Lower Decks

Would you believe it? I’m about to do a column about something I like that’s actually popular, that I don’t have to defend at all. Unbelievable! What’s the world coming to?!? Oh, and that topic’s Green Lantern.

Some of the comic book characters who were my early favorites were Spider-Man and Robin, but this was before I’d ever read a comic. Spider-Man I’d encountered a number of times on television, from a glimpse at his earliest live action work to the ‘Amazing Friends’ cartoon that the Ultimate comics revisited a few years back. Robin, from the 1960s TV show. I developed enough interest to be crushed when readers infamously phone-called Jason Todd to death, even though I had no idea at that point that the newspaper article I read had nothing to do with the Robin I’d loosely become attached to. My interest in these two traditionally youth-oriented characters wasn’t related, at least as far as I was concerned, with the very reasons they were created, for someone a little older than me to relate to, so it was pretty ironic that I became so interested in them. No, when I latched onto my first real favorite, from the time I got to read comics themselves, it was because…the dude wore my favorite color.

Yeah, so that’s my dirty little secret origin, the reason why I developed such an affinity for Green Lantern.

In middle school, during activity period, my first real interaction with other comics readers who weren’t my brothers, all I had were a few DC reprints of early Hal Jordan stories, plus a back issue featuring Hector Hammond, the genius whose head grew (literally) as the years progressed (to the point where he really can’t, these days, er, support himself). Anyway, while I proudly represented my interest with this meager offering, the rest of the group had their collections filled with Punisher and other such participants in the violence wave that was still following the late 1980s fad begun with ‘The Dark Knight Returns.’ They didn’t quite openly mock me, but it wasn’t hard to notice that they didn’t exactly respect my choice.

Green Lantern in the early 1990s was certainly an established character. He was respected for a run twenty years earlier he’d had with Green Arrow as part of a social wave of stories that helped comics begin to mature. Hal Jordan himself was the second incarnation of the character, after the original (and quite different) Alan Scott version from the Golden Age. Jordan’s version, along with Barry Allen, helped usher in the Silver Age. But he wasn’t popular. He was fairly obscure, known only by his fans, despite a number of stories from DC that had attempted to emphasize the Green Lantern Corps, including ‘Cosmic Odyssey,’ which even today is remembered as the story that saw John Stewart let a planet be destroyed on his watch (which was even depicted in the ‘Justice League Unlimited’ cartoon). (It’s worth noting that the Manhunters, a key part of Green Lantern/Guardians of the Universe lore, in ‘Invasion,’ did DC’s version of Marvel’s ‘Secret Invasion,’ oh, about a decade sooner.)

Anyway, it was to the point where, in 1994, Hal Jordan was used to help bring Superman back and then cast aside during ‘Emerald Twilight,’ leading to a streamlining of Green Lantern mythos and the introduction of a modern version known as Kyle Rayner.

Okay, that might sound more flippant than I mean it to. I had a chance to read comics around this time, and ‘Emerald Twilight’ was the first run of Green Lantern that I got to read on a more or less regular basis. I thought it was a great time to be a fan. I had no problem trading Hal for something new, and Ron Marz did a terrific job. Kyle was my Green Lantern, as a reader. I was familiar with Hal’s adventures, but was more than happy to actually read Kyle. There was a campaign to bring Hal back almost from the point he was taken out, even though technically his transformation into Parallax (with villain status firmly established in ‘Zero Hour,’ which at the time was in itself the sequel to ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ and is still a testament to the career of Dan Jurgens) kept him around for years, until his death in ‘The Final Night’ (another event comic that’s still a must-read), and first resurrection as the Spectre. Okay, so he wasn’t exactly Green Lantern then.

Anyway, Kyle (and the demise of Hal’s good boy reputation) did start the positive buzz going. Green Lantern still wasn’t setting the comics world on fire, but at least, in the community, he was starting to earn some real respect. For ten years, Kyle carried the torch (even garnered some mainstream publicity when Judd Winick began writing him and introduced a gay character in memory of his late friend and fellow ‘Real World’ alumnus Pedro). Then Geoff Johns came around and decided the time was right for Hal to return.

