So what's up with the Guy Gardner obsession anyway?

I only cut this because the word wrapping kept screwing my blogroll...I love Guy Gardner. I'm sure this shocks you. I've blogged about him many times, (though probably about equal to the amount of time I've blogged about Kyle or Sand, but I've never counted to be sure).

Somehow over time, probably with the end of Recharge actually and when I finally got a chance to sit down and read pre Kyle Green Lantern as well as Warrior, he became one of my two all time favorite DC characters. (If you can't guess the other, you're new here, I'd bet. :-) Oh well, it's not like I've ever claimed to be varied in my topics. Eventually my attention span will shift again. Maybe.)

Most of the appeal comes from his Warrior, post-healing-of-brain-damage personality. I liked his interactions with Kyle. I liked them with Arisia. I liked him mooning Batman and verbally poking the nightlights to get their asses in gear in Recharge.

I find it incredibly amusing that he was a sweet guy who after finally healing himself apparently decided being a jackass was more fun, but still lets glimpses of his squishy center show. I also like that every so often, he's a scheming manipulator, poking and poking until he gets the results that he wants.

Really, I probably like him because if I were a man, I'd probably be Warrior/Recharge-era Guy Gardner, without the cool powers. And that's a little disturbing.

Besides, my narcissistic tendancies are not the topic here. He's just a fun character whose actually quite a bit more intelligent/deductive than he seems, is more complex than he seems, and says and does things that make me laugh. A lot. I think it'd be really easy to write dialogue for him...though I'd have to cut back
on the foul language. Comics code and all that. (The dialogue I imagine is just a little unpublishable, so it'd need toning down to be comics-appropriate.) And he got turned into a woman, which is just damned funny.

But the version I tend to end up posting about and focusing on and dissecting the most is the brain-damaged, idiot/jackass version. The one I wouldn't know where to begin to actually write. The one that tries to take control of the Justice League, gets punched by Batman, says horrible things to pretty much everyone, smashes phones and hates Power Girl's cat.

I suppose some of it could be traced to the Guy-Ice thing, how she manages to extract those teeny fragments of humanity out of his prickly, egotistical, dimwitted self. And that's a part of it. I do like their relationship. A LOT. As well, some of it comes from my interpretation of him as a bratty, confused, eight year old in an adult's body (emphasized by things like this and even this which ties into the Ice thing too.) Part of it has to do with my attraction to dynamic growth in characters, I mean, each stage of the character's evolution is vastly different but tied together in a narratively-logical manner. Which is a pretty good trick.

But most of it is because of, well, this:



This is an excerpt from an "article" out of a tabloid magazine "Spy" in JLI/JLA v2 38. It's a little hard to read but it basically involves the reporters having gone through a magazine collection. There were a lot of dirty magazines of course, but then they continue with the excerpt, which I'll type as it's hard to read:

"What struck us as oddest in this collection, however, were a number of various children's magazines, all carrying mailing labels bearing Mr. Gardner's name. Why, we wondered, would Guy Gardner be interested in THESE? Interestingly, all the magazines of this type we found were dated within a six month period, ending six months ago. Examining them closely, we discovered that all the activity and coloring pages were dutifully completed, straight through to the crossword puzzles -- although we hasten to point out that most of the answers there were incorrect. In some places, two or three letters were entered into a single box. Beyond testifying to Gardner's sub-human IQ level, we were at a loss. Could this boorish, super-powered lout have a soft, child-like underbelly? Or was this just some sort of phase he was going through?"

The truth is, I find the entire concept of brain-damaged Guy Gardner viscerally horrifying. My fascination with this version of Guy Gardner has more to do with why other people watch scary movies or play Silent Hill with the lights off than anything else.

When I was seven or eight, in school, they made us read Flowers for Algernon. This was the first book I'd ever read to make me cry. This book seriously gave me *nightmares* for weeks. It didn't matter that Charly was only reverting back to his original state, for me, the sheer concept of being an intelligent and articulate person, even if only for a short time, and having it stripped away again...and to *know* that it's been taken away...

That's my idea of Hell, literally.

So this little article snippet is one of the most genuinely horrifying things I'd ever read. Here you have a man who at one point was a very intelligent person. He graduated college with *two* degrees. That's not easy to do. That's a lot of work. That's a lot of exams and papers that would require a decent capacity for analytical thinking and logical reasoning.

Reduced to a mind that can't complete a child's crossword puzzle correctly.

And there isn't any memory loss or amnesia involved. Guy gives every sign of remembering things that happened before the damage. He certainly remembers Hal's role in the whole thing. That implies that he remembers having the intellectual capacity he would have needed to get his degrees, he'd remember being able to take tests about Freud and Jung and Kinsey, write reports on educational theory or technique. He'd remember being able to do all that.

And he can't correctly complete a child's crossword puzzle.

For me, this is quite possibly the most intensely horrifying concept in all of superhero comics. It's the most devastating loss I could ever imagine. I'm no genius, I'm not particularly gifted academically, but if somehow that happened to me, I sincerely would not have been able to take it.

Which in turn makes the character hit something else for me. Admiration and amazement. This character's endured something I never could, survived, kept going. Kept completing those kid's puzzles, even wrong, even though it must have been incredibly frustrating and painful.

And eventually another thought occurred to me, have you ever tried to complete a crossword puzzle incorrectly? *Especially* using a few letters to a box? It'd have to work across and down, you know. And from the derisive tone of the article, they'd have said if it was completed in gibberish. From the sound of it, there were actual words in the puzzles.

And that's pretty damned amazing. That takes determination and real creativity. The intellectual crippling is definitely still there (it's pretty unmistakable in JLI/GL) but that...it's *breathtaking*.

And now he's *better*. When he became Warrior, through his own determination and will and not some bestowed gift from above, it *healed*. And that is incredibly gratifying. It's...beautiful and impossibly gratifying.

I've heard comic book fans talk about the true and real feelings of awe and amazement that Superman instills in them. That's what this entire concept does for me. It's just that damn powerful to me.

Or I'm just crazy. There's that possibility too. :-) Besides, it's my blog, I can obsess about which characters I like. :-P

(Ack, I just had a disturbing thought... Between those crosswords and the fact that in Warrior, he speaks Ice's language well enough to have complex conversations with her mom, which he would have had to learn from her while having the intellectual capacity of a drunken, concussed babboon...how the hell smart is he with his brain *intact*?

I'm not going to think about that anymore. I'm getting a headache.)