Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Green Lantern (Vol. 5), Issue #6 – “The Other Hero”! I guess it can be considered “Sinestro (Part 6)” but that would be boring! In the previous installment, Sinestro successfully eliminates the yellow corps threat on his planet in less than ten minutes and then sends Hal Jordan packing. Back on Earth, Jordan realizes that he’s been stupid and he begs for Carol Ferris’ forgiveness. She’s just as dumb as he is and accepts it.

The guardians, the little blue gnomes, have their own plan. They’re going to free the First Lantern, who will lead the Third Army, which will render the Second Army (the Green Lantern Corps) obsolete.

But that I probably won’t read about for, like, another six years or something at this rate!

This issue wraps up the Sinestro storyline. Overall, I found the Green Lantern mythology highly enjoyable and you can bet your butt that I’ll dip into the other Green Lantern Family series that the lovely New 52 has to offer! You can bet your butt.

Green Lantern (Vol. 5), Issue #6 [April, 2012]
Written by: Geoff Johns
“The Other Hero”

“AT THE MERCY OF SINESTRO” claims the cover art. A little Green Lantern-style BDSM in Issue #6 I hope. Hubba hubba. Just look at that face. Sinestro ain’t got no safe words!

Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris are on a lovely date at the COAST CITY AERONAUTICAL MUSEUM! And it looks like we have a different artist for this issue: Mike Choi, instead of Doug Mahnke, and it’s noticeable right away because Hal and Carol look like happy little wholesome PBS Kids characters that aren’t mad at each other like they usually are.

It’s implied that they’ve been fucking, so that’s nice. Carol excuses herself to go poop in a toilet, so Hal waits under a Boeing B-59 which I don’t think is a real type of plane at all. As Jordan makes his way over, he hears a loud, belligerent argument in a mechanic’s garage. One man had caught another man stealing and selling parts, and he plans on testifying in court! The other man, the scummy thieving man, threatens the first man with a wrench to the head causing certain death!

So Jordan intervenes and threatens the scary wrench guy. He smiles like a Ken doll while doing this, which undercuts the intimidating effect that he was going for. Wrench Guy gets his three cronies, so it’s four against one. Jordan is itchin’ for a fight! Carol is still making bathroom poops.

Thus spoke the mouse.

Long story short, Jordan takes them all out and the Wrench Guy is bleeding from his mouth on the floor. He looks pretty dead, actually, or at least dying. He probably should get some medical attention immediately.

Hal Jordan steals the dying guy’s tie because his own tie got ripped off his neck in the scuffle. Carol finally finishes pooping and she comes back out to see him. He suggests getting the hell out of there because airplanes are dumb. Carol can’t get used to this new not-fighting-red-or-yellow-light non-ring-wearing Hal Jordan. It’s weird and strange and unnatural! “I don’t need to be Green Lantern,” he says unconvincingly, “I don’t need to be some kind of ‘super hero’ anymore.”

Some kind of ‘super hero’. Uh huh.

Meanwhile, on SPACE SECTOR 1417: THE PLANET OGORO, a hunched-over old man creature is pulling a cart through a shitty part of town. He arrives at his hovel, where the Glorious Sinestro is waiting. “I find it hard to believe I’m looking at the once great Starstorm.” Sinestro says, hovering decadently in Starstorm’s presence. Starstorm is like “gaaahhh, oh fuck, you again? No, please, come on man! Get out of here! Goddamnit, you.”

You’ve already taken everything from me! My money! My family! My collection of solid gold lightbulbs! Everything that matters!

Luckily, the Great Sinestro isn’t interested in Starstorm. He’s looking for someone named Lyssa Drak, who is somewhere on Ogoro. She’s got a relic that’s messing with Sinestro’s ring GPS system! Sinestro conjures up a battle helmet for Starstorm and tells him to shake a leg, they’re going to find Lyssa Drak together!

Starstorm says no. And Sinestro says “the fuck you say?” And Starstorm says “You told me you’d kill me if I wore this again, so nuh uh, fat chance pops.” And Sinestro says “Huh. Oh yeah. I did. That’s interesting. But I’m gonna kill you if you DON’T wear it, so step on it!”

But Starstorm still doesn’t budge, and he asks Sinestro to just kill him already and be done with it. Sinestro says he’ll kill his friends, but Starstorm doesn’t have any friends. He’ll kill his family then, but they’re all gone. Sinestro is quickly running out of leverage. “I have NOTHING because of you!” Starstorm whines. His hair is scraggly and gross like Heath Ledger’s Joker, and, to me, he certainly doesn’t look like anybody holding out on Sinestro here.

