Celebrating Green Lantern's 75th Birthday With Cake

The party continues for Green Lantern's 75th anniversary but let's face it, what is a party without cake?  And what is a geek party without geek cake?  So, in an exciting first for Flodo's Page, I would like to welcome a very special guest writer to the blog.  She is the undisputed queen of geek cakes and my long-time Super-Blog Team-Up comrade, Karen Williams from Between The Pages Blog, the most delicious nerd culture fansite on the web.  In honour of GL's 75th Karen has a real treat in store for us - five of the finest Green Lantern themed cakes ever baked. So without further ado...

KW:       Back in 1940, Martin Nodell, a young comic book creator who had only been working for All-American Publications for a short period of time, went to the opera and saw Richard Wagner's classic The Ring of the Nibelung. He left with the idea for a superhero whose powers came from a magic ring. From that idea, Martin went on to create a new superhero called Green Lantern. That was 75 years ago this summer! So today, we are celebrating Green Lantern's 75th birthday with cake!

Alan Scott was the original Green Lantern. Here is Alan with his famous Golden Age counter parts: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash. Talk about a winning hand. The awesome Justice Society of America / Poker Hand Cake was made by Annette.

By the 1950s, interest in superheroes was waning. So In 1951, DC Comics published the last appearance of the Justice Society of America. This was Alan Scott’s last Golden Age appearance. This probably would have been Green Lantern’s last appearance ever if not for Julius Schwartz. Julie was an agent for famous science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft. But, he was also a comic book editor. Since science fiction was popular, he decide to try to revive golden age characters like Green Lantern, The Flash, The Atom, and Hawkman by creating new versions of these classic characters and giving them a science fiction spin. In 1959, a new Green Lantern – Hal Jordan appeared. Hal was given his ring by a dying alien, had adventures in space, worked for a little blue men, and was part of The Green Lantern Corp. This great cake, made by Jo Takes The Cake, is based on the Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern’s costume.

 

This stunning cake, made by Matty Cakes, recreated Green Lantern's power battery.

 

 

In 2011, Green Lantern stared in his own feature film. This cool cake, made by Erivana Cakes, features the lantern, glove, and power ring from the movie.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Green Lantern’s popularity was dropping again. In 2004, up and coming comic book writer Geoff Johns became the writer of Green Lantern. He began a 10 year run on Green Lantern that would add tons of new characters to the Green Lantern universe and restore Green Lantern’s popularity. For years, the Green Lantern Corps had green power rings and Sinestro, the renegade Green Lantern, had a yellow power ring. Geoff Johns created a whole series of power rings. In addition to Green there is Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Indigo, Violet, Black, and White. Each ring color is powered by a particular emotion. Green = Willpower, Red = Rage, Orange = Avarice, Blue = Hope, Indigo = Compassion, Violet = Love, Black = Death, and White = Life. This wedding cake, made by the legendary Carlo’s Bake Shop (home of Buddy, the Cake Boss), is based on the cover to Green Lantern 18. It features Green Lantern, Star Sapphire, and Larfleeze.

It has been 75 years, since Martin Nodell, sat in the audience of an opera and dreamed of a superhero with a magic ring. Like that ring, Green Lantern’s first 75 years have been magical. Happy Birthday Alan Scott and Thank You Martin for creating magic!

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And thank you Karen for treating us to such wonderful collection of cakes.  You can find more from Karen on her fabulous Between The Pages blog, and if you pop over there right now you might even come across a Green Lantern anniversary guest post from yours truly!

And don't forget to check out all the other fansites and podcasts that are joining Karen and me in celebrating 75 illustrious years of Green Lantern.

Duty To The Corps - 75 YEARS OF GREEN LANTERN

As the Green Lantern 75th anniversary celebrations continue I felt it was high time to pay our respects to the rank and file of the Green Lantern Corps.  These are the men and woman (and sentient beings of all descriptions) who you spot in the background of panels.  They put their lives on the line in the defence of universal peace day after day and year after year without aplomb or accolade.  There was never a more true example of this than the second Green Lantern of Earth.  A man who struggled to find his way in a universe that seemed very different to the world he grew up in.  A man who did his duty and served his Corps faithfully at all times.

