Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Green Lantern Corps: Recharge, Issue #4 – “Hunted”! In the previous installment, Rayner and Gardner find Soranik Natu and convince her to go from “I’m NEVER becoming a Green Lantern!” to “I’m a Green Lantern now!” by doing nothing more than calling her a chicken. Meanwhile, Kilowog saves Vath and Isamot from the black hole, but it turns out that they ended up in Vegan space as well (and no, that’s Vegan as in “Vega”, not vegan as in “you’re annoying”).

So everyone has converged in one place! Oh yeah, and random space bounty hunters are after the Lanterns, so they’re going to have a field day rounding up these sad-ass sacks. That’s what this issue is going to be all about.

Green Lantern Corps: Recharge, Issue #4 [February, 2006]
Written by: Geoff Johns
“Hunted”

Vega is where the party’s at. Rayner and Gardner, through their ring walkie-talkies, tell Kilowog to sit tight. They’re coming to get him. Kilowog is floored that Rayner and Gardner are even here. They’re not supposed to be here! What a coincidence, at any rate.

Rayner, Gardner, and Natu scramble and head in the direction of the Spider Guild (?) while the bounty hunters prepare to nab them a few fresh Lanterns. “I would follow Rayner to Hell itself if it meant I could kill him,” Fatality says. The other two bounty hunters don’t really want to follow Rayner to the Spider Guild. Spiders give them the boo-boo jeebies. Bolphunga, who is named after a tick-borne disease or a salad dressing or something, agrees to go with Fatality.

“Scary, huh, Natu? Confined spaces and spiders… brrr!” Gardner says once they get to the Spider Guild. He is obviously hitting on her here. She tells him he’s an arrogant caveman and that she’s neither claustrophobic nor arachnophobic. So fuck right off. Rayner and Co. stick to the service ducts to avoid most of the spider drones. By the time they’re done, the spiders won’t know what hit ‘em!

No, I have no idea what these fool are doing. Best keep reading.

Oh, they’re looking for Kilowog. And they found him. Well, uh… well, this is kind of embarrassing, ha ha, um…

Kilowog is floored again! Soranik Natu is alive! Yes, she too ended up in Vega after falling into a black hole. Isn’t that odd? All black holes lead to Vega. Kilowog doesn’t seem to think they’re true black holes, or else they’d all be the deadest people who have ever lived!

So where are ol’ Vath and Isamot at? Are they up to some shenanigans?? Whatever they’re doing, they powered down their rings to reduce their energy signatures. You know, gotta keep stealthy against the spiders. Speaking of stealthy, gotta stay very quiet here or–

Yo, Chris Farley. You’re scaring the kids.

“COME OUT, LANTERNS! I KNOW YOU ARE NEAR! COME OUT AND FIGHT, YOU COWARDS!” That’s the bleated yelling of who I assume is Tick-Borne Disease. Gardner is like, well shit, we gotta find Vath and Isamot before the spiders follow the raucous noise.

As they move down the ducts they find a room glowing in purple through a vent. Central Command. There’s something that looks like something out of Metroid in the center of the chamber. It’s a map of the galaxy. You can see stars an’ shit. “Our models had Oa in the center. The stars only seem wrongly placed to us,” explains Isamot to Vath. Then he realizes that it’s a fuckin’ spider web and they need to get out of there instead of ooh-ing and aah-ing over it.

“Don’t you see, Isamot,” says Vath. “It’s how we got to Vega – the black hole we fell into is connected to this place by a subspace web. All those black holes are.”

Well, that solves the mystery of the – wait a minute! Why spiders, exactly? Is someone going to answer that particular question for me?

The alarms in the facility begin to sound. Finally, some of these hosebags are going to get caught. It’s all Vath’s fault, he added a smidge of power to his ring to get more of a visual of the web and now they’re both boned. So are the fools in the ducts, they’re boned too.

Kilowog does not want to be boned! He creates a gigantic, loud diversion by sending some green ring energy toward a machine and blowing it up all over the place. “Speed now, not stealth!” Rayner exclaims obviously.

The spiders in the Spider Guild are hooded and mysterious. The speak in these squiggly letters with purple speech balloons. Eight intruders have been revealed by the alarm and sentry systems! “Eight?” booms one. “Who dares enter our nest?”

Well, sir, only six are emitting Oan ring energy. Two are emitting rogue bounty hunter energy! Wait, did someone hear an explosion?