But Sinestro is ready for this one. He tells Ol’ Starry Storm that he is, in fact, THE KEY in taking out Lyssa Drak! So put the fucking helmet on.

So Sinestro has to jam the helmet on Starstorm himself, and then he conjures up a big green hand to comically drag the wretched little imp off with him.

Oh baby. Do you read a lot of Books of various other colors too? Let’s talk about it over some coffee after work.

Off to a large fortress we go! After Sinestro tells Starstorm that he is but a shell of the man that he used to know and revile, Starstorm admits that Sinestro himself turned him into a quivering little coward. “You have no idea what it means when everyone loses faith in you.” Starstorm tells him. This is when some blue seductress with long, raven hair uses some yellow-light chains to bind Sinestro’s and Starstorm’s hands and legs and ropes them into her lair. She must be Lyssa Drak! She’s wearing a leather two-piece. This is where the BDSM happens, no question about it!

She knows all about Sinestro’s failures on Korugar, and now she wants more tales of failures! She’s got a big book, the Book of the Black, in which EVERYONE’S SORDID STORIES OF WOE AND FAILURE are kept forever! HA HA HA HA HA!!

Starstorm is perfect for the book as well! Look at him, the whimpering, pulpy pile of crab shit and barnacles! The saddest of sacks! “Your tales of self-pity will be delicious!”

Lyssa Drak feeds on bad memories and stories like a real Disney villain.

“TRAITOR! You betrayed me to Krona for this sacred book!” bellows Sinestro. Whoa, hold on there, buddy! Airing your dirty laundry like this in front of your readers? The only krona I know buys you a lot of pickled herring in Stockholm, sir.

He tries ripping a page out of the book, but the wispy, smoky electricity that emanates from the tome makes a bee-line right for his eyeballs! There, he sees a horrific vision of the future. A future where he and Hal Jordan team up to defeat the guardians as they attempt to raise the Third Army. Sinestro dies in a puddle of purple, gooey Korugarian blood! BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

Sinestro is distraught. He becomes a whimpering, pulpy pile of goose feathers and duck eggs! Even Starstorm has to laugh and mock now! But Drak takes the wind out of his sails quickly, telling him that she knows how he dies too: he’s going to push his little cart into his smelly hovel one last time and then kill himself. lol

So now Sinestro tries to buoy Starstorm’s spirits. “This is your chance, Starstorm. Overcome fear, or give up and die.”

This is supposed to be a NON-CONTACT sport, ya pansy.

Starstorm screams and cries and twists in his chains. “Please don’t hurt me!” he yells in large, flamboyantly bold comic book font. Lyssa Drak cackles. Sinestro is getting impatient, floats on over to Starstorm and throws his helmet to the ground.

When the helmet connects with the ground, a massive beam of white light bursts around the room and Lyssa Drak is blasted through the adjacent wall. “You’re lucky I don’t slit your throat and watch you bleed out, Lyssa. After what I’ve learned from that book…I may need you alive.” I don’t think she hears him. She looks unconscious. More alive than that Wrench Guy, though.

Sinestro tells Starstorm that he’s no Hal Jordan, and it seems Hal Jordan is the living example of hitting rock bottom and still hoisting himself out of it? Pretty sad. Sinestro grips onto the Book of the Black flies away into space while Starstorm screams at him, DEMANDING to know who the hell Hal Jordan is.

Speaking of Hal Jordan, he and Carol are getting out of bed in the morning (likely after a bit of daybreak fuckin’), when suddenly a green ring whips around the room and finds itself on Jordan’s finger. Carol’s like “what the fuck are you doing, dear?”, but Jordan, now in full Green Lantern garb, is miserably trying to pull it off to no avail. “Because it is my will.” declares a floating green figure outside the bedroom window (hint: it’s Sinestro). He tells Jordan to start moving. Now! He needs him again, damnit!

“I’M DONE BEING A GREEN LANTERN!” waaahhh! That’s Hal Jordan.

Thus spoke the mouse!

“No Jordan. Unfortunately, you are far from done.”

That’s Sinestro.

Final Thoughts

That’s right, Hal “Michael” Jordan. Get out of MLB-related “retirement” and into your basketball shoes, because your post-retirement career is going to be the best you’ll ever be! Time to take out the guardians! Pack a sandwich, motherfucker.

Green Lantern Vol. 5 continues when I come back around to it during Trump Jr.’s son’s daughter’s inauguration.