In the "Silver Age Green Lantern question" thread, I made this statement:
It's amazing the ups and downs that Hal Jordan has had as both a character and a property. Sure, many characters have gone through the "died, but got better" phase ... but Hal has just been all over the map.
What I mean by that is not only have different creators given Hal different personality traits (which is understandable, as this happens with most characters in comics, especially the ones who have been around for decades), but his role within his own book has often changed (perhaps not unique, but not quite so common). He was the star of the book for the first 75 issues; co-star with Green Arrow for a time - although the few issues I've read between 76-89 quite clearly have GL being the second banana to GA - and eventually by the late 70s, he's the solo star once more. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, shortly after GA is no longer part of the book, Denny O'Neil leaves DC for Marvel.
In the mid 80s, Hal gets exiled off Earth in issue 151. He gets to go back in GL 172, the first issue by Len Wein and Dave Gibbons. In GL 181, he quits when (as I remember it) the Guardians get on his case for favoring Earth over his entire sector and threaten to banish him from Earth again. Hal sticks around as a supporting character until he becomes a GL once again in #198, but in truth the book is no longer just his. John Stewart had been named as his replacement by the Guardians after he quit, and this is also when Guy Gardner emerges from his coma. We have a lot of GLs running (flying?) around, and with issue 201, the book is renamed "Green Lantern Corps". Until the series is cancelled with # 224, it's a team book, and Hal is just one of the team; "Jordan and the Outsiders" this is not.
Star - Co-star - Star again - Supporting character - Team member; that's quite a journey. And that's only the first part. After the cancellation of GLC in 1988, the strip finds a home in the short lived Action Comics Weekly. There's a revival in 1990, and Hal has aged considerably, having somehow acquired Reed Richards' hairstyle (brown with a white strip at the temples). He eventually goes crazy, gets replaced, dies, becomes the Spectre for five minutes, and comes back. He is now partly back to his original characterization as a Man's Man, along with traits of "thinks with fists", and also for some reason bedhopping and bragging about it like Charlie Sheen's character on Two and a Half Men.
Btw, according to Commander Benson, this "punch first ask questions later" thing was a very short lived phase in the mid 1960s - Hal decided to primarily use his fists, and his ring only when necessary, but this was dropped after a few issues. I wonder if a young Geoff Johns was captivated by this?
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I've only read the first Showcase, and that some time ago. I'm looking forward to reading a few more, especially if there is a hi-sci-fi high water mark after the first showcase.
I was intrigued from the earlier thread that Green Lantern seems to have been mishandled more often than handled well in his career. The steps you outline above where he becomes a co-star and bit-palyer in the series would seem to indicate that the character himself was somehow problematic.
Having said that, and tying in with the last line of your piece, what exactly is the Golden Age that Johns is harking back to in his work? When was Hal Jordan the greatest super-lantern of all? He looks to have been a shambles of a man for much of his career.
In this and the last thread, there was much made of Hal often acting like something of a buffoon. I find it funny that Johns and co, whilst trying to portray Hal as the greatest etc etc, also portray him as a complete buffoon without they themselves realising it. I'm not the only reader to have noticed this. There would appear to be some trap inbuilt in the Hal Jordan character that leads to this.
Between the cancellation of the GL/GA series and its revival he appeared in back-ups in The Flash.
I began reading and following the GL series in 1984. There were numerous references to Hal being "the greatest GL of them all", usually by other members of the Corps. However, the only thing that made Hal stand out as far as I could see was that the rest of the Corps was depicted as being ineffective when he was around; they were often defeated easily, and Hal's "willpower" was somehow greater, so he would always save the day. He was only smarter, tougher, mentally stronger, etc. by writer's fiat. Without Hal around, how did any of these bums live more than a week?
I much prefer the current version where many of the Corps just don't like him. If they don't hate him because he went evil back in the 90s (that number has dwindled), they look down on him for being from Earth. Much more interesting than the pre-COIE Corps, the Care Bears of the Galaxy.
IMO, the best GL Corps stories were the 80s backups that didn't feature Hal at all.
This is somethng that I was going to raise myself. I think sometimes fans (and writers) confuse a great story with a great character. (Before Watchmen looks like a result of this to me!) The backdrop to the GL stories, the Universe-spanning GL Corps is just a wonderful story generator, or it should be. Jordan, as quite a bland character, is the perfect foil for all the weird and wonderful beings that we meet in the pages of good GL Corps stories. The nature of superhero stories, where the same character is continued through the stewardship of many different creative teams, tends to focus the fans on the characterrather than the story set-up. I think the set-up with the GL Corps is just as important as the character of Hal, if not more so.
I see in your summary above that the GL Corps as a group pushed Hal aside in his own comic for a while, so the fans and editorial agreed to some extent then that it was the set-up that mattered more than the character.
I've read the two TPB collections of Tales of the GL Corps. They are excellent, especially in the range of stories that could be told: from comedic to horror, fantasy to sci-fi etc. I wonder is Johns harking back to this era of the franchise, which was so fruitful in creating an ever-widening canvas for the stories to take place in?
In contrast, one of my gripes with Johns' GL is that there is only one tone, dominated by over-rendered machismo and grand guignol evisceration. Moore's GL Corps were a fellowship of living wonders and miracles, whereas Johns' gathering of Lanterns captures the aggressive posturing and testosterone-fueled rivalry of the locker-room...
Anyhow, sorry to lead this conversation down the Johns by-way. I've gone on elsewhere about his GL. I don't like it myself, but it fascinates me, all the moreso because it is so damned popular!
I'll come back to the pre-Johns Jordan if I post further.
I don't think you're on the mark with this argument, Fig. Compare Fantastic Four - it's similarly had acclaimed runs and mediocre runs. In the 70s most of Hal's solo appearances were written by Denny O'Neil, who handled him as an everyman dealing with difficult situations (he was a trucker for a while) and didn't give him a fixed home or supporting cast. O'Neil also wrote the revived GL/GA title. Around when it was converted back into a solo GL title (initially, still with O'Neil writing) Hal went back to work for Ferris, and the approach became one of doing a modern version of the earlier Silver Age strip (so e.g. Silver Age Green Lantern foes returned). Marv Wolfman's run led into Hal's space exile year. That separated him Earth and his supporting cast, so when the period ended the feature needed a direction again. Len Wein built on the conflict-between-Hal-and-the-Guardians element - which Wolfman had used and which goes back to the O'Neil/Adams run - to have Hal quit the corps and John Stewart take over. Then Wein left, and after an issue Steve Englehart took over and took the feature in his own direction (which included writing out Carol, making Hal a GL again, and turning the comic into a GL Corps comic). According to Englehart's account at his website he and Joe Staton left because DC wanted a strong feature to serve as the backbone of Action Comics Weekly and they didn't want to switch to the more constraining format. When the ongoing title was revived it was the 90s and Gerard Jones wrote until DC decided to do Emerald Twilight.
I have read hardly any GL before Geoff Johns run, Luke, so my argument is based on the various conversations about GL on the board here. I'll happily defer to anyone who's actually read the comics! But which part of my argument are you saying is off?
John D has more or less answered my original query, but I do wonder just where in all this chopping and changing, truck driving and claims adjusting, is the classic Hal Jordan which Johns is harking back to. The Fantastic Four had lulls and high points, but Marvel didn't move the whole family to Milwaukee at any point, or set them up as photocopier repair men. They generally cleaved to their original remit of exploring the fantastic as a family.
I think it's telling that the most critically acclaimed version of Hal Jordan over the last decade or so has been Darwin Cooke's "New Frontier", where Hal was a Korean War jet pilot.
Essentially, Hal is a pre-Vietnam hero who floundered in a post-Vietnam world. Going by Commander Benson's cut-off of the great period of Hal's career, I checked out the date of Green Lantern vol 2 #57. Here it is. December 1967. Isn't "Major Disaster" an ominously military-sounding name for a baddie? When I googled "Vietnam War 1967 "Major Disaster"" I got numerous references to the Tet Offensive in January 1968. In the wiki there are cited references to the growing unease amongst the American public regarding the war, alarming to the government and military by the second half of 1967. This was the context of the public reaction to the Tet Offensive in 1968.
The main victors in the Vietnam war were the arms and aeronautics companies who made fortunes out of all the defence spending. On some level it became problematic, or the writers saw it as problematic, that their hero was working for war profiteers during a highly unpopular war that was widely perceived as morally dubious.
As well as moving him on from his glamorous job, the writers seem to have projected their own unease at militarism onto poor Hal, and I'm sure that led to how he was (mis-)handled right up to his big push over the edge in the 90s.
That Hal has had his most successful period ever (by some measures) during the 00s tells us something about how attitudes to the military have changed since the War on Terror began. Certainly Johns' Lantern tales are full of apocalyptic horror and a pragmatic willingness to get the hero's hands dirty rather than the clean-cut heroism of Hal's earliest adventures.
As a counterpoint to DC's treatment of Hal, can anyone say when Iron Man's involvement in the arms industry and links to the military became problematic for him?
I'm willing to bet that Tony Stark got out of the munitions business around the same time as the Vietnam War escalated and younger writers began working for Marvel. It was becoming apparent that not only was the war becoming unpopular (as far as wars go) but unwinnable (without destroying the world). So it was better that Marvel ease off Stan's anti-Commie stance, which I'm sure was fueled by patriotism, and evolve a more pacifistic approach to world politics and stop having Iron Man, and to be fair, Captain America and the other heroes appear like war-mongers.
As for Hal, Denny O'Neil decided to turn the character upside down and it happened very fast! My theory is that he and Neal Adams planned early on to give Hal a foil in Green Arrow as he was the most bland and revisable JLAer on hand. Besides Green Lantern/Green Arrow sounds cooler than Green Lantern/J'onn J'onzz or Green Lantern/Elongated Man! Look at the timeline: in Justice League #74 (S'69), Green Arrow is in his old costume [written by O'Neil]; Brave & Bold #85 (S'69), Green Arrow has a new costume and beard combo [drawn by Adams]; Justice League #75 (N'69) has GA lose his fortune and inducts Black Canary to the team and Ollie's life [O'Neil]; JL #77-78 (Ja-Ma'70), GA gets a new liberal attitude that clashes with authority [O'Neil] which all leads to Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (Ap'70) by O'Neil and Adams and Hal's philosophical collapse. Seven months is too short a time to get reader reaction about the New Green Arrow being popular enough to co-star in a book and certainly too soon to judge if readers agreed with his new views.
Thus any turmoil Hal went through in those last seven or eight issues of his title pre-GA was to bolster O'Neil & Adams' portrayal of a man whose values have been compromised. But Hal was indeed a marked man!
Oh, I would have said about the time that he steped on that land mine back in Tales of Suspense #39.... LOL!
Figserello said:
LOL indeed! :-)
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