“The Guild Fathers will be displeased by this unexpected violation,” says a spider. Lanterns aren’t allowed in the Vega system in the first place, let alone destroying some Space Spider hovel. Let the underlings capture the Lanterns. The Fathers can get involved in their punishments! Muahaha!

Kilowog, Rayner, Gardner, Natu, and Seinfeld all catch up with Vath and Isamot, whose power rings are running out of delicious power. They’re shocked to see Natu, just like EVERYONE ELSE. “I’m not trusting her with my life,” Isamot says of the deserter. She’s about to say that hundreds of lives have trusted her, but Rayner interrupts like a man to say Lanterns trust each other or they die, so let’s fucking go.

Oh no! Fire! One of my 700 weaknesses!

Fatality jumps in to make things harder on everyone. Now there’s an unnecessary fight mucking up the plans. She’s delighted to see that Rayner’s ring energy appears to be quite weak. His sword projection is getting cracks in it. Next comes four incomprehensible panels where Rayner fights Fatality and the rest of the Lanterns fight spiders. Natu gets chided for not helping, but she claims her ring isn’t working. “It’s cursed!” she says. A likely story.

Bolphunga shows up to the room all “RAWWWRR!” Kilogwog works on him. Everyone’s rings have now dipped below 10% power, which isn’t good if you’re a Lantern who has no other skills other than letting your ring do all the fightin’.

“BOLPHUNGA FEARS NO LANTERN, LARGE OR SMALL!” bellows Bolphunga, who talks in the third person like one of those douchebags.

Everyone seems to be floundering here. Kilowog orders everyone to combine ring energies and create a spherical force field. Natu’s ring is the only one whose power level is still high because, as Isamot puts it, “GUESS WHO’S NOT BEEN FIGHTING?”

Kilowog says it’s suicide to stay any longer if the power rings are almost dead. Time to retreat. Now it’s up to Natu to come forward and help, dammit.

So she busts a hole through the hull of the spaceship and they all blast out of there in a big, green force-field balloon. The day is saved! *Superman theme plays*

This is boring. Do you guys get Nintendo on this thing?

So let’s regroup here. All these black holes lead to a Spider Guild base in Vega. So that means that the ship can store the energy of collapsed stars! (?) The Spiders are sucking the life out of stars and suns! (!)

So who’s next? Ah, here’s who’s next. Earth’s sun, Polaris, Deneb, and Oa’s sun. Nothing to worry about, then. Wait, what’s that? I wasn’t paying attention.

Something explodes around their force-field. Natu’s ring couldn’t hold the shield for long enough, and now a couple of jerkass bounty hunters are on their tail. “Knew it,” says Isamot. “She’s got us all killed.” Then Kilowog calls him a poozer, as is the fashion.

Things look quite dire for our heroes until two more Lanterns show up out of literally nowhere to help. It’s so anticlimactic that I’m jerking off right now to make up for it.

Now that everything is ok, the last thing that anyone needs to worry about is getting caned back on Oa for working outside of the Lantern jurisdiction. Rayner is distracted by Natu’s ring, which is emitting a faint Code Zero alert. Do you know what “Code Zero” is, motherfucker? “Code Zero” is a direct attack on Oa itself!

It seems that the Spider Guild has black-holed their way straight to Oa’s star! Way to skip a couple of landmarks along the way, you silly geese. Oa was caught unawares, and rookies and full-fledged Lanterns alike aren’t able to take these spiders down with just their rings. Looks like everyone is fully b-b-b-b-BONED!

And the Guardians want a report on the damage. “Masters. The situation is grave. Our sun is showing instability – the radiation fluctuations replicate those preceding the sudden formation of black holes in other Sectors.” Uh oh is right! And on top of that, there are creepy crawly spiders everywhere! Gross!

Ganthet hangs his withered little blue head. “I am afraid, fellow Guardians, that we have left the reconstruction of our Corps too late. And most of all, afraid for the universe itself.”

But one thing is certain! The Green Lantern Corps will fight the Spider Guild to the death!

Or at least until that new Matlock with Kathy Bates gets cancelled.

Final Thoughts

I like what I’m reading, but the art is so busy most of the time that it’s hard to see exactly what’s happening when there is fighting or when things are exploding! Otherwise, no notes, except maybe let’s try a different color next time? Green is so gauche. I want some Purple Lanterns.