Back Where It All Began - 75 YEARS OF GREEN LANTERN

In 1940, while much of the world was headed on a devastating course towards World War, a new hero burst into life in the pages of All-Americans Comics to “shed light upon dark evil.”  And 75 years later the legacy of this self-same hero continues to do just that.  In that time we have been introduced to literally hundreds of character baring the moniker of Green Lantern but I thought it would be a fitting 75^th anniversary tