By Cat Wyatt

With the way things have been going for Jess lately, it’s no surprise that fans have been anxiously waiting for Green Lanterns #48. This issue is titled Rebel Run and it’s a disturbingly accurate title for this issue. As you can clearly see on the cover, Hal has arrived and is looking to arrest none other than Jessica Cruz. We can only guess as to why…perhaps it has something to do with his wanting to take her ring in the last issue?

A quick moment before we start getting into the plot for this issue. The first page is actually a full image of Jessica Cruz, with Hal Jordan coming up in the background. It’s clearly not part of the actual set of events, but it is absolutely beautiful.

The start of this issue is a bit disorienting, and that goes for Jessica as well. It starts out with her waking up, chained up by a green lantern construct, under arrest, and with no memory as to why that’s happening. So not exactly a good situation, to say the least.

During this whole scene Jess is running an internal monologue about how she doesn’t drink. Sure, she knows it might theoretically help her with her anxiety. That it might get her up and out of the house. But she also knows that she’d by lying to herself if she tried to say those things were true. She’s seen too many people’s lives ruined by their self-medicating like that. And thus she’s literally never had a drop of liquor. Presumably they’re leading up to something with this point…

You’re probably wondering what Jess is being charged with. She’s under arrest for assaulting multiple officers of the law and for basically destroying an entire city block. All of this can be clearly seen in the background. Here’s hoping those guards are just unconscious…

The arresting officer, Tig is very green at this, no pun intended. He hasn’t even met Hal Jordan yet, though he desperately wants to make a good impression on the guy. Sadly that made him more vulnerable for Jess to manipulate him and escape. It’s hard not to feel bad for the poor guy. Hopefully that doesn’t ruin his career in the corps, though realistically he’ll probably be okay.

There are probably a lot of questions running through your mind right now. Like what is actually happening here, and is Jessica being set up? Or worse, is she being controlled by that ring? We already know that the Guardians wanted Hal to go and take the ring away from her, because it had been altered. Perhaps this is the reason why they don’t allow rings to be altered like that? Or could this have something to do with the Annual that came out last week, where she downgraded her ring to communicate to older systems. Okay that one seems less likely but you never know.

Jess does what any of us would do in this situation, assuming we had a ring on us that could record every moment of our lives. She asked for a playback of what happened. It’s pretty telling that the ring didn’t want to do so, and called her hon in the process. Clearly whatever this is, it’s pretty bad. Actually, even when we’re shown the recording we’re still not shown how Jess came to be in this situation. So we’re still missing a whole lot of the puzzle.

The short story is that Jess was meeting with Accampo Tor’mn, a wanted and extremely dangerous criminal. During their meeting the police arrive, and Jess ‘handles’ them swiftly.  As stated above its still unclear why Jess was meeting with this guy and what he wanted.

What do you do, when the whole of the Green Lantern Corps is seeking to arrest you? You go underground or seek out allies that will be unlikely to be checked out. Going back to earth is out of the question, it’s too obvious. That leaves Jess with limited options, even with the use of her ring. She settled on going to Ungara to ask a friend for help.

Jess’ plan was actually a pretty good one. Part of her must have known that they could track her ring – it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that her ring informed her of that. So the only logical option was for her to ditch the ring. Sadly that means she’s limited to regular transport, but thankfully her ally has a ship.

You’d think that if Jess was being possessed by her ring throughout this entire situation that she’d abandon her plans to meet Accampo the minute she was free of it. But no, she’s still hard set on meeting the guy. That gives us the impression that she did in fact intentionally meet up with him…that or there’s something more going on here.

The meeting does in fact happen…but the device Accampo is handing to her is less than obvious about what it is. It almost looks like a key fob; it’s blue and cylindrical on one end with a metal hook poking out the other. So it certainly looks like keys…but that can’t be it, can it?

If you’re sitting here thinking maybe Jess is working undercover or something, trying desperately to find an excuse for her behavior…well, one has to ask, wouldn’t her partner at least be informed of what is happening here? Theoretically that means that Simon would be the last person to come after her, and yet…

This issue has been interesting. It’s different from the others; in that it’s not terribly clear what is actually going on. We’re missing the whole beginning of this story, clearly in an attempt to obfuscate the truth from us. We can only hope that the next issue will give us more answers than this one will. On the bright side this one did do a good job of getting us emotionally invested in what was happening, so there’s that.

Score: 4/5

Green Lanterns #48
DC Comics