It might have had to do with the fact that Kevin Smith had already resurrected Green Arrow to great critical acclaim and sales success. I don’t know. Before ’Green Lantern Rebirth,’ Johns was mostly known for some controversial Marvel writing on ‘Avengers’ and co-scripting ‘JSA,’ not to mention back-to-basics runs with The Flash and Teen Titans. I don’t know. But Johns brought Hal Jordan back and in the process began to unfold a complicated new version of the mythos. While I would have been perfectly content for Kyle to remain Green Lantern, by the time I was finished reading ‘Rebirth,’ I understood how much he was actually doing with his story, from explaining Parallax to be the manifestation of Fear (or the color yellow, thus explaining a confusing bit of the lore of years past and setting the stage for the spectrum of rings that now includes orange, red, blue, indigo, and even black, plus a better integration of the Star Sapphire, which at one point was just a villainous version of Hal’s perennial girlfriend Carol Ferris) to bringing back Sinestro, a character who is as important to the Green Lantern saga as the destruction of Krypton is to Superman.

During those early days, though, reading Green Lantern in my own little bubble, I enjoyed reading the letters columns (hey, some indy books still remember those), and the fans seemed to like comparing Green Lantern to Star Wars. Maybe it was a little difficult to see back then, but by the time Johns came around, it was a lot easier. Hal’s origin, how he got his power ring from Abin Sur after he crashed to his death on Earth and was trained by Sinestro, the “greatest Green Lantern,” until his need for order made him a villain, was made into a cartoon movie, finally, last year, and so it became easier for a wider audience to sample the mythology.

Johns continued writing the ongoing Green Lantern series, and worked on the seeds he’d planted in ‘Rebirth,’ which gradually grew stronger and stronger buzz, until it became a verifiable bestseller, culminating in ‘Blackest Night,’ which became a true rival to the dominant stories in Marvel, with even spin-off series ‘Green Lantern Corps’ (a title DC had resisted supporting for decades) enjoying strong sales. Finally, Hollywood is even developing a movie, which in Marvel terms might not be all that significant (almost any character of theirs can get one these days), but for DC is practically unparalleled. Superman and Batman are well-established with audiences, but even Wonder Woman has only ever had a TV shows, decades old at this point. ‘The Flash’ lasted one season. (Any, um, other examples? ‘Swamp Thing’ doesn’t necessarily count. Okay, so there was also ‘Birds of Prey.’)

So it’s a good time to be a fan of Green Lantern. A great time, even. Frankly, I don’t know exactly how it happened, but it’s pretty awesome. Hal Jordan’s creation ushered in a new kind of hero, a super cop (but not, sadly, Jackie Chan), technically just one of many such versions of the same character (thereby acknowledging the secret behind the entire superhero genre), but one who has managed to endure for decades despite this apparent flaw. Hal has been replaced three different times as Earth’s Green Lantern, by Stewart and Rayner and also, infamously, by Guy Gardner, whose popularity has kept him around as one of the original anti-heroes of the modern era. And there’s lots more alien Green Lanterns worth knowing, too, not to mention, lately, thanks to Johns a whole spectrum worth exploring. The saddest part is knowing that it probably won’t be very soon that a guru like Johns will come around to make things quite so lively.

But hey, he’s here now, and that’s a good reason to celebrate Green Lantern. ‘Blackest Night’ is over next month, a culmination of five years work. It’s not the end of the ride, though, and for new readers, there’s plenty to explore, from how Hal ended up on the road to ‘Rebirth’ in the first place to his glory days of comparative innocence, the classic ‘Emerald Dawn’ version of his origin (though ‘Secret Origin’ as told by Johns might seem to make it irrelevant), even Green Lantern/Green Arrow, which even today still defines GA Oliver Queen (making way for an upcoming arc that may return that one to prominence, too).

So that’s my popularity story, something I was in on the ground floor with and am happy to continue riding, wherever it leads.