Ch'p Gets Grim and Gritty

[tpsreports]

A few pages from Green Lantern Mosaic #2




Do not adjust your set you're about to experience...





Post-crisis Ch'p is really suffering.



So John Stewart gives him a job guarding a road. What could go wrong?


Well at least I'm sure the creative team will handle the death of beloved lantern with the care it deserves, right?





Sigh... If for some reason you want to read more you can visit my blog but it's really not worth it.

Comments

[chrisdv]

DAMMIT, JOHN! STOP KILLING OTHER GREEN LANTERNS.

[skemono]

Everyone knows that's Hal's job!

[chrisdv]

Um... Would you believe me if I said Parallax did it?

[mastermahan]

Yeah! Killing people individually is too penny ante for John. John prefers to kill entire planets.

[skemono]

Indeed. And as John does so, Hal thinks back on the time he wiped out the entirety of reality, from the beginning of the universe until its end, and smiles.

"Petty planets?" he thinks. "That's just cute."

[darkknightjrk]

Funny thing is, if I remember that part of the story right, you're not entirely far off...

[icon_uk]

Always liked Ch'p, and I liked Mosaic too, but that death always just felt.... pretty shitty actually. Not so much moving as deeply unpleasant, but that was 1992 for you.

[tpsreports]

I too like Mosaic and was sorry to see it have such a short run, but like you this just seemed like "let's kill Ch'p to show how serious things are."

[bmaryott]

I always felt that the treatment of Ch'p and Salakk was a stab in the back and a kick in the nutsack from one team to the prior one. I *liked* both characters, and the way they were written was completely out of character for them both. Ch'ps death was done incredibly bad.

[fungo_squiggly]

So, what, they couldn't use their Green Lantern powers to stop the truck because the truck is yellow?

The truck's wheels are black. The truck's bumper is grey. No part of the truck that is likely to hit tiny little Ch'p is yellow.

Just put a green hamster-ball type forcefield around Ch'p, and boing, he bounces away from the point of impact unharmed.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

Or he could have just stayed where he was, since he wasn't in front of the wheels, the truck would have passed over him and he would have been fine.

Too many people seem to ignore something I think should be a basic rule of writing; Unless you're going for an "everyone dies and there's no hope for humanity" level of darkness, you don't kill off the comic relief.

[silicondream]

I didn't enjoy this issue much either, but I'll devil's advocate for a bit:

John is, at the time, being possessed/influenced by the spirit of Sinestro (and possibly having other psychic turmoil en route to evolving into a Guardian, if I recall correctly). Ch'p is paralyzed and panicked by perceiving all that psychic evilness--there's a reason why he runs from John when he tries to dodge the truck. And that's also what keeps John from effectively helping him here.

Ch'p is also dealing with memory loss from his hibernation cycle, plus being out of practice with the ring, plus just having fought a hard fight against some unknown villain which I think turned out be John's psychic evil whatsis (or else Sinestro, I don't remember exactly). So it's not like they're both just being idiots for no reason.

As for the general "do a grim story with preexisting cute characters" thing, I think that's been done and done well, along the lines of Alan Moore's Pogo story from Swamp Thing, or Grant Morrison's Coyote Gospel from Animal Man. (I'd be very surprised if this issue wasn't influenced by Coyote Gospel, at least artistically.) I thought this story at least tried to be respectful to Ch'p, in terms of fleshing out his culture and figuring out the ways in which his psychology would differ from a human's. The letters page might have treated him as a joke, but the story didn't.

IMO, a lot of Green Lantern: Mosaic can be summed up as "Tried to be both awesome and uncomfortable, mostly only succeeded on the latter count, but points for trying." A lot of it was tedious and some of it was urgh, but some was pretty inspired.

[icon_uk]

That's sort of the internal justification for why he died in story, but that still doesn't make it any less of a "We're going to kill the "fun" Green Lantern", never mind the expansion into "...by hitting him with a truck because turning a squirrel based character into roadkill is funny" territory

[silicondream]

Yeah, I can't defend killing him, still less putting it on the cover and having "Roadkill!" as the title. It wasn't appealing to the fans, it wasn't necessary to the story (given that John didn't react nearly as strongly as he should have, and Ch'p came right back later as a ghost dispensing cryptic wisdom, which he could have done while alive), and it scrapped a valuable character. Which is why, on the whole, I think the story's a failure.

I did like how the story developed Ch'p. I actually liked him having trouble figuring out an onrushing vehicle, not because it's funny but because it made him seem psychologically squirrelier and less human. (And one of Mosaic's big messages is how badly you can mess up by assuming that aliens/other cultures are really Just Like You deep down.) Jones just didn't need to kill him for any of that.

On another note, I don't know that we can blame this story for grimdarking Ch'p in the first place. Wasn't pretty much his whole Post-Crisis career grim and gritty? Marriage destroyed, alienated from his people, contemplated suicide after the Central Power Battery was destroyed? He may still have looked cute, but his life was pretty hellish then.

[leoboiko]

I thought grim reimaginings sucked by definition, until I found The Protomen.

[big_daddy_d]

This is my first time actually seeing Ch'p's death.... I'm gonna sit alone in the corner now.

[superfangirl1]

May I join you? As I will bring some comfort food.

[big_daddy_d]

Room for everybody.

[beyondthefringe]

Ch'p. :(
I didn't stay on this series much past this issue for some reason. Hm.