 

 

Let me guess.  You’re thinking, “That doesn’t sound much like the Guy Gardner I know!”  And you’d be right.  The hero I’m writing about, the second Green Lantern of Earth, was a man called Charlie Vicker.  Charlie first appeared in Green Lantern, vol. 2 #55 (1967) and faced down evil for almost 30 years until his death at the hands of Darksied’s son in Green Lantern, vol. 3 #75 (1996).  If I were to liken him to a character in Star Trek, Charlie would be a ‘red shirt’ who served under Kirk in the 60’s TV series and in all of the 80s movies, and then continued to man the Enterprise throughout Captain Picard’s tenure in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

 

 

Charlie’s story is touched with tragedy throughout.  When we first came across him he was an actor who had landed a role playing Green Lantern in a TV programme.  He was a bit of a playboy who preferred the party life to old fashioned hard work.  Although he looked every inch the hero physically, he was the last person you’d expect to step up and be counted in a crunch.  In fact, on an occasion that he couldn’t even be bothered to turn up to record the GL TV show, he sent his brother to take his place for the day.  No-one could ever have guessed that would be the fateful day when enemies of the Green Lantern Corps would mistake Charlie’s brother for the true Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, and strike him down with a deadly energy beam fired from a spaceship floating hundreds of miles above the Earth.

It was to be the turning point in the guilt laden actor’s life.  He joined Hal on a mission to avenge his brother and when the real Green Lantern gave him a copy of his own power ring to protect him in the fight, it didn’t take Charlie long to realise he had found his new calling.

Not that it was an easy ride being a member of the GLC.  Fans have often wondered why there can be 3, 4 or even 5 Green Lanterns all born on Earth and simultaneously serving the Corps, and seemingly assigned to protect their local sector 2814.  No such luck for our Charlie.  In their infinite wisdom (in the days when there was only one Green Lantern assigned to each space sector) the Guardians of the Universe decided to assign Charlie to sector 3319.  For much of the time he served there he never came into contact with a single humanoid, much less an actual human being.  He found life tough and in his numerous dark moments he wanted to jack it all in and hand back his power ring.  But he never did.  The duty came first.  Eventually Vicker learnt to look beyond the surface and realised that some of the giant bugs and odd looking furballs he worked so hard to protect shared the same moral values he did, even if they didn’t have recognisable facial features to show it.

 

 

Charlie Vicker lived through many of the major touchstones in the Corps’ modern history.  When the Central Power Battery on Oa was destroyed after the trial of Sinestro, Charlie lost his powers along with the rest of Corps.  Unlike the majority of his brethren, however, he never even knew what had occurred.  He had been entrenched in a battle protecting the inhabitants of 3319 and was unable to heed a summons to Oa for the trial.  To all intents and purposes he was abandoned in space without explanation.  Even then, Charlie Vicker rose above his predicament and drew on his previous skills as an actor to inspire the local population to victory against their oppressors with tales from the works of Shakespere and other noble plays.

 

Much of Charlie’s life happened off panel, of course.  Comic Vine puts him as appearing in eleven original comics (and several reprinted collections) throughout his entire tenure.  Of those eleven issues he is the featured character in only five.  Truth be told, I have read the issues and I’m not even certain I can find him in them all.  He’s the superhero equivalent of Where’s Wally? (or Where’s Waldo to my transatlantic pals!).  But continuity tells you Charlie Vicker was right there, representing all the Green clad warriors whose time served didn’t involve tossing in their ring every five minutes or socking a Guardian in the jaw before breakfast.

Even after the Corps tragically fell to a crazed Hal Jordan who internalised their power source and took the supervillain name of Parallax, Charlie refused to throw in the towel.  Together with a handful of former Lanterns led by John Stewart, he joined the Darkstars, a sort of cousin of the GL Corps whose abilities came from an advanced exoskeleton suit instead of a power ring.

 

 

This was to prove to be his final undoing.  The Darkstars themselves suffered one setback after another until their numbers were whittled down to just eighteen recruits. They were to unable to mount a credible defence when they were attacked by Darksied’s son, Grayven, and his murderous horde.  Ironically even the death of Charlie Vicker, violently and bloody though it was, merely played as background art to the dialogue captions of two more prominent characters from the story.  Regardless, he died a hero’s death doing the job he signed up to do – saving a world that was not his own from certain destruction.

 

 

So charge your tankard with sector 3319’s famous Hwagaagaaian scrumble and join me in a toast.  To a man who came from simpler times.  A man who turned his back on fame and fortune to do what he knew was right.  A man who journeyed far from home, upholding this self-same mission on planets far away from his native Earth.  Protecting people that were inconceivably different in appearance and culture to the friends and family he left behind.  A man who found new family in the Corpsmen of every species who shared his righteous mission. And a man who ultimately gave his life for that mission.  This man was Charlie Vicker.  This man was Green Lantern.

 

 

 

 

 

Status: Dissipated

There have been many poignant moments in Green Lantern comics. Death and Lanterns are never far apart, as this long list of fallen heroes posted at the GL Wiki goes to prove.

But for my money, the saddest moment of them all comes in Green Lantern #224 when a brave little gas bubble sacrificed himself to protect his fellow Corpsmen and to save the universe from certain destruction (for the second time!).  In this, the final issue of GL volume 2, the Corps inadvertantly cause the destruction of the central power battery on Oa.  Mere minutes before they had taken the impactful decision to execute the renegade Lantern Sinestro for crimes of genocide.  What they did not realise is that the Guardians of the Universe had built a failsafe into the battery that prevented wielders of the green light from harming anyone from the Sinestro's home world of Korugar.  The reasons were noble in their intention but the disgraced former GL had somehow corrupted the Guardian's programme in the final moments before his death causing the power source to become a ticking time bomb of universal destruction.

To make matters worse, the only people who could explain what was going on and how it could be stopped where the Guardians themselves. Unfortunatley they had recently retreated to another dimension to meditate and reflect on the purpose of their immortal lives.  It was for this reason that Flodo Span had volunteered to give up his corporeal being in order to transport Hal Jordan to that other dimension.

The only problem with his plan was that Flodo would need his power ring to restore himself after the jump and with the central battery in meltdown there was no way he could get the vital recharge he needed.  This was going to be a one way trip and Flodo was only too aware of the risk involved.

It's strikes me as sad that Hal, a simple passenger on the duo's transdimensional journey, is too busy admiring the wonderous sights around him to realise that his companion has given his last moments to ensuring the Earthman's mission is a successful one.

According to the mythos and every website that has ever passed opinion on the subject in the days since Joey Cavaleri and Gil Kane originally penned our dramatic saga, Flodo is gone. Dissipated means dead.  Steve Englehart was obviously so sad that he quit the book at the end of the previous issue despite a three year unbroken run. I guess he just couldn't stand to see Flodo go.

But I like to think the gaseous hero has not disappeared for good. Instead he is floating around out there.  An infinite number of sentient particles that may some day breach the dimensional border once more and find his way back to Oa to take his place among his brethren and don the power ring he so richly deserves to wear.  For Flodo Span is a being without fear.  He is Green Lantern.

Happy Rebirthday! (The First Day of the Rest of my Life)

27 October 2004.  Although I didn’t realise it at the time, this date heralded the biggest world changing event in my life outside of my wedding day and the births of my children.  For it was on this day that DC Comics released Green Lantern: Rebirth #1, the first issue in a six issue story recounting Hal Jordan’s return to the role of Green Lantern. My life and the long-suffering patience of my family can be divided into two parts – ‘Before Rebirth’ and ‘After Rebirth’.  Before Rebirth I was a young twenty something with a wide range of hobbies and interests, one of which happened to be reading comics.  In fact, I enjoying reading standard text novels far more and I got a lot of my superhero fix from reading novelizations of comic book stories such as Death of Superman.  If anyone asked, my favourite heroes where Batman and Punisher “because those guys were dark and they didn’t need superpowers to get the job done”.  Then Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver came along and nonchalantly tossed a phenomenon right there in my lap.  From that moment forwards I have been an obsessive.  Obsessed with comic books in general, and more importantly, obsessed with all things Green Lantern.  Check out some of the other posts on this blog if you don’t believe me!

The funny thing is, Hal Jordan isn’t even my favourite Green Lantern.   He isn’t even my favourite Green Lantern from Earth (that honour goes to John Stewart), or indeed my second favourite (Kyle Rayner).  But the book itself unleashed something within me that cannot be quelled or sedated.  I’m not going to try and tell you the story contained with the pages of Green Lantern: Rebirth.  I know my fellow GL blogger Myron Rumsey of The Blog of Oa intends to publish a celebratory post today as well.  Myron is a die-hard Hal fan and I admire his writing and his blog very much and expect he has provided an exceptional recap of the book that I can piggyback on.  So stop, go read his post and make sure you come back here when you are finished.  Ok then… welcome back.

What I do want to tell you about is why Rebirth lit the touch paper within me that quickly became an everlasting green flame.  First I have to tackle the art.  When it comes to getting under the skin of Green Lantern, Ethan Van Sciver is untouchable.  There are actually a few artists out there who I probably like more, Ivan Reis being one of them.  But Reis nor anybody else could have done justice to this book like Van Sciver did.  I can imagine Geoff Johns’ receiving his artist’s pages through the mail and thinking “Wow, I kind of thought I knew what I was trying to say here but Ethan just nailed it better than I had even imagined possible”.  Let me home in on one specific concept to demonstrate what I mean.   With Hal back in the green there are now four Green Lanterns from Earth.  In another creative team’s hands they could all be said to wield the same power – ring energy is ring energy, right?  No.  As Johns tells us, each Lantern’s power is influenced and enhanced by his own personality.  It is all very well to write this in a script but Van Sciver went to town on the concept and brought it to life in a way that I think has not been replicated since.  John Stewart is an architect, a designer, he builds his constructs in minute detail.  Guy Gardner is a wild force and his constructs burn and flare just as he does.  Without even reading the narrative textboxes we already know from the art alone how each GL thinks.  What fuels them.  How they look at the world.  To capture that emotion in such a unique way is, I think, one reason why Rebirth should be considered some of the best art that comic books have to offer.

And if that weren’t enough there is always this…

…and this…

…and this…

…and this.

So that’s the art.  But, let’s face it, Green Lantern: Rebirth would not exist at all if it were not for the brilliant and unusual mind of Geoff Johns.  My obsession is entirely borne out this writer’s own obsession.  He opened me up to a history that I had never really considered before.  I started reading Green Lantern on and off through the Kyle Rayner era.  Kyle was my guy, he was young and essentially cool but with a touch of the Peter Parkers about him.  I was well aware that he was the latest in a long legacy but I didn’t really give it much thought.  With Johns arrival on the book I could think of nothing else.  I know it has been said elsewhere but it should not be underestimated the risk that Geoff Johns took when he brought Hal back.  He could have gone down the traditional comic book route of retconning all that came before out of existence.  He didn’t.  Johns took every bit of mythology from every era of GL.  Golden-Age, Silver-Age, Bronze-Age, Modern-Age.  He took them all and threw them all into the mixing pot.  He gave it a stir, blended the ingredients together a little, and poured out the glorious creation that is Green Lantern: Rebirth.  And not only did he manage to hold on to the essence of the last 60 odd years of the character’s portrayal in comics and bring back the most famous iteration of said character in a move that many thought was impossible; hindsight shows that he also sewed the seeds for the next ten years of his unrivalled story-telling.  Wonderful stories like The Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night have their origins right here in Rebirth.

I’ve written other blogs about how much I like to scrutinise both the real and imagined history of Green Lantern.  It appeals to the geek in me.  Is there a hardcore comic book fan that doesn’t spend hours deliberating over continuity and who begat who, killed who and brought who and who back to life?  It was Johns that opened my eyes to the endless possibilities that Green Lantern mythos contained for just this activity.  Sure I’d read quite a bit of Kyle’s run and had come across Hal and the rest here and there, mostly via Justice League but I hadn’t sat down and blown my mind with a billion years of continuity.  And I hadn’t respected how much ground Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps had covered, even in the last twenty or thirty years, until Geoff Johns tied it all up in to one neat little package for me.

So that’s the history bit.  Green Lantern: Rebirth has it in spades and I love it.  But that’s not the main attraction.  The real reason I hold Rebirth as one of the finest comic books ever written is the feeling it gives me every time I read it.  The characters contained within these pages are the very definition of ‘superhero’.  In the face of the untold adversity they stand tall.  In the shadow of evil they burn brightly.  In the space of these six issues the Green Lanterns come together to combat two of the greatest enemies they have ever had to contend with, namely Parallax and Sinestro.  They show valour akin to knights of old.  Strength worthy of ancient Greek titans.  Ferocity reminiscent of Viking warriors.  And an unswayable determination matched only by mighty modern champion himself, Superman.  In short, the heroes of GL:Rebirth  are truly the stuff of legend.  And let me assure you, as if there was any doubt, the bad guys get well and truly beaten!

There are a dozens of scenes I could point to illustrate my meaning more clearly.  Hal Jordan battling for his soul against Parallax and Spectre at the same time as both entities fought to possess him will always stick out in my mind.  Green Arrow donning a power ring and mustering all of his will to construct a single arrow of green energy and drive it into the chest of Sinestro is another.  And if my respect for Green Arrow was raised measurably through this act, my respect for Green Lanterns and the effort it takes to use the ring every day was raised a thousand fold.  Guy Gardner purging his Vuldarian DNA.  John Stewart standing up for his beliefs against a disapproving Justice League and taking down the aforementioned Superman with a pinpoint accurate beam of energy.  The list goes on and on.

As well as establishing the individual traits that make each character remarkable, all of these vignettes share a common subtext which can be boiled down to two words, ‘The Corps’.  This was a concept that had been essentially missing from all the Green Lantern titles I had read in recent years.  I’d read team books like Justice League, or the more nurturing Teen Titans.  I’d followed team-ups and crossovers were allies band together against a mutual foe.  But I had never read a book that stirred within me a sense of unity like I experienced reading Rebirth.  This was something I wanted to be a part of and to read more of.  Geoff Johns understood that Green Lanterns aren’t just a legacy of characters sharing the same name.  For all of their differences they are bound as closely as any blood-tie.  And together they will face down anybody.  His Lanterns don’t reel off their oath in secret, charging their rings in some hidden broom cupboard.  They roar it proudly in the field of battle, standing side by side with their fellow Corpsmen and revelling in the association.  “Beware our power…”

Frankly, I’ll never look back.  Hundreds of unwritten issues awaited me.  Hours of trawling back-issue bins.  Literally thousands of pounds of hardcovers, trade papers backs, variant covers, T-Shirts, prints, cups, caps, figures, belt buckles and DVDs featured in my newly discovered life. …And one crazy little blog that I am pretty damn proud of!   On 27 October 2004 a bright green light was switched on and it has been shining over my universe ever since.

Oh, and that guy Batman I professed to love so much, the dark shadow of superhero comics?  Well…

Beware their power, Green Lantern's light!

IT’S BEEN EMOTIONAL

When is a Lantern not a Lantern?

When she’s the inspiration behind a global social resistance movement, of course.

This article is a bit of a first for Flodo’s Page.  It will be the only time in over two years of blogging that I will have featured a DC Comics character that has never appeared in any Green Lantern title.  Ever. 

Let me go back to the beginning.  The Movement slipped under my radar when it was released.  It was marketed along with Green Team, a book that I was disappointed to discover had nothing to do with either Green Lantern or Green Arrow.  With that my interest in either title was tossed to the wayside.  It was only with the growing critical acclaim on Twitter (particularly from one Mr. @Fotocub) and with the intoxicating enthusiasm of the Raging Bullets podcast that I started to wonder if I had missed out on something.  Curiosity led me to flip through an issue about half way through the run.  My attention was immediately taken by a masked character who seemed to glow a certain shade of green at one moment and an oddly familiar yellow the next.  Was this some kind of White Lantern?

