Red Lanterns #1 - Eric's Review

With such titles as Enigma, Shade, The Changing Man, Skreemer, Human Target, Hellblazer and X-Statix, Peter Milligan has proven himself to be an architect of some of the most intelligent comics of the last quarter century. And he happens to be one of my favorite writers, which makes Red Lanterns an even greater disappointment.

As great as his more offbeat work has been over the course of his career, Milligan has never thrived as a writer of mainstream superhero comics.  His work on X-Men is forgettable and his work with Elekra is best forgotten. Red Lanterns proves no different. He appears to assume that none of the readers of his more intellectually challenging work would follow him into the DC Universe, and so he writes for an audience of twelve year-old boys with poor attention spans and who might possibly have ingested bottles of paint thinner before approaching the comics. 

An excessive use of narrative captions breaks one of the cardinal rules of storytelling -- show, don't tell -- and represents a disturbing lack of faith by the writer, both in his collaborator Ed Benes, a veteran artist, and his readers.

Consider this:

"I am allowed to look into the viscera of time itself. And I see...I see all the pain that there is and will be... so much suffering. So much brutality."

Now, consider this:


"On a mountain of skulls, in the castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood! What was will be! What is will be no more!"

One of the above quotes is from Red Lanterns #1. The other is from Ghostbusters II. Only one of the two was intended to be funny.