pretty great in the few issues of his solo title that I've read.

Today's featured creator, Darryl Banks, did most of the art chores for Kyle's run on this title. I like his work - it's very mid-90s DC, which is a great art style, emblematized by work like Howard Porter's previously mentioned JLA run, or by the various artists who supported Mark Waid's Flash. It's not quite the grim 'n' gritty that was overwhelming Marvel in the wake of the Image exodus, though it does retain bits of that, but it's also more stylized and more, well, DC. Perhaps it's the colour palette, actually. DC comics just seem to be a little brighter than their competitors. In fact, when I come across a DC title that is dark or resembles more Youngblood than Young Heroes in Love, I find it slightly off-putting.

A Green Lantern artist has to be dynamic, and Mr. Banks' art is certainly that. There's lots of flight, lots of things moving around thanks to the ring's power, and lots of bodies in action, as one might expect from a superhero comic. All of these fluid moments are very nicely-rendered. It's a vital part of comics that the static images you see on the page actually look like they're moments of movement - this makes it easier for us to take the disparate images and stitch them together into what our brains perceive as actual movement. One of the greatest tricks of comics is to make you forget that you're looking at a bunch of static images. Well, one of the greatest tricks of well-made comics. Which this one is.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

I've got a couple of other pieces by Darryl Banks in the project, and it turns out of them was one of his very first works.

There's a bunch of Green Lantern stuff on the blog. Have a look.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 780: Green Lantern #59, February 1995

Alright. I know I said I'd blog this today, but it's really a kind of mediocre comic, and that's coming from someone who just loves the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern. Or rather, I love him in the JLA comics, but his solo adventures....meh. So I'm going to blow through this one today. I hope you don't mind too much.

Today's featured creator is Darryl Banks. With regard to his Green Lantern work, Mr. Banks is responsible for co-creating Kyle Rayner, and also with much of the design work of the various famed events that come out of the era (Parallax and all that). The comic is well rendered, and honestly the story is kind of a nice little Christmas tale of a lonely Green Lantern on monitor duty for the Titans. He ends up facing a newly-clad Dr. Polaris, bonds (?) with his teammates, and ends up fulfilling every fanboy's early dreams and kisses Donna Troy. All rendered with great facility and flow by Mr. Banks. If we consider the ramifications of the Parallax storyline (if it still has ramifications in the "Rebirth" era), then his contribution is crystal clear. This Green Lantern story, the fall of Hal Jordan, defined the character for most of the 90s, and well into the new millennium, and had lasting and important ramifications throughout the DCU titles. Hall Jordan's turning to evil forced a mistrust and fear into the mainstream superhero community (and their writers) that hadn't really been seen since the early days of the Dark Age with Watchmen and Dark Knight. But this new dark age was inflected by the optimism that such titles as Waid's Flash and Morrison's JLA infused in the time.

Another contribution, though more notorious, is that Mr. Banks was the penciller on Green Lantern for the story that gives us the "Women in Refrigerators" trope. That's a longer conversation, though.

One last thing before moving on: according to Wikipedia, Mr. Banks was responsible for one of the first painted comics, Cyberpunk, published by Innovation comics in the late 80s, and which I reviewed last September. Though I can't actually remember what I said about it. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 580: Cyberpunk #1, September 1989

When I was a teenager, and had, in some respects, graduated from the role-playing game education that was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk was one of the more popular of the games I moved on to, at least in my small gaming group. We liked the idea of a fantasy world that resembled the technology that we utilized. And, while technically a science fiction game, the concepts bound up in the setting were really far more fantastic that scientific. Today's comic is similar. It is, as the opening of the fantastic Max Headroom television series had it, set mere moments into the future, in a place that is eerily familiar, but populated by people who have become indistinguishable from the technology they use. The protagonist is more at home in the virtual environment of "The Playing Field" than real life, which metaphorically resonates for so many peoples' experiences nowadays, but the environment itself is still fantastical - what I mean by this is that it in no way resembles the virtual environments within which we interact now. This is perhaps where I'm going with the categorization of this comic, and the game I played, as fantasy - they're speculative pieces that, in a lot of ways, got it wrong. Speculation that doesn't jibe with reality equals fantasy?

Maybe. Or maybe it's late, I'm rambling, and it's time to say goodnight. Onward!