• Hal Jordan
• Guy Gardner
• John Stewart
• Kyle Rayner

I read a few of the stories this afternoon, and these panels from the Green Lantern story in issue 1, “The Adventures of Luckless Lenore,” made me laugh out loud.

Green Lantern’s sidekick, Doiby, has been trying to romance Lenore, whose “bad luck” seems to be engineered. At this point he’s been captured. I didn’t even notice the name of the bar the first time through, it was the menu that caught me off-guard.

• Whiskey
• Beer
• Whiskey & Beer
• Whiskey & Milk
• Whiskey & Egg
• Whiskey, Beer, Egg & Milk

I rushed into the other room to show Katie, and she immediately said, “Spam, spam, bacon and spam!”

On a related note, I recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons DC has released so few Golden-Age books in Archive Editions is that the original art is rarely available. In the 50s or 60s, they started keeping their own archives, but for the stuff from the 40s, they generally have to take an actual copy of the comic book—crappy printing, faded newsprint and all—scan it, re-ink it, and re-color it. This book actually has credits for “black-and-white reconstruction” and “color reconstruction.”

I’ve been avoiding the miniseries because, in general, I’m of the opinion that it’s better to move on than to go back. Yeah, it took me years to warm up to Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern, but I’m not of the opinion that Hal Jordan is the one, true GL. That said, what they (DC Editorial) did to Hal was basically insane and spitting on their own character.

A decade later, DC is “correcting the mistake.” And who does DC go to when they need to revamp or repair a hopelessly tangled character? Geoff Johns. He did it with the Flash’s Rogues. He did it with Hawkman. Heck, he even tried to bring back Hal as the Spectre. And now he’s straightening out the GL mess.

OK, here’s the background you need to know: The Green Lanterns were a galactic police force, formed by aliens who became known as the Guardians of the Universe. Each GL had a power ring which, controlled by their will, would create anything they imagined (though generally green and temporary). The rings were charged from lantern-shaped batteries which themselves drew power from the Guardians’ main battery on their home planet, Oa. Because the main battery had a “necessary” yellow impurity, the rings had no effect on anything yellow. The key requirements for a Green Lantern: a strong will and a complete lack of fear.

In the early 1990s, DC decided they needed to revamp the character and get rid of Hal. Really get rid of him, so it was clear it wasn’t just a publicity stunt (like killing Superman, or breaking Batman’s back). They gave writer Ron Marz something like 3 issues to make Hal go insane, wipe out as much of the GL mythos as possible, and hand the ring to a new character. They’d just destroyed Hal’s hometown, so he tried to recreate it with the ring, killed off the rest of the Green Lanterns and most of the Guardians (somehow he missed the other two human GLs), and the last surviving Guardian handed the last remaining ring to a guy he saw in an alley. (No, really.) Incidentally, that ring had no weakness against yellow.

Hal spent the next few years as a villain called Parallax (because he had two rings), actually destroyed the universe at one point, and finally sacrificed himself to save the world in the crossover-of-the-year. Kyle, meanwhile, spent a lot of time learning the ropes, though at one point he was told he would one day surpass Hal because he knew something Hal did not: fear.

Somewhere along the line Kyle found another GL ring—one that could replicate itself—and started rebuilding the corps. (This included handing a new ring to John Stewart, now working with the Justice League). And Hal’s soul has become bound to the Spectre, the spirit of God’s Wrath.

So how are they untangling this?

In the distant past, a creature of pure fear came into being. It wiped out entire civilizations, creating more fear and feeding itself, until the future Guardians gathered together enough will and imprisoned it. Emotional energy has a spectrum: will appears green, and fear appears yellow. That creature became the “yellow impurity” in the main power battery for the Green Lanterns. To prevent anyone from trying to break it out, the Guardians simply allowed the rest of the universe to forget it over millions of years.

Eventually, it escaped, and corrupted—or perhaps took over—Hal Jordan. By the time Kyle got his ring, it was free—which was why his ring had no weakness against yellow. Now Parallax is completely free, able to control all the Green Lanterns through their rings, except for one: Kyle. One character said something like, “It’s hard for fear to sneak up on you if you already know it.” And thus the Sandman’s prediction comes true.

Now, ordinarily, I’d look at “oh, he was possessed when he committed genocide” as a cop-out. From the little I’ve read, though, it’s tied so thoroughly into the mythos that it makes more sense than the original story.

And that’s not something I was expecting.

This is from Flash #276 (1979), right after the Flash’s wife, Iris, has been killed. Barry goes straight to the JLA satellite HQ and asks Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern to bring her back from the dead. Hal, being sane at the time, refuses. (The others don’t have the ability.)

The thing is, in the past decade or so, Hal Jordan has become DC’s poster boy for the phrase, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He’s tried to recreate a major city and its inhabitants, destroyed a planet, destroyed the universe and attempted to build his own universe to replace it — and that’s just before he died. He’s now tied with the Spectre — a powerful supernatural being — and he’s brought at least one person (Green Arrow) back from the dead, and mindwiped the entire human race to forget the identity of the current Flash. He’s probably done even more questionable stuff in his own series or in JSA.