Monday, September 10, 2007

Apparently, Kyle Rayner Likes To Plan Ahead: The Secret Origin of Kylax

In June's Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special, former Green Lantern (and then-Ion) Kyle Rayner was possessed by Parallax, the giant yellow space monster/alien fear god that long ago possessed Hal Jordan, turning him into the villain of "Emerald Twilight" and Zero Hour. Kyle/Parallax immediately transformed Kyle's Ion costume into a new costume that mixed Hal's old Parallax design with Kyle's old Green Lantern costume design.



So did Parallax-in-Kyle come up with that design of the top of his/its/their head?

Actually, it looks like Kyle had been thinking about what his costume design should look like should he ever become Parallaxed at some point for a long, long time—long before he (or anyone but Geoff John) knew that the real reason Hal was all evil and answered to the dumbass codename of Parallax was because there was a giant yellow space monster/alien fear god in him.

About seven years before, actually.

Flipping through 1998's Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins #1 recently, I came across a five-page story called "Kyle Rayner's Sketchbook" by Ron Marz, Paul Pelletier, Darryl Banks and Terry Austin. Basically, Jade finds Kyle's sketchbook and flips through it, and we get a few pages of Banks-sketching-as-Kyle.

Among the images in Kyle's sketchbook is this little gem, which I've chopped out and zoomed in on:


Bravo, Sinestro Corps creative team of Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver. Way to reference an obscure, forgotten piece of Kyle Rayner history from a book I imagine realtively few of those currently digging on DC's Green Lantern books even read into a part of the story.

Now that's and Easter egg.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow.
That IS obscure.

Anonymous said...

I still prefer the theory about Hal creating the giant space bug during Zero Hour as his "Not my fault!" out.

SallyP said...

Oh Geoff Johns definitely does his homework.

KentL said...

Or Ron Marz, who is back at DC and has been writing Kyle as Ion for a while now, remembers something he had a hand in. Could be he thought of the idea back then, but didn't get to use it until now.