"Found Art"
Cover Date: October 1999
Writer: Ron Marz
Artist: Darryl Banks
Previously....
It's 1999, so Kyle Rayner is your Green Lantern. Also, despite a statue of him appearing on the cover, Hal Jordan is not in this issue.
Plot
The issue begins in media res with Kyle being choked to death. But how did he get there?
It turns out that he was working on a painting for an art show (Kyle Rayner was an artist, you see), but he had to stop over at Guy Gardner's bar to housesit or something. So he goes over to the bar, and, wouldn't you know, the Manhunter that Guy kept deactivated in his bar for some reason immediately comes to life and begins attacking. I suppose the moral being, do not keep deadly, deadly robots as trophies.
So Kyle and the Manhunter get into it, and that leads us back to where Kyle was at the beginning of the issue. In shocking twist, he is not then brutally strangled to death by the killer robot, but instead manages to eventually decapitate it with a power ring axe.
But wait! In the middle of the fight, Kyle's painting got destroyed, and the art show is in one hour! What will Kyle do? Well, despite learning first-hand how dangerous it can be to keep Manhunter technology laying around, he decides to take the battered Manhunter head and pass it off as his latest work of art...although I thought he was a painter.
The issue, realizing that it's several pages short, then has Kyle hang around his supporting cast for a while, before he decides to leave the art show with his girlfriend, Jade. Just then, his ex-girlfriend, Donna Troy, and that's the cliff-hanger ending. Because nothing sells comics like the prospect of awkward conversations with an ex-girlfriend. To Be Continued!
Comments
Like most of DC's output in the late '90s, this issue is basically innocuous. I wouldn't exactly call it good, but there are worse comics out there.
I don't know, it's kind of hard getting worked up over a book starring Kyle Rayner. This issue brings attention to the fact that he's an artist, which always seemed to me like a crappy occupation for a super-hero, because, when you think about it, artists are usually pretty unlikeable. The comic opens with Kyle working on his painting, and talking about his latest work draws from Impressionists. So, by the third page, I'm kind of rooting for the robot to kill him so I won't have to hear him talking about his fucking art show anymore.
I guess the only thing I'd recommend is the final page, where Kyle and Jade react to the presence of Donna Troy with horror:
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