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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[big_daddy_d]

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

[beyondthefringe]

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