Today, I watched Green Lantern at the same theater where we’ve been watching a series of special screenings of the extended-edition Lord of the Rings movies. Afterward, thinking about the two ring-focused stories and the in-progress event comic book Flashpoint, I found myself imagining: What would The Lord of the Rings have been like as a modern “event” comic book like Final Crisis or Blackest Night?

No doubt it would have tie-ins, side stories, spinoffs, and a bunch of extra tie-ins added to plug the inevitable gaps in the schedule. Check out my full list at Speed Force!

Comic Cavalcade was an anthology series that ran from 1942 until 1954, publishing super-heroes and other adventures for the first six years. Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Green Lantern were the headliners. Earlier this year, DC reprinted the first three issues as The Comic Cavalcade Archives, Vol. 1. (At 100 pages per issue, it’s still a pretty big collection!) I bought a copy a few weeks ago, mainly for the Flash stories, and it finally arrived yesterday.

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.

Two panels from Comic Cavalcade #1

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. Continue reading

At the comic store this week I actually flipped through the current issue of Green Lantern: Rebirth. And I was shocked to find that it made sense.

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. Continue reading

I found this while looking for pictures to scan for some new profiles on my Flash site. It’s very interesting in light of where Hal Jordan has gone since:

[The Flash and Green Lantern argue over trying to reverse death]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.