Oh no they didn’t. Yes they DID!!!

They Captain Planet-ed the Green Lantern rings!!!

“By your powers combined, I am Captain… Rainbow Lantern!’

I giggled like a school girl when this happened. Squeed and guffawed like an idiot. And that’s the magic of this particular Lantern series — a Lantern ignorant reader like myself can giggle like a school girl after only two or three issues.

I didn’t get into the other Lantern books of the ‘not a reboot’. For some reason I just couldn’t take the Green Lantern overload. Between the Greens and the Red and whatever else there was I just wasn’t interested. I read the normal Lantern book and it just didn’t do it for me. So I didn’t bother with the rest.

Admittedly, it probably had a lot to do with the fact that I read Green Lantern #1 right after reading Batwoman #1. That was Grren Lantern’s bad luck. Wow, it looked boring in comparison. So static and lifeless. Then I saw the movie a little while after that…

And that was that.

But I did eventually want to work out what was going on with the whole ‘different coloured rings’ thing so the cover of Guardians finally got me in. It was so colourful and… strive-y. They were all striving for the rings. They strived. I like the word ‘strive’. I like to say strive…

And it was fun! Sure there were parts I didn’t understand. Actually, I didn’t understand a lot of it. Why are there so many of these different rings? And why are they all acting like superpowered Gollums? And do the red lanterns really barf blood? Why?

But you know what? It didn’t matter. Every person has their own colour. You know how much easier that makes things? There’s like 7 or 8 of them but they’re so easy to keep track of because they all have their own colour (unlike a certain OTHER green hero’s rogues I’ve been trying to read lately…). As a new reader I can roll with that. It’s not taxing for my comic-noob brain, so why not? I’m a child of the 90s; this thing happens in cartoons all the time.

And then they did it. They actually did it. They took things to their natural 90s cartoon conclusion.

Captain Rainbow Lantern!!!

And he even got special armour from nowhere and everything! It was awesome. Didn’t make sense but it was awesome. And weren’t those little green dudes the good guys? Don’t care. They were beating on Captain Rainbow Lantern so they deserved bad things. Preferably from something that gets powered up when they put all their rings together and transform into the MegaLantern or something. That would be EPIC.

And that’s why I read this book. It couldn’t be simpler. It couldn’t be more to the point. And it couldn’t be any more early-90s-cartoon crazy than it already is. I mean the new bad guy is called Agent Orange. If there was ever a name lazily used out of its proper context than this is it. Is this guy used on rainforests with nasty side-effects experienced by those who come in contact with him? After Captain Rainbow Lantern I’m not ruling it out. I mean the bloke has his own Ghostbuster Slimer ghost. Anything could be possible. And I’ll be there next issue just in case it does.

And just in case the MegaLantern thing happens.

‘Captain LANTERN, he’s my hero. Gonna take the evil down to zero….’