Green Lantern (vol.3) #59 (1995)

Green Lantern (vol.3) #59 (February, 1995)
“Green Christmas“
Writer – Ron Marz
Pencils – Darryl Banks
Inks – Romeo Tanghal
Color – Steve Mattsson
Letters – Albert De Guzman
Assistant Editor – Eddie Berganza
Editor – Kevin Dooley
Cover Price: $1.50

Hey, it’s the fifth day of the Twelve Days of Christmas on Infinite Earths!  Yesterday we checked in on Hal Jordan as he celebrated Christmas… guess it’s only fair we give Kyle some time.  Let’s check out a very lonely Titan-ic Christmas Eve.


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It’s Christmas Eve (I’ve been starting a lot of pieces like that lately) and Kyle is arriving at Titans HQ.  This is from that odd time where Green Lantern was a member of the Titans rather than the Justice League… might sound strange, and it is… but, dude really dodged a bullet, staying away from what might be the worst Justice League team line-up of all time!  Anyhoo, Impulse bum-rushes him and they play fight… until Roy shows up to ruin everybody’s fun.

He reads Kyle the riot act for being late… ya see, nobody wants to have monitor-duty on Christmas Eve, so it’s based on seniority… and wouldn’tcha know it, Kyle’s at the bottom of the totem pole.  The lecture wraps up while they walk through the halls of the headquarters, and ends with them on a first name basis.

Green Lantern’s real name is overheard by some new New Titans… Damage, Impulse, and… the fake-Terra.  They all share their civilian identities before the kids leave Kyle by his lonesome.

Well, not completely… Kyle runs into the person he’s relieving at the monitors… Donna Troy.  She’s wrapping gifts for her son, Robert… and mentions that she and EX-husband, *grumble* Terry Long have decided to put their differences aside for the Holiday.  We’ll talk about how that all went down pretty soon…

Donna leaves, and Kyle’s left to his own devices.  He doodles some very 90’s doodles… including a NIN logo, Donna Troy in a manga style, and writes the word “NOT!” as well.  He then falls asleep…

What follows is actually quite interesting… the ring taps into his memories, and projects the likeness of the original woman in a refrigerator, his former squeeze, Alex!  I forgot about this scene… it’s really quite well done.  Kyle is furious at his ring, and demands it stay out of his head.  He decides it’s time to “get some air” and leaves the monitors just as Doctor Polaris shows up on the screen.

Kyle flies over the streets of New York City, and comes across a bell-ringer Santa getting held up by some thugs.  It doesn’t take all that long for Kyle to wrap’em up… but notices that his ring is just about out of juice.  He leaves the baddies with Santa, and heads off for a recharge.

After “In Brightest Day”ing, Kyle leaves home and runs into Doctor Polaris as he wrecks havoc on Rockefeller Center.  Of particular interest here, Kyle is unsure how he could know if his ring is ever “fully” charged.  I like that dude’s still learning the ropes here… I feel like in current comics, he’d have just figured it all out right from the start.  It’s nice to see a little bit of self-doubt… especially in a Green Lantern, whose whole thing is predicated on will-power.

We get a very short tussle between Kyle and Polaris… in which Polaris uses his powers to move the statue of Prometheus.  Kyle simply blasts him… and that’s all she wrote.  Kind of anticlimactic, no?  Of note, after getting walloped, Doc doesn’t seem to remember what he’d done.

We wrap up with Kyle returning to Titans HQ.  He is soon joined by Donna Troy, who just put Robert to bed so that Santa may visit.  She’s got a gift for Kyle… it’s mistletoe… the story ends with them sharing a kiss. 

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Decent enough issue, from such a weird time in both Green Lantern and Titans history.  This comes from such a… horrendous time for the Titans… I like to think that New Titans quietly drifted away into cancellation shortly after the Titans Hunt, and the next few years didn’t happen.  I’ve never been able to read straight through… my New Titans rereads usually begin to peter out just after #100.  It really became difficult to read… but, I suppose that’s a discussion for another day.


On the other end, we’ve got Kyle wrapping up his first year as Green Lantern.  A pretty exciting time for the character and the title… there were so many story possibilities on the horizon… surely, we’d be seeing Hal/Parallax at some point… and seeing Kyle meet all of the DC heavy-hitters was pretty entertaining.


Here we learn that not only are Donna and Terry divorced… but she’s just about ready to move on with our man Kyle… I guess that’s moving up in the world, right?  I don’t recall how I felt about their potentially knockin’ boots… it seemed like one of them “blink and you miss it” kinda things.  I don’t remember them being an item for all that long… but I could be mistaken.


Roy is kind of a jerk here… and these Titan tots are really quite lame.  Damage, the fake Terra, and Impulse before they de-aged him for Young Justice.  Yeesh.  I guess it’s not so bad compared to the spike-haired Supergirl, emaciated Starfire, and Beast Boy would could only change into that creepy winged baboon thing that they replaced… but still, yeesh.  What a sad state of affairs for (what’s left of the) New Titans.


Where this issue shines is in its depiction of Kyle as a super-hero in training.  He doesn’t have all the answers just yet, and he’s still very much playing it all by ear.  He doesn’t appear to have complete control over the ring… and isn’t even clear on how long to charge it.  I really like that… it provides Kyle with almost a “point of view” quality, where he’s kind of our set of eyes into the greater DC Universe.  I’m cool with Kyle being unsure and even doubtful… it was these qualities that attracted me to the book and this character.


The baddie here… ehh, Dr. Polaris doesn’t really do all that much.  Pretty much just an excuse to throw in a quick fighty scene to break up the monotony… nothing great, but nothing offensively bad either.


Overall… this issue is such a strange time capsule… but I gotta say, it’s definitely not must-reading.


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