I had just been introduced to the remarkable Virtue.

Virtue is the leader of The Movement, known to the public as Channel M.  At the group’s core is a small band of metapowered young people who come together to protect and be a voice for the disenfranchised.  In creating the character Gail Simone has managed to develop the most original spin on the Emotional Spectrum since Geoff Johns wrote Blackest Night.  And I realise that is no small claim on my part.

The girl’s superpower is described as “riding emotions”.  Twelve issues is shamefully short for a title as high in calibre as The Movement and not nearly enough to give Virtue’s origins and abilities the attention they deserve.  As a result there is much that is still unclear.  What we do know is that her gift is handed down through the woman in her family from one generation to the next.  She can detect emotions in others and harness them.  Her body is transformed into an essence powered by the people she reads.   In her spirit form Virtue can fly and we’ve witnessed her trail waves of emotion like a bloodhound on the scent.  She has changed her size, growing huge on fuel of red fury.

She can also take control of the feelings she encounters.  She was able to siphon the fear of being buried alive from her friend Vengence Moth and transfer it into a would be attacker, leaving the villain paralysed by terror.

The girl, known as Holly to her friends, does not have to rely soley on her special abilities either.  She is very apt at administering a swift running shoe to the jaw too when the occassion demands it, and leads her team from the front in a conflict.  Mind you, you can't solve every problem with a superpowered light show or a round of fisticuffs.  Virtue shows true leadership quality in her understanding of what can be achieved through dialogue.  Her favourite venue for peace negotiations is the milk and doughnut store!

I get the impression that Simone is very fond of her creation.  The character is representative of a number of minority or maligned sections of society but she is not written as a token gesture to any of them.   She stands up proudly for those who will not or cannot stand up for themselves.  In issue #12 Simone takes time out from having to wrap up a story that could have happily gone on for many more months to share some of Virtue’s history with us.  The character’s motivations are integral to the whole premise of this book and it is only fitting that we get to learn some of what shaped her into becoming a heroine for the folks who live on the wrong side of the tracks.  In her own young life she overcame traumas that no child should have to face and betrayals that no child could understand.  Much of this was a dubious consequence of her “gift”.

But against all this, it is also her gift that allowed her to move on.  It empowered her to help those around her.  Emotions are laid bare to Virtue and because of this she can see the smallest spark of love or hope in anybody, even in the worst that humanity has to offer.  While the likes of Superman profess to believe there is good in everyone, Virtue can actually see it.  With this ability as a constant presence in her life how could she not make a stand for the people who are looked down on by society for who they are or the circumstances they have come from?  This, dare I say, is the true virtue of the character, not the fact that she can shoot beams of concentrated energy from her fingertips.

The image at the top of this post of Virtue unleashing Green willpower on a hapless Sinestro is a little deceptive.  In her private moments she dreams of The Movement being accepted by the superhero community and standing shoulder to shoulder in battle alongside the Justice League.  They would quite literally come out of the shadows and into the light.  Her team protect "The Tweens", an area of the city that has been abandoned by the police and it's monied population.  The series ends on a high note when a detective she befriended observes that they will never change enough to fit in with the "justice people".  "Oh, I know...” Virtue replies, "but sooner or later, Captain, THEY are going to have to change to fit in with US."

And I for one hope they do.  It would be a travesty if we do not get to see more from The Movement in the DC Universe.  I want to read another volume of the self-named title and I also want to see the characters popping up in other books.  I am already writing Virtue’s first meeting with Earth’s Green Lanterns in my head.  Each would take to her a little differently and none of them would walk away from the meeting looking at the world exactly as they had before.  In the unlikely event that somebody from DC happens to read this blog I cannot make myself any clearer - Virtue’s debut appearance in a Green Lantern comic has got to happen.  The sooner the better too.

The Movement Vol. 1 is available on Comixology and at your local comic book store.