This week, I bought “Green Lantern Corps: Recharge #1” (online preview at that link) and it is an awesome read. I recommend it. However, I was borrowed by one minor, niggling detail from Geoff Johns (who usually nails stuff like this).

Salakk informs Guy Gardner that he’s going to be training the new recruits. Guy says to Kyle Rayner, “I’m NOT a teacher!”

Um, yes he is.

Perhaps Geoff Johns has forgotten that part of Guy’s history. Here now is my attempt at a nowhere-near-thorough recap of Guy Gardner’s exploits.

And I’m leaving out the whole thing about him being an attorney. I don’t get how a football player goes to law school for years to become an attorney and then suddenly switches to being a gym teacher.

When Abin Sur’s ship crashed in the western desert, he scanned Earth for viable candidates and found several. Two of the best were Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner, so the ring picked the closest one. (I don’t know what Clark Kent, Dick Grayson and Boston Brand were up to at that moment; according to the Action Comics Weekly #642 story where Hal was dying and summoned successors, they were all qualified candidates.)

Hal found out about Guy having been in the running for the ring and Guy was selected as the backup GL in case anything happened to Hal.

Later, Guy was chaperoning a field trip. There was an auto accident and he saved the life of one of his students but was badly wounded. This caused Hal to seek out another backup, John Stewart, while Guy was in recovery.

I’m not sure of events over the next 70-some issues of GL, but at some point Guy fell in love with a fortune teller named Kari Limbo. Guy had an accident with his ring which put him into either the Phantom Zone or a coma or…oh, I forget, it’s a complicated backstory and it’s made worse by the removal (and then re-installation) from continuity of the Phantom Zone. Suffice to say, Guy’s out of it and Hal falls for Guy’s fiance and Guy feels betrayed and then he’s in a coma for seven years.

Guy wakes from his coma (perhaps brought about by the Guardians of the Universe) and, muscular atrophy be damned, hikes into the mountains to dig up Abin Sur’s grave and have a fistfight with Hal, then is summoned to Oa to get a ring of his own. They stop off to watch “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” so he can get design ideas for his cool new costume. Then Guy is commissioned to serve as GL for a band of renegade Guardians who want a more aggressive style of Lanterning. They tell him that he is the one, true Green Lantern and the rest are all pansy has-beens. Guy buys into this.

A lot.

Guy recruits supervillains and alien criminals to posse up and attack the Weaponers of Qward. This story is VERY complicated, but I will mention that Guy all but murders Hal Jordan, perhaps explaining their testy relationship over the years.

Then Guy escapes back to Earth, joins the JLI, loses his ring to Hal in a grudge match, decides he still wants superpowers and breaks into Guardian Headquarters to grab the power ring from Sinestro’s dead body. (Always bury a weapon of mass destruction with the personal effects, that’s the Guardians’ motto.) This serves him well up to the point Hal Jordan destroys the Great Battery, which causes Guy’s anti-GL-energy ring to explode while leaving his hand intact.

Then, once again, Guy goes off on a journey to find power. This time he finds the “Warrior Waters”…which is a coinkydink, since he just happens to be the only person on earth who is genetically descended from a Vuldarian and his DNA is activated by the water, making him a Vuldarian warrior.

This isn’t TOTALLY inconceivable, inasmuch as this backstory of being genetically inclined to be Warrior explains his lack of fear and his lifelong craving of power. Becoming Warrior also seems to drain some of the jackass out of the dude. Ironically, becoming Warrior seems to bring him some measure of internal peace.

Oh, and talk about bad timing; since he is temporarily without powers, he isn’t on Mt. Everest with the rest of the Justice League when the woman he loves gets incinerated. Shortly after that, he finds out that the woman he loved before that also got incinerated in the explosion of Coast City. But don’t expect any heartache; Beau’s writing him. 🙂

Bringing us back to the main topic: Guy returns to teaching for a brief moment. (See “Detention Comics #1”.) So we know he still has a teaching certificate and considers himself a teacher.

Guy pals around with Buck Wargo and his buddies, and Wildcat, Lead, Arisia and Lady Blackhawk. Then things seem to calm down and Guy goes into semi-retirement, just running his bar Warriors. (Somewhere the Vuldarians are rolling over in their graves, unable to believe that their millennia of preparations for continuing their legacy have led to this fella serving up frosty ones to Northwind and Reverb.)

That brings us up to this last year, when Guy’s power causes a bar-destroying explosion. Guy is taken to the Watchtower, where something causes his body to “reject his Vuldarian DNA”. Yeah. Not just making his power go dormant, mind you, but somehow his cells kick out part of his genetic structure and yet keep him the same person he was before he became Warrior, even though he was part-Vuldarian all along. I’m not a geneticist, but I think if your cells spit out half of what makes you you, the rest isn’t going to look exactly the same; more likely, you’re a sizzling lump of beef.

Now Guy has his power ring and his frat boy attitude back. That brings us up to date.