Hal Jordan vs. Guy Gardner

While Batman and Superman beat up local supervillains, the past decade of Green Lantern comics amp’d up the stakes considerably higher than a building explosion or lost hostage.  Wars raged non-stop between the few thousand Green Lanterns and planetary-sized armies, the other rainbow spectrums of Lanterns, their own leadership, and practically everyone else in the universe with a weapon and a temper.  I’m saying if you ever wanted to see a lizard-esque Green Lantern blown in half by a space laser, any random issue from 2004 on should do.

Today, there’s more war brewing in Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #8, written by Peter J. Tomasi and drawn by Fernando Pasarin.  While the darling genius of DC, Geoff Johns (who deserves every ounce of praise) receives most of the credit for the Green Lantern surge, Tomasi’s contributions shouldn’t be minimized.  His stuff remained on par, if not sometimes better, than Johns’ main series. Like this we’re about to read:

So I’m skipping enormous amounts of back story.  Sorry.  I’ve discussed Jordan before (the most famous one), but let’s quickly talk about Gardner, the third Green Lantern after Alan Scott and Jordan. Y’see, when the dying Green Lantern Abin Sur crashed on Earth, two candidates were chosen as his successor: Jordan and Gardner.  Unfortunately, the ring chooses its wearer by proximity, and Jordan happened to be closer to Abin Sur that day.  Our red-headed protagonist grabs a spare ring soon enough and over the years, Gardner’s persona has developed into one lush of machismo.  He’s a dude’s dude.  He runs a bar on the planet Oa.  He probably has back hair.  And now he’s going to punch Jordan in the face.

The fight ends quickly; I only have five pages left.  But for the fans wondering which Green Lantern’s the strongest, keep your expectations low.  Spoiler alert: it’ll end in a tie — all superhero versus superhero battles tend to end without the scales tilting one way or the other.  Still awesome to read.

Oh, the baggage for these two is definitely not carry-on sized.  Jordan became a supervillain, possessed by Parallax, and destroyed the entire Green Lantern Corps.  Gardner’s insane anger issues caused him to switch teams to the Red Lanterns and make all sorts of secret deals with other Lantern-wielding monsters.  But most egregiously, Gardner wore a bowl cut for decades.  He didn’t even keep a mask to hide his identity from that haircut.  As for the second picture below, it’ll get larger if you click it.

Only superheroes can kick each other in the face to the point of major head trauma and team up a minute later.  As we end, I want you to remember the moral of this story: Kyle Rayner could have taken them both.