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Green Lantern: On The Ring Again

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17:18 / 28.04.04

I find it difficult to muster up the enthusiasm, unlike some folks. While Geoff Johns is a good writer, he also has a tendency to make his heroes, well, realistic.

And the great thing about Green Lantern is the sheer potential of a series about a group of alien Marshals. I can't help but think that the first few arcs/trades (same thing, these days) will be about him moping around on Earth, bemoaning his mistakes. (Look at his recent work on Flash).

It's probably not an accident that my favorite GL stories are the two by Alan Moore, that do more to project the completely alien in one story (or, in the case of the Mogo story, one _panel_) then an entire year of "Kyle goes undercover to defeat the Galactic Mafia".

If Grant was writing it, I'd be excited. But until I see that sense of wonder coming out...I'll stick to reading the solicits.

Anyone else care to comment?

17:30 / 28.04.04

Hal Jordan was my first favorite superhero. To my mind he will always be the ultimate superhero.

I love the whole fearless test pilot turned sci-fi super sheriff. I love his relationship with Carol Ferris. I love him using his ring to make a giant green fist. I love his oath. I love his bond with Ollie and their adventures on the road. I love his enemies: renegade green lantern Sinestro, giant-headed Hector Hammond, and Star Sapphire, his own girlfriend turned evil!. I even like his getting married to Kari Limbo.

And I can buy him wigging about Coast City, trying to rebuild it, but from that point on they kind of lost who the character was. They forgot that he was born without fear, they made him a killer, they turned him evil. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

I thought it was intersting what they did with making him the Spectre, but that's about it. Interesting.

So, I guess, yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with Hal Jordan as Green Lantern again. At the very least, it should be... interesting.

17:41 / 28.04.04

I've always loved the space peacekeeper aspect of GL but the execution has always been shit. I might pick this up given Ethan Van Sciver's art on it but everything from the H.E.A.T. wankery to zipping Hal Jordan into the Spectre role to the anti-Green Lantern with the Moe Howard haircut to Pat Broderick's horrific art in the third volume series has always scared me away from any utter coolness that is Green Lantern.

(I still hold that Emerald Dawn would make one helluva feature film).

17:55 / 28.04.04

I dunno, despite Hal/GL being my favorite comic for my entire childhood/teen years, I thought bringing in a new guy and upending the status quo generally was a great idea. Problem was, once they had the new character DC never seemed to know what to do with him. Kyle as a character had a lot of potential, but the book never got a decent writer, and the editorial direction was confused at best. Morrison did a great job writing Kyle in JLA, but other writers handling the character seemed unwilling to follow his lead. Personally I wish they'd just hand the reigns of the current book to some real talent, but it looks like the current retro/nostalgia fad will win out in this case.

Additionally, bringing Hal back using an utterly conventional funnybook writer like Geoff Johns kind of mutes what interest I would have in the book were it written by someone more interesting. Once the basic premise is established, this one's likely to read pretty much by the numbers.

On the positive side, the art will probably be pretty freaking cool.

19:17 / 28.04.04

He married someone? What??? Who was this girl/alien female??

19:20 / 28.04.04

Great topic title, by the way!!

Geoff Johns occasionally has inspired moments of characterization or some cool plot ideas, I think. And Ethan will kick on the art. I'm curious to see where all this goes. What becomes of Kyle (who I actually like)? Who will be the new Spectre, or will there be no more Spectre?

20:41 / 28.04.04

Thanks. It just came to me.

I expect there'll be a new Spectre host, who'll return the character to his bad-ass Spirit of God's Wrath incarnation. One idea I've heard is that the host will be whoever dies in Identity Crisis (tho if it is Snapper Carr, as I expect, that could be painful

)

21:06 / 28.04.04

After replacement-GL Guy Gardner sprung the trap Sinestro had set on Hal's lantern, he got plunged into the Phantom Zone, where Sinestro tortured him for years. Hal got there too late to save him and thinking Guy dead, went off to tell his girlfriend that he'd died.

That girlfriend was latino psychic Kari Limbo. Brought together by their shared grief, Hal and Kari became romantically involved and even made it to the altar (the classic "With these rings I thee wed..." storyline). Of course, just as the ceremony was finishing up, Guy managed to (finally!) send a psychic message to Kari, letting her know that he was still alive.

