I Miss Beau Smith!

Well, here is a fine coincidence. The past couple of evenings, I've been re-reading all of my Guy Gardner: Warrior books. I started out trying to find stuff about Ice for my previous essay, but was just having too much fun to stop. Then today, I was on the "Line of Fire" site, reading reviews, and just for the heck of it, checked in on Mr. Smith's "Busted Knuckles" column, which is always fun.

Lo and behold, he was talking about Guy! A few years have passed, and he's gone on to write a whole passel of other good books, but I was delighted to learn that people still love those Warrior issues. As well they should. I liked the series from the start, with Gerard Jones, and Chuck Dixon, but it didn't REALLY start to get crazy fun until Beau Smith hopped on. Besides, after Guy got Parallaxed, it had Nazis riding Dinosaurs, and it doesn't get much better than that. Well...maybe talking Gorillas, but those came in later in the series.

I love what Geoff Johns and Peter Tomassi are doing with Guy and all the Green Lanterns right now, but none of that would have been possible without the careful...yet wacky...work that Beau Smith did on Guy's character way back when. And while the old JLI of Giffen and DeMatteis is still my favorite incarnation of the Justice League, there is no doubt that Guy was pretty much a one-note character back then. In his own book he was granted some depth and a more fleshed-out personality.

I do wish that DC would give him a mini-series or something. How about reviving Green Lantern Corps Quarterly? I'd be in heaven.

Oh, and Mr. Smith also had the very good taste to link Ragnell, Kalinara and myself. I immediately ran around yelling to my kids that I had been linked. They put down their "Guitar Hero" game for a nanosecond and stared blankly at me, which put a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm, but what the heck. I'm still all of a twitter.