Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Green Lantern (Vol. 4), Issue #13 – “Revenge of the Green Lanterns (Part 4)”! In the previous installment, Hal Jordan is able to tear the Lanterns (who he thought he killed) away from their states of stasis on the manhunter planet. Metallo-Superman was ready, though, because he’s bringing in the big guns! Highmasters! They’re like super-duper HUGE manhunters and they’re going to literally kill everything. Even you, you deplorable skunk.

Green Lantern (Vol. 4), Issue 13 [August, 2006]
Written by: Geoff Johns
“Revenge of the Green Lanterns (Part 4)”

“It was during a war between the Corps and a renegade Guardian that I first met the Green Lantern of Sector 2815. He name was Arisia.”

Hal Jordan regales us with a tale about how he started making out with a 13-year-old in the middle of outer space. Granted, she was 13 under the Graxos IV orbit. 240 years on Earth. “We became more than Green Lanterns for a while.” And when Hal Jordan became Parallax, Arisia took it the hardest of anyone. She believed Jordan would come back, and she believed it continuously until the day she died.

Of butthole poisoning. Eek.

She was strangled by a major force, and she didn’t have her power ring on hand at the time. Whoops!

But she’s not really dead, is she, Hal…?

So Hal Jordan and the freshly-revived Green Lanterns fight the manhunters and the highmasters and god knows what else. Boodikka, some hot purple lady, is too busy being really, really mad at Jordan to focus on the task at hand.

The other Green Lanterns are, indeed, fighting the highmasters. They’re so damn big it’s like, wow, man. And they’re powered by Green Lanterns! Guy Gardner is in one right now, hamming it up as usual. “Is that why they brought the others here?” one Green Lantern asks. “Why they brought us here?”

And the red guy with the devil horns, Ke’Haan I think, is like “FUCK THAT, SON” and tries ring-ing the heck out of one of these behemoth highmasters. So now that everyone’s preoccupied with fighting the bad guys, Hal Jordan can slip away from fighting the bad guys to find his teenage lover Arisia. He’s about to rescue her from the cave wall when she gets scooped up by Metal-Superman. He holds her unconscious form as he soliloquys about aliens of her ilk shut down like robots running out of batteries after being dead for too long! You don’t say! And now she belongs to the manhunters, so shove off ya jabroni.

Hal Jordan has a new mission. What was once a mission of atonement (yeah right) has now become a mission of Save-Arisia-So-I-Can-Bone-Her-Again. Men, bring out your most powerful forces! Hal Jordan WILL bone again!

Jordan gets so dang mad that he blasts Iron-Superman with all the green light he’s got. He drops Arisia to the ground.

This green light is greener than other green lights! Green means Go, Metal-Superman! As in, Go To Hell!!!

The blast is so large and incandescent that it throws off the other Lanterns. I think they realize that Hal Jordan isn’t going to hurt them, miraculously. “You came here thinking you’d rescue those you betrayed and all would be forgiven?” says a half-melted Metal-Superman. “Simple goal. Simple mind. Just like Superman.”

He flies toward Jordan and grabs him lovingly by the head, taunting him about his wonderful highmasters and how they are so damn big that they can destroy entire planets like Earth or Alderaan. Jordan calls the guy a piece of shit and blasts him through the tummy with green light. Not-Superman keeps taunting Jordan about how much the Guardians hate him and how he lost everything because he has the urge to disobey every order that he has ever been ordered.

Then Arisia rises from her slumber and tears Not-Superman’s right arm off at the elbow. “Oh, I’m sorry, did that hurt?” she says, smiling devilishly. Not-Superman goes “NNRR!”

The other Lanterns have destroyed the highmaster and rescued Guy Gardner. Let’s keep killing highmasters and freeing other Lanterns! A plan with focus, finally!

It’s like no time has passed at all! It must be the kind of love that can only be between a grown man and a 13-year-old alien.

“Where are we?” asks Arisia.

