Ion - Kyle Rayner's return to his own book!

I have known about this series for a couple of months now, but I am stoked about it! After a brief hiatus from comics (I quit for a girl... it figures), I returned to my first love in 1996. One of the first things I read was The Final Night by Karl Kesel and Ron Marz.

Now I had never been a DC fan before, so it was a big step for me to try it out at 19 years of age. In this book, I found an everyman hero that was a controversial, and he went by Green Lantern. Now, they were calling this guy Kyle and I knew that Hal Jordan had been Green Lantern when I quit, so i asked around and apparently, DC had replaced a styrofoam character Hal Jordan with a cocky young 20-something guy.

I thought he was interesting, so I tried the Green Lantern series.

I picked up the next available issue that looked like a good starting place (after Hal Jordan's "Funeral" in #81). That happened to be the issue you see on the right - issue #82. I found that Kyle reminded me a lot of Spider-man, which, at the time was just getting back around to being Peter Parker after the whole clone saga thing (yes, I just missed it!) and had not gotten back around to where he needed to be (he still hasn't but that's for another entry). Kyle was the character i could most relate to in all the comics I read. I picked up #83, and after that, I was hooked. I collected all the back issues I could and PRESTO!, Green Lantern became my favorite character. The series remained awesome until Marz left the book in issue #125. There were four fairly awful fill in books until Judd Winick's very mediocre run beginning in #129. Winnick started out good, but he started pushing his ever present political agenda. Eventually, Winnick buckled under the pressure from fans stating that they were tired of Kyle being a rookie, and that he needed to mature the character. Ion was the result.

Ion was a failry decent story centered around Kyle having Omnipotance and Omnipresence. Yes, he was a god. It did mature the character, but I thought it felt a little rushed. All of the sudden, Kyle was handing out super powers like they were candy and making the lame walk (literally!), along with becoming Earth's most powerful being. Oh yes, more so than Superman. He was all powerful, but he gave it all up to recreate what Hal had destroyed. The planet OA.

The book went down hill fast after the Ion storyline. Winnick was often filled in by the atrocious Ben Raab. Worst writer in comics. I swear. When Winnick was replaced by Raab for about 18 issues, I thought I might lose my mind, but then I heard that...

They were bringing back Ron Marz. Yes!

For Kyle's last story. NO!

Kyle's run as the main protagonist of the Green Lantern book ended with #181 (at left), an even 100 issues after I began collecting them. Since then, DC has brought back Hal Jordan as Green Lantern and he remains one of the dullest characters in all of comicdom.

But with the events of Infinite Crisis, Ion has been rebirthed! Sure, he'll no longer be called Green Lantern, but Kyle Rayner is back in his own solo book. I know that DC is marketing him as "what if Kyle's a villain now" but he's not. DC won't make the same mistake twice.

Please if you are into comics at all, chreck this series out. The more it sells, the more likely it is that it will become ongoing, and if it becomes ongoing, and you bought it, I'll give you fifty cents. I promise.