The Lady in Green

Yesterday was new comics day and the final chapter of the Blackest Night saga running through Green Lantern comics was released, and I picked it up so that finally, after eight months of the story unfolding, which came on the heels of literally years of build-up, I could get the conclusion. So, was it worth a mid-day Metro ride to the closest comic book store, which happens to be at the Pentagon City Mall?

In a word, yes. Not YES!!! But, yes. It was satisfying, it made me smile, it didn’t directly cause me to feel like I was wasting my life. All in all, a win. But there was an additional bit of unexpected surprise that really helped put it over the top.

(Spoilers, I guess? It’s a minor thing but technically gives away a plot twist of sorts. Not that anyone whom I know for sure reads this blog also reads GL comics, but on the off chance some random internet denizen has surfed his or her way over here … don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The whole upshot of Blackest Night ended up being literally a matter of life and death. The Black Lanterns, an army of zombies, were in the thrall of Nekron Lord of the Unliving and trying to eradicate all life in the universe, and only the combined power of every color of Lantern Corps plus the heretofore unknown White Lantern power could save the day. And whereas Nekron’s Black Lantern Corps consisted of reanimated corpses, the White Lantern was able to bring dead heroes fully and completely back to non-icky life.

This happens in comics all the time, of course, characters that were dead come back to life, sometimes in the metaphorical “you only THOUGHT I died because you left me for dead!” sense and sometimes literally in the supernatural cosmic intervention sense or the time travel paradox sense or whathaveyou. So the fact that there were a bunch of previously dead characters standing around looking hale and hearty at the end of Blackest Night was not exactly earth-shattering, and not even necessarily any less arbitrary than any number of other returns from the grave. But I was delighted because of one resurrection in particular.

Jade is back.


There is no known way to explain the character Jade without sounding like a crazy person making things up as he goes along, but I’ll make the attempt nonetheless: the original, World War Two era Green Lantern (who either does or doesn’t have any connection beyond the name to the Green Lantern Corps of alien peacekeepers I’ve expounded on previously, depending on which writer is currently re-interpreting the character) had a fling with one of his femme fatale nemeses and ended up fathering fraternal twins, Todd and Jenny-Lynn. Todd was born with shadow powers and Jenny-Lynn was born with green skin and hair and green light powers. They grew up in an orphanage but became superheroes themselves, Obsidian and Jade, younger contemporaries of the Hal Jordan space cop Green Lantern. By the time Hal Jordan was replaced as Green Lantern by Kyle Rayner (the result of a long story in which Hal went power-mad, killed a bunch of Green Lanterns, and seemed to commit suicide but would return later as a villain and much later as a redeemed hero, but in the interim the one surviving Guardian of the Universe gave the Green Lantern power ring to Kyle – this was around the same time Superman died (he got better a year later, see what I mean?) and Batman had his back broken and comics in general were gratuitously dark, aka the ‘90s) … right, by the time Kyle was Green Lantern, Jade was semi-retired from being a hero but she ended up romantically involved with Kyle, and also got to be Green Lantern herself for a while when Kyle went on a vision quest in space and deputized her to hold down the fort. And then, a few years ago, during another big storyline, Jade died heroically in the line of duty. Kyle and Jade were a pretty heavy couple (Kyle even proposed at one point but Jade thought the time wasn’t right) but he eventually got over it and has recently been romantically involved with a girl named Soranik who just happens to be the current Green Lantern Corps successor (by planet of origin, not by temperament) of good old diabolical traitor Sinestro.

Jade is just a character I adore. She is part of a heroic legacy that includes both literal bloodline heritage and thematic echoes and romantic entanglement, all within the particular heroic legacy that is my all-time favorite in comics. She has a cool look and cool powers and a cool personality (upbeat, confident, sense of humor, noble) and a cool back story. Granted, she’s got a lot of soap opera-esque elements in there, but I would be a big old liar if I said I minded the soap opera-esque attributes of superhero comics. (In fact, not only do I not mind them, I kind of dig them.) When Jade died, and the Kyle/Jade romance-for-the-ages died with her, I was bummed.

But now she’s back, huzzah! And the soap opera-esque can be turned up to 11: who will Kyle choose, Jenny-Lynn Hayden or Soranik Natu? The green chick or the magenta one? Will there be a Melrose Place style catfight, or one woman simply flying off like a broken-hearted green-energy shooting star?

Actualy, I went to the Wikipedia page on Jade to do some quick fact-checking for this post and it turns out that rumors are already out there about a potential romance between Jade and Starman, so it looks like Kyle will be sticking with Soranik. Damn, Wikipedia, how about a little spoilers warning next time?