“On the manhunter homeworld,” replies Jordan.

“Brilliant. How many manhunters?”

“Ring said 40.3 million.”

“And how many Green Lanterns are there?”

“Not counting us, about twenty-five. But nineteen are unconscious. And the other six want me dead more than the robots.”

“So, same old, same old.”

“Pretty much.”

These two work together famously to fight off the Super-Threat. Jordan gets ahold of Gardner on his ring walkie-talkie, tells him to round up all the other Green Lanterns and get them off the planet. “I outrank your ass,” says Garnder. “Don’t order me around, Hal!” And that’s that, I guess. The planet blows up and everyone dies.

So Hal Jordan promises the phone numbers of all the fine ladies that he has ever boned and Gardner says “done deal”.

“All these years and you’ve never once asked me why I chose Coast City for destruction. Why I incinerated everyone in it,” Super-Not-Man goads. Jordan says he doesn’t care, but you can tell he really does. “My wife was from Coast City,” Superman-Not continues, clearly leading toward a reason that’s all “I WANTED TO ERASE EVERYTHING THAT REMINDED ME OF HER, WAAAAAHHHH!!”

Or, eliminating life = eliminating suffering. Obviously. Meanwhile, Hal Jordan, you are to be stuffed inside a highmaster to fuel it like a battery. In you go, now.

Arisia says “NO!” I think she means it, too. Too bad she gets snatched by the same highmaster, so now they’re both in the highmaster body together. After a quick over-the-pants genital-fondling, they decide that the two of them can easily override the highmaster’s controls.

1… 2… 3!

“The highmaster amplifies our power one hundred times over. Henshaw was right about one thing,” Jordan thinks as the manhunter planet blows up. “They have the power to destroy a planet. The hull of the highmaster protects us from the immediate blast. I see the metal melt off Henshaw’s organics, leaving half of a torso and a head. For a moment, he’s what he so desperately doesn’t want to be. Human.”

And then he’s gone! Poof!

Pfft. The fifth element is love? What a copout.

Now that the threats have been easily neutralized, Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner return to Oa to face the scolding of the Guardians. Guy Gardner stands by his statement that he ordered Hal Jordan to fly to Sector 3601 outside of Lantern jurisdiction. And guess what? According to the Big Book o’ Lantern Laws, he gets to break three rules before expulsion. So neener neener, you little blue twerps.

The Guardians know that Gardner is covering for Jordan. They sentence Gardner to one month of prime duty, whatever that is. As for Jordan, they do not authorize his request to expand Lantern jurisdiction to Sector 3601 and help do a tech sweep of the area to detect and remove Hank Henshaw’s consciousness! F that! You are the weakest link, goodbye!

Later, the Lanterns who Jordan saved instead of killed regroup. They tell Jordan that they won’t kill and destroy him for now, but please stay out of their way. There is still a bit of saltiness in the air.

Arisia gives Jordan a kiss and thanks him. He thanks her back and flies the fuck outta there.

Here’s what prime duty for Gardner entails: “No reading, no eating, no talking, no ring messaging, no Sudoku, no yelling, no chewing gum… and listen closely to this one: no drinking.”

Gardner is in charge of making sure a red sun doesn’t burn out while someone orbits it. I’m not sure who orbits it, but it’s apparently important that the red sun stays burning. It must be some Superman shit. Maybe it’s Not-Superman. Whoops, I ran out of giving a shit.

And, in the end, the Guardians decide that Hank Henshaw is indeed the threat that Hal Jordan made him out to be. They all vote unanimously to go out and find him.

Which means that Hal Jordan will be involved, probably. That guy is always involved.

Thank you and good night.

Final Thoughts

Hal Jordan’s going to lose Asiria again within the next four issues. She’s going to become an intergalactic pizza delivery girl and someone is going to snipe her in the brain on the third moon of Galoopus Prime XIX because she was three minutes past the delivery window.