How a Green Lantern Coloring Mistake Turned Into a Plot Point

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, see how Ron Marz cleverly wrote a coloring mistake into a Green Lantern plotline

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and sixty-eighth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first legend in this installment.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Ron Marz cleverly worked in Donna Troy accidentally being colored green into a plot point in Green Lantern.

STATUS:

True

Ron Marz took over writing duties of Green Lantern just in time to write Hal Jordan out of the series as the villainous Parallax, and brought in Kyle Rayner as the brand-new Green Lantern, the last Green Lantern in the universe!

In Green Lantern #57 (by Marz, Darryl Banks and Romeo Tanghal), Kyle moves to New York City, where he met his new landord, Randu...

In the next issue (art by Cully Hamner and Romeo Tanghal), he reveals his identity to his new teammate (as Kyle joined the New Titans when he moved to New York), Donna Troy....

In the next issue (Banks back as penciler), Kyle and Donna share a Christmas kiss and begin dating...

WHICH TWO SUPERHEROES DID KYLE RAYNER DATE?

In Green Lantern #86 (by Marz, Jeff Johnson and Romeo Tanghal), Kyle returns home and assumes Donna is in the shower...

but it turns out to be Alan Scott's daughter, Jennie, the hero known as Jade!

She asks Kyle to let her room with him, and he agrees, although Donna isn't thrilled when she finds out later...

That turns out not to matter, though, as Donna and Kyle break up in Green Lantern #90 (by Marz, Chris Batista and Chip Wallace) for unrelated reasons...

Kyle and Jennie get together as a couple in Green Lantern #103 (by Marz, Jeff Johnson and Andy Lanning)...

But then Kyle runs into Donna again while on a date with Jennie in Green Lantern #118 (by Marz, Banks and Anibal Rodriguez)...

Jennie is pissed at how Kyle is reacting to his EX-girlfriend in front of her, and she storms off back to their place. Kyle spends the evening catching up with Donna, who had gone through some messed up mental stuff recently, and doesn't FULLY remember her past with Kyle. Kyle and Donna share a kiss...

but agree not to get back together (as Donna had started dating Roy Harper around this time). However, an attack by the Enchantress delays Kyle, making Jennie think that he is blowing her off, so when he finally DOES get home, Jennie has left...

Their breakup is confirmed next issue (Cam Smith now on inks) when Jennie finds out about the kiss. She's not here to be Kyle's BACK-UP girlfriend, ya know?

Okay, so now Jennie is gone, but Donna is kind of sort of back in Kyle's life. This leads to the oddity of Green Lantern #120 (by Marz, Jeff Johnson and Cam Smith).

HOW DID A COLORING MISTAKE COME INTO PLAY?

In the issue, Kyle discovers that his longtime landlord, Randu, has a dangerous enemy. Randu had been a solider in Romania, and after his service ended, he was hired as part of the secret police of Romania, where he served under a sadistic dude known as Dracul. Eventually, Randu and his wife decided to escape to the United States. Dracul tracked them down, and Randu cut Dracul with Dracul's own knife. However, while Randu escaped, Dracul shot him, forcing him to drop his wife from the train they were escaping on, so she was tortured and killed and now, years later, Dracul was here to kill Randu. Kyle got invovled and was shot for his efforts!

We learn then that Randu, of course, has always known that Kyle was Green Lantern...

Randu turns to Donna Troy for help with the wounded Kyle, but, well, that sure doesn't look like Donna, right?

Yep, almost certainly because Jennie was green and had been part of the book for so long, Donna was accidentally colored green like Jennie!

The next issue, though, saw Kyle wake up living on Oa, MARRIED to Jennie, who was part of a whole new Green Lantern Corps with Kyle!

However, during a fight against a bunch of villains led by Green Lantern's old foe, Effigy, Kyle realizes that Effigy knows something about all of this and that he knows it is not right. So he and Effigy team up to try to break free, and at the end of Green Lantern #122, Kyle confirms that it is all fake, and he wakes up back in his apartment, still recovering from his gunshot wound!

In the next issue (by Marz, Banks and Smith), Kyle figures that Donna being green must have been part of the same weird illusion that he had just gone through...

Reader Kevin E. wrote in to ask if that was actually planned or was that just Marz trying to cleverly covering up for the mistake. I asked Ron about it, and he confirmed that it was a coloring mistake and that this was his attempt to explain it away. That was pretty darn clever of him, I think.

Thanks to Kevin for the suggestion and thanks to Ron Marz for the information!