The Four Color Media Monitor

Since the subject of GL came up earlier, NBC wrote about another DC project that may be part of their young-adult pandering line highlighting a POC - here, an Asian - in an established superhero role:

When the author Minh Lê began thinking of ways he could put his own spin on the story of the classic DC Comics character the Green Lantern, he suddenly recalled the jade ring his late grandmother always wore.

Lê's grandmother, Ton Nu Tuy-Nhan, had brought the ring with her when she and the rest of the family fled Vietnam as refugees during the Vietnam War. As Lê began developing the storyline for his middle-grade graphic novel "Green Lantern: Legacy," which DC Comics is set to release Tuesday, he realized that making his main character a Vietnamese American boy who is granted supernatural powers through a jade ring he inherits from an elder would be a perfect fit for the story he wanted to tell.

But what turns this article annoying is when they get around to the time in the past decade when GL was really exploited for social justice propaganda:

"Green Lantern: Legacy" marks the first time the character has been depicted as an Asian American. The original comic introduced readers to a white New Yorker named Alan Scott, but in recent years the Green Lantern has diversified. In 2012, readers were introduced to Simon Baz, a Muslim American of Lebanese descent, and the first female Green Lantern, a Latin American woman named Jessica Cruz, was unveiled in 2013.

What's irritating here is how they make it sound like GL was one single role that got race/gender-swapped, and they sugarcoat how Geoff Johns crafted his atrocious story for promoting Islam, with nary a mention of the cliches resorted to, like a terrorist in Detroit turning out to be a white US supremacist. A subject that may still have validity in itself, but when another white supremacist ideology/religion is whitewashed to look clean by comparison in the process, all legitimate concerns about white supremacy of the non-Islamic variety goes out the window.

Illustrated by the Singaporean artist Andie Tong, "Green Lantern: Legacy" explores the story of Tai Pham, an introspective middle schooler who lives in an apartment above the store his grandmother diligently runs. Tai's world is rocked one day when he puts on his grandmother's ring and realizes that he is the Green Lantern. As he comes into his powers, the ordinarily quiet Tai realizes that it is his job to protect his neighborhood from racist bullies while building on the legacy his grandmother began in Vietnam.

What are the odds this'll turn out to be anti-American propaganda whitewashing communism, and making only whites out to look bad? That won't be good news.

Lê said that as he was growing up in a family of refugees and immigrants, he found it particularly powerful to be given the chance to remake an iconic American character into a story about a Vietnamese American boy and his grandmother. But that responsibility also came with a fair bit of pressure.

"With that meaning comes a lot of anxiety as you are writing," he said. "You're trying to represent a culture that is so personal while also trying to get all of the details right."

A particularly poignant moment occurs when young Tai gets a glimpse of what life was like in Vietnam at the height of the war. Even more shocking is the moment he learns that, as the Green Lantern, he'll be continuing a legacy that began with his grandmother.

Now it's beginning to sound as though this could be propaganda opposed to the Vietnam war, and you have to wonder if it'll all come from a leftist viewpoint that's lenient on communism. Which has long been par for the course at these companies.

And they waste only so much resources on crafting these "alternate retelling" books in the process. There's too many of them at this point.

Labels: dc comics, Green Lantern, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics