Unfortunately, if I am going to discover the spiritual resonance of my chosen DC Comics B-Lister, it’s probably not going to come about as a result of reading the Sleepers trilogy of novels. I read Book One earlier this month, and feel honor-bound to review it here and now. Nothing would make me happier than to say that the experience was utterly transcendental, but I gotta call it like I see it, you guys: Not. Very. Good.
Super heroes and comic books are so intertwined that people sometimes simply use one term to evoke the other, but the characters have broken out into other media early and often, in radio and tv, movie serials and summer blockbusters, and even prose novels. Superman got his first novelization back in 1942. Green Lantern: Sleepers came out in 2004 and 2005, so it’s hardly a groundbreaking combination of subject matter and format. Not even for me, personally; obviously the idea appeals to a comics fan and bibliovore like myself, and I have other novels starring Batman and Daredevil on my home library shelves as well. And yet Sleepers reads as if no one had ever before attempted the bold experiment of converting four-color panel grids into black and white unadorned letters on the page, and the end results are more than a little messy.
It turns out that maybe all of my ruminating and speculating on The Dark Knight Rises may have been well-timed for Green Lantern Month after all, because Sleepers raises its own slew of issues about super heroes as characters engaged in never-ending struggles. The trilogy of novels is (I imagine) intended to be somewhat self-contained, much like Nolan’s film trilogy. Except that almost from the get-go the story draws heavily on existing DC Comics continuity (circa the late 90’s or early 00’s), such that anyone coming into the books cold, without having read a lot of Green Lantern comic books, would probably be mystified. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: Green Lantern is complicated. Over decades and decades of comics publication the story elements that have accreted around the concept are many and varied, any given one of which will be a bit of whimsical sci-fi madness making the whole enchilada a convoluted and overstuffed riot. And to the initiated, this is part of the appeal. But to the uninitiated, the barrier of entry is high.
So it’s possible that a determination was made that only hardcore Green Lantern comics fans would be likely to shell out for a Green Lantern series of novels, and therefore the target audience is expected to have an intricate knowledge of the source material’s backstory. Setting aside the ultimate wisdom of that determination, the Sleepers novel is utterly confounding because it doesn’t exactly stick to comic book continuity. So some ideas are lifted, direct and intact, from old issues of Green Lantern and dropped into the prose novel with minimal explanation, while other ideas are tweaked in a different direction or invented out of whole cloth, sometimes with attendant explanation, sometimes not. As I said about the Nolan films, I want certain story elements to change when going from one medium to another, because they have to change in order to be viable. But changing things inconsistently and randomly doesn’t exactly satisfy that condition. The end result is a story that wouldn’t make a lot of sense to someone who had never read the comics, but at the same time is needlessly confusing to someone who has read the comics. It may be that the only two people who ended up satisfied with the story on the page were Christopher J. Priest and Mike Baron, the co-authors, who told exactly the tale they wanted, using the elements of Green Lantern comics they wanted to use and also changing them at will to accommodate the plot and other considerations they had their hearts set on.
And honestly, maybe neither of the authors ended up completely satisfied either. I strongly suspect there may have been some miscommunication between the two men about some of the ideas they were trying to get across. It’s not at all strange for two comic book fans (even, I reckon, two fans who also happen to be comic book pros, as Priest and Baron are) to disagree in their interpretation of some of the more esoteric weirdness that comics traffic in. Exhibit A: Hal Jordan as the Spectre. Book One is set in a period in Green Lantern history where Kyle Rayner was the active ring-wielder; Kyle’s predecessor Hal Jordan had gone crazy, turned evil, died, and been sort-of-resurrected with a shot at redemption as the incarnation of God’s wrath known as the Spectre; and Hal’s predecessor Alan Scott was essentially retired from superheroing but still working in the news industry. All three characters are featured in the novel. At one point Kyle and Hal have a conversation in which Kyle asks Hal if he believes in God, and Hal gives a very noncommittal answer. I know I just went over this, but let me say it again: at this point Hal Jordan is literally the embodiment of God’s wrath. He has been brought back from beyond the grave by God, to work for God. That’s his whole deal, and Kyle knows this. Yet Kyle asks if Hal believes in God, and Hal isn’t sure, and they both behave as if this is the first time the idea has come up. I can’t imagine any way this scene came about other than one of the authors feeling it was crucially important to have two of the characters discuss their belief in a higher power with no easy answers, and the other author being equally determined to use the Spectre version of Hal Jordan, and neither one wanting to be a buzzkill to the other. Clearly this book needed a stronger editorial hand to mediate such problematic issues. (Not to mention a stronger copy editor. For an actual legitimately published book, the manuscript is annoyingly rife with stupid typos.)
I should have really liked this novel, because not only does it feature multiple Green Lanterns, and not only is the bulk of it devoted to Kyle Rayner (who is my hands-down favorite), but it also gives a ton of subplot time to the romantic bond between Kyle and Jade (and I am a total Kyle/Jenny-Lynn ‘shipper).
But not so much. Said subplot revolves around (1) the relationship being semi-dysfunctional, with Kyle as the tetchy jealous type and Jenny-Lynn obnoxiously commitment-phobic, and (2) Kyle finding a pregnancy test box, assuming Jenny-Lynn is pregnant (of course she isn’t really, and the ultimate explanations are super-contrived), and freaking out about both imminent fatherhood and Jenny-Lynn’s hiding it from him. Jenny-Lynn’s attitude, and Kyle’s possessiveness and rampant stupidity, are all wide of the mark as far as the usual characterization in the comics, so once again I find myself asking: why? Why these characters in these situations acting this way? Don’t get me wrong, in the abstract, a superhero with nigh-limitless cosmic powers weighing the responsibilities of parenthood against the responsibilities to defend the galaxy is interesting stuff. So is the same kind of superhero wondering if there’s any kind of higher power or plan guiding the universe and giving it some kind of meaning. But you can’t casually namecheck the story arc where Kyle became Ion with even more cosmic power and consciousness than a standard Green Lantern, thus situating your story firmly in that continuity, and then think it makes sense to have Kyle behave like a petty child for dramatic tension. Just like you can’t have Kyle sitting across from a dead guy who is now doing time as GOD’s WRATH INCARNATE and have him wonder if there really is a God. Those subplots all belong in a different story that isn’t yoked to the well-established and thoroughly explored DC universe.
It’s almost as though Priest and Baron were assigned the task of writing a Green Lantern novel and just shoehorned in whatever spare ideas they had lying around to pad out the wordcount. But my understanding is that this was a voluntary project, even a labor of love. So it reminds me of another type of labor of love: fanfic. Poorly conceived, poorly executed fanfic, really. I have a lot of experience with and strong opinions about fanfic, of course (here, here, here, here and here!), so I don’t say that lightly. But the thought recurred to me often while making my way through the novel, so I’m putting it out there for the record.
The saddest thing of all, of course, is that I’m hellbent on finishing the trilogy. Maybe not this month, since the endeavor got off to such a rocky start, but at some point. I went ahead and ordered Book Two of Sleepers before I had finished Book One (though not before I had determined it was never going to be one of my favorite books) and at some point I will get my hands on Book Three, too. I have a combination of motives at this point. Some of it is no doubt morbid curiosity, wondering how many other off-model characterizations and borrowed-yet-bent elements of DC Comics canon Priest and Baron can mash together. Some of it has to do with being a stubborn completist and collector, which includes intellectually wanting to know how the story ends and also aesthetically wanting all three books lined up together on my bookshelf. And some of it, some tiny bit illuminated by the intersection of my Green Lantern fandom and my eternal optimism, has to do with just hoping that maybe Priest and Baron pull off a miracle somewhere in the next book, or possibly even at the very end of the trilogy, where suddenly everything will click into place and have all been worth the effort. Extremely unlikely, I know, but I will give the official report either way when I get there.
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