Tom King's The Omega Men (and my personal heartbreak)

So I’m a little late to the game. I just read Tom King's The Omega Man, his foray into the Green Lantern mythos, and guys, I’m not okay. Let me begin by saying it’s a fantastic story. It’s definitely a must read, but it’s intense AF, and there’s a lot to unpack, But the story is so layered and so messed up, and ultimately it’s so fundamentally human that you’ll find yourself slipping from one audience gasp-worthy moment to the next.

Let’s start with the basic premise of the story. Insert the mandatory spoiler alert warning here. So the story begins with Kyle Rayner, perhaps one of the least liked characters to take up the Green Lantern mantle, being killed on camera by a group of terrorists called the Omega Men. Kyle’s original mission is to go into the Vega system, a collection of planets ruled by the Citadel, and find a peaceful resolution to the bloody conflict that has raged on for a number of years. Now in the Vega system, stellarium is mined religiously because it’s a planet-saving element. Stellarilluum can save planets from Kryton-like fates, so you can imagine how coveted this substance is. There’s also the issue of religion—in the Vega system, inhabitants follow a religion that worships a deity known as Alpha, which means the beginning. Omega is obviously the end and the deity that the Omega Men worship—though I don’t know if I wholly buy that they worship Omega. I think their affinity for Omega is more a matter of convenience in branding so that they can position themselves as the opposition to the Citadel and their religion, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

Throughout the story, we get glimpses of Kyle‘s life on earth, his life before he was a Lantern, and even a little bit about his romantic past. These scenes inform his motivations and ultimately show the reader how much of a Boy Scout Kyle really is. The book follows his radicalization(?) with the Omega Men. Now understand that I use the term “radicalization” with a bit of a question mark. As you read the story, you come to see that the Omega Men are fighting a number of injustices and a level of cruelty that needs to be stopped. The Vega system, despite its galactic removal from Earth, is oddly familiar to most readers. We see hints of the conflict in the Middle East represented, specifically in the opening scenes  where Kyle is killed on camera in a manner many of us have seen on tv. However, I would argue that much of the conflict and the violation of different planets throughout the Vega system is an allegory for the way that dominant powers on Earth often rape and pillage different parts of the world, and this book examines the cruelty and dehumanization that results from such violence. In addition to Kyle’s plight, we also get origin stories for each of the Omega Men so that we understand why they’re fighting the Citadel. Each story is uniquely FUBAR, but I found myself weeping at Scraps' story. Scraps lost her family and her home planet to the Citadel's royally fucked up efforts to mine stellarium. They essentially blow up life on the planet in order to facilitate their mining efforts, but because the Citadel is so noble and just *barf* they set up a memorial on the planet for all the fallen people of Voorl.

So this scene. This scene. So obviously it's a visual representation of how much sacrifice and loss is expected from people--specifically from people who live in non-dominant power countries. But for me, I don't know. I needed a minute. Understand that I grew up with war stories about the Civil War in El Salvador, so stories of mass graves and the equalizing force of death kinda went hand-in-hand with my bedtime stories (put away the rosaries, you don't need to pray for me. I am blessed with a wonderful family who loves me and read Puss in Boots to me in Spanish, but who also wanted me to understand where I came from). So back to this scene, notice the lighting on the Omegamen in the corner as if to suggest that they are the beacon of light that will end the type of destruction seen on Voorl. The background is a myriad of Industry and graves as if to suggest that the two go hand-in-hand (perhaps a visual that is too much on the nose for me), but the path of the lighting is nevertheless interesting. While the Omegamen are standing at the center of that light, they are facing the darker side of the page--specifically the area that holds the graves and the stellarium factories in the distance. The light illustrates their cause and motivation, but as the Omegamen embark on this path, the light that has guided them till this point is deviating--or perhaps more accurately, they're deviating from their initial motivations. While the cause is just, their actions and path towards ensuring victory will not be. They will follow a similar path of destruction in  order to remove the Citadel from power, but in doing so, will ultimately become the monsters that they are fighting.

There are a number of scenes that we could focus on, but the grave scene is my favorite because I feel like this is the moment that both convinces the reader to be on the Omega Men's side, but also the moment when you realize: shit, there's no clean way out of this. The Omage Men wage war on the Citadel, kill the Viceroy, win the war, and become leaders within the new galactic order. However, each Omega Man is a revolutionary. A soldier incapable of ruling without an iron fist, and consequently, each Omega Man either becomes a shadow of the Viceroy, and equally as cruel, or an incompetent ruler who leads his people down the path of their own self destruction. Scraps, my favorite in all of this, disappears and the reader is left with a seemingly broken Kyle Rayner, who might turn on his own government. 

While for some this book is a bit too allegorical-y, for me it's simplistically human--which speaks to how fucked up I think we can be as people sometimes, but hey, you don't read Tom King to have warm fuzzy unicorn feelings, you read his stuff to feel like shit and eat your feelings of disappointment away. 

I think one of the bigger questions that I had coming away from this book were: Are leaders of revolution responsible for proving their followers with tangible solutions AFTER the revolution is done? or is that too much to ask of them? Is there a place for these revolutionary leaders in society after the revolution is done? Are we capable of living without hierarchies or was Loki right when he said that humanity craves a ruler? Mind you, I don't actually have answers to these questions, but like, I am interested in hearing what you all think. Now excuse me while I go watch some easily digestible and procedural sci-fi and try to forget all the feels this book awoke.