Hal, a bit bummed, promptly did the right thing and went off to rescue the now-brain-damaged Guy Gardner from Sinestro.

I'm not sure if Kari Limbo was ever seen again...

22:39 / 28.04.04

my two cents. I like Kyle. I like the fact that an artist has the ring. It makes sense that someone with a great visual imagination gets the ring. Both Morrison and Winnick did good things with him. Then winnick left the series and took most of Kyle's personality with him. The recent 'black circle' arc has been basically poo. Star trek at its worst. But that is the writer's doing, not the fault of the character.

I think the death and redemption cycle of Hal was interesting. I liked the recent spectre book. But bringing him back as GL? After he decimated the CL corps and attempted to rewrite the universe? I don't think so. Also does the character of the 60's test pilot still hold relevance today?

But I'm sure DC executives are thinking, it worked for Green Arrow it can work again!

22:52 / 28.04.04

yeah, Kari L. turned up in Guy Gardner's solo series back in the early nineties. I think it was just a one-shot, though.

m.

09:04 / 29.04.04

Don't you be talkin' about '60's test pilots, or Mama Grimm's favourite son is gonna hafta stuff ya into a trash can like a crummy little Yancy Street Gang twerp.

11:21 / 29.04.04

Kari Limbo died in Coast City.

13:22 / 29.04.04

So is "brain-damaged by the Phantom Zone" how Gardener went from a reasonable seeming guy in, say, the first John Stewart story (read it in the first Hard Travelling Heroes trade) to the Reaganista of the late '80's ??? ("Sly models himself after me.")

13:30 / 29.04.04

Well, after Hal rescued him from the Phantom Zone, Guy was in a coma for years. I believe he got snapped out of it by the Crisis. His change in personality, I always assumed, came from a hatred of Hal Jordan that developed while he was being tortured by Sinestro and watching helplessly as Hal dated his girl. He became sort of an anti-Hal Jordan.

As to the 60s test pilot, I have to say yes. I've been reading New Frontiers and I have to say it's a beautiful era, especially as rendered by Darwyn Cooke.

17:28 / 29.04.04

DC Comics are so stupid for this.

Why do comic books refuse to evolve? Why is it that no matter how much they shake up the status quo make it so that 'things will never stay the same after this', they inevitably change things back to the same thiry year old formula.

I liked Hal Jordan. But those stories should be over and DC should look to the future with Green Lantern. I should have known this would happen when they brought back the Corps (for the Nth time) after they said they wouldn't. No change is ever permanent in a comic book universe. They'll probibly bring back Barry Allen next.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

17:55 / 29.04.04

Yeah, I don't read the comics so I don't ostensibly care but whether DC are surrendering to the mania of the fans or not it's kind of bad. They had the balls to kill some of the heroes in the early 80s and since then have undone each of them except Barry Allen so far, though they did have Impulse, his previously unmentioned son. It's conservatism on the part of the DC management or the writers. They might as well have Silver Age Superman wake up and have the Psycho Pirate walk out of the shower...

19:06 / 29.04.04

Impulse (who is now Kid Flash) is Barry Allen's grandson, but same difference. Its the same thing as the newest Superman and Supergirl retcons and it pisses me off.

Same thing with Marvel undoing most of Grant Morrison's X-Men and going back to superhero costumes, Xavier crippled, etc.

You don't have to like every direction certain comics have gone but it is selling out to just undo it all in favor of tired Silver Age formulas.

Regrettable Juvenilia

07:47 / 30.04.04

Point of information: Xavier being crippled again occurs eight issues or so before the end of Grant Morrison's run (indeed, it's revealed that he was never really healed), so this is not an example of Marvel undoing Morrison's work at all.

18:37 / 30.04.04

Grant Morrison kind of undid his own changes by the bringing Magneto storyline anyways, which is the most unoriginal X-Men story of all.

With regards to Green Lantern, is it premature to be doing all this judging? The Newsarama article I saw was kind of vague on exactly what the Hal Jordan thing will be. But we'll see.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

17:31 / 02.05.04

The ironic thing is I remember an interview a year or two ago with the writer that turned Hal bad and it was done out of desperation because the series was going to be cancelled again, because there was absolutely no interest in Green Lantern. It was kill or cure and certainly Kyle saved the GL title.

I'm hoping that if Hal is back as the GL in this title then it folds in a year. Serves the Kyle haterz right!

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

17:56 / 02.05.04

The ironic thing is I remember an interview a year or two ago with the writer that turned Hal bad and it was done out of desperation because the series was going to be cancelled again, because there was absolutely no interest in Green Lantern. It was kill or cure and certainly Kyle saved the GL title.

Ron Marz isn't exactly known for giving the full story when he gives interviews on Green Lantern...and I really don't blame him, seeing as how he and the editor involved got death threats for a while after the "Hal Turns Evil" story. However, it's a bit more complicated than he says.

Green Lantern had been a book that had started with a HUGE push, but after 4 years, was in the sales doldrums. It had a rotating cast its first two years, which killed a lot of the sales momentum, and suffered through some pretty bland art while the Image style was taking off.

Gerard Jones was dealing with things outside of his control as well, such as that Hal was "aged" by previous stories to where he was one of the older of the Silver Age heroes, having to tie in with "Darkstars" and "Flash" when their sales were low, and probably his own stress (he was writing a lot of comic back then, making GL as pretty bland comic. After the "Death of Superman" and "Knightfall" (as well as the endless Big Events in the X-Men and the Spider-Clone), Jones was asked to come up with a Big Story that would shake up the book. He submitted a storyline that was accepted, put into production, advertised and by some accounts was drawn and inked before Editor Kevin Dooley said he didn't go far enough.

Mike Carlin, Paul Levitz, Archie Goodwin, and Dennis O'Neil (the three lead editors of DC and the EIC) put together the plot of "Emerald Twilight" literally at the last minute, which was eventually scripted by Ron Marz. This explains why the art for the three issue sequence is so poor.

Sales went up, as they always do when you do a Big Deal, and they settled in about 25% higher than they had been with Hal. I still think they would have gone up that amount with a change in creative teams, but who can say at this point.

Mister Six, whom all the girls

00:41 / 03.05.04

I've also read that Emerald Twilight had a completely different ending originally.

I've always really liked Green Lantern, Hal especially. But the multitude of other GLs never bugged me. The only thing that did was Kyle's terrible costume/hair. My big complaint with the character is that outside of the Archive editions, there are no good stories. I mean, Bats has numerous trades like Year One, DKR, Hawkman has Hawkworld by Tim Truman, Wonder Woman has that Goerge Perez book, etc. I've stood in a comic shop many a time trying to find a fix for the 'Man, GL is cool, I wanna read a cool GL story' and coming out empty handed (except for the Alan Moore stuff).

What the character needs is a good writer. Grant and Winnick did great things. They're good writers. Geoff Johns is also a fantastic super hero writer. He got me to like Hawkman and the Flash and even JSA until the artist change after Black Reign.

So I think Hal coming back will be a good thing for people who like the idea of Green Lantern but cannot find any issues to read.

17:20 / 03.05.04

There was that Neil Gaiman Green Lantern story that came out a couple years back (after having been on ice for years before that).

I have it, but can only remember that Nighthawk has a cameo, as well as the Golden Age JSA members being in the book.
I can't recall if it was an Alan Scott story or not.

I also still can't figure out why there hasn't been a Green Lantern movie, since it's something that seems MADE for CGI effects.

15:53 / 04.05.04

Grant, are you talking about the one where Green Lantern and Superman took a "wacky magical journey" through the world inside the power ring?

Haus of Mystery

16:58 / 04.05.04

It is weird that there has never been a 'great' GL story. there's enough goddamn potential.

Matthew Fluxington

18:05 / 04.05.04

I honestly don't get why some people get so excited about Hal Jordan - he was always a very bland character, not too much personality. I've always thought of him as being a pretty generic superhero cipher whose appeal came from the ring, the corps, and a well designed, iconic costume. Couldn't they just give Kyle Rayner the old costume, put some white in his hair, and call it a compromise?

18:09 / 04.05.04

It is weird that there has never been a 'great' GL story. there's enough goddamn potential.

The problem is that what aside from team books and occasional one-shots, GL has yet to be helmed by an A-list writer in the post-Watchmen era. What "great" GL stories there have been were produced back before comic writers were expected to be, you know, good writers by the standards writers of books have generally been held to. There was some genuinely inspired material in John Broome's 60s-era run on the book, but to enjoy it you do have to be pretty forgiving when it comes to the silver-agey dialogue, characterization, etc.

Matthew Fluxington

18:21 / 04.05.04

Maybe the reason that no one's ever bothered to write a "great" GL story is because there's no central conflict for the character that would lend itself to a good character-driven story. Also, Green Lantern doesn't really have any great villains. If Sinistro is the best they can do, then that's just sad!

It seems that someone would have to work hard at reinventing the character and adding new concepts to the franchise to make it interesting, which may be more effort than its worth.

18:22 / 04.05.04

Flux: I think Hal Jordan always came across as a cop, which was generally a pretty good thing, dramatically speaking. That's the whole dynamic with that Green Arrow/Green Lantern team-up -- GA was basically a leftist vigilante, a hippie version of Batman without the detective skills -- perfect foil for GL. Flash was a scientist. Superman may have been a cop, too, except he's a little more unique than that. Green Lantern, though, was a cop. A beat cop.

gridley: That might be the one. I honestly can barely remember anything besides a couple of the images -- I think the Golden Age Hawkman's skeleton is in there somewhere. Ah. Here's the rundown on it. I think that's the same one. Forgot that Eddie Campbell, Matt Wagner and Mike Allred all did art for it.

19:11 / 04.05.04

Maybe the reason that no one's ever bothered to write a "great" GL story is because there's no central conflict for the character that would lend itself to a good character-driven story. Also, Green Lantern doesn't really have any great villains. If Sinistro is the best they can do, then that's just sad!

I realize a lot of people have never read the 1970s Green Lantern series, but there are many great stories from that era. The fact that Hal was badly written in the 1990s doesn't mean he's a bad character.

And you want conflict and villians? How about the fact that Hal's girlfriend would frequently have her body hijacked by aliens to become the evil (and overtly dominatrix-like) Star Sapphire. He had to fight his own girlfriend! If that's not the epitome of superhero comics conflict, I don't know what is...

Haus of Mystery

20:00 / 04.05.04

And you can write a great story with any character, surely? I mean, Animal Man?

Matthew Fluxington

21:34 / 04.05.04

Most of my contact with Hal Jordan has been in post-crisis 80s comics and Justice League Europe, for the record.

Star Sapphire is alright, I guess. I don't remember very much about that character. That could be interesting, but the story would really need to be retold outside of continuity, wouldn't it? I think someone could probably pull off a good story with that plot thread.

I suppose that the best idea would be to play up that straight-arrow good cop persona, in the way that Grant Morrison played Cyclops' uptight personality to his advantage. That could be really interesting contrasted with the girlfriend who suddenly changes and becomes more aggressive.

Matthew Fluxington

21:37 / 04.05.04

Why don't they just bring back Green Lantern/Green Arrow? Those characters really don't seem to function well without one another, do they? It's a little like how Wolverine solo comics are completely boring because he needs to be a group dynamic to really shine.

22:40 / 04.05.04

And you can write a great story with any character, surely? I mean, Animal Man?

Indeed. To amplify my point above, the specific reason there haven't been any "great" GL stories isn't that the character is in any way deficient as comic characters go, rather it's that GL hasn't been dedicatedly written by any of the five or six writers who've written pretty much all the "great" superhero comics of the modern era. It's kind of sad to put it that way, but there really are shockingly few great writers working in the medium.

22:45 / 04.05.04

Why don't they just bring back Green Lantern/Green Arrow? Those characters really don't seem to function well without one another, do they?

There's something to that, certainly, but the schtick might get old if it were a monthly series again. Best to keep it more occasional, IMO. Actually I'm looking forward to some of the amusing conversation that can take place now, with the two of them both having spent considerable time dead. Hell, they can have Zombie's night out for all the post-dead JLA members, there's getting to be a crowd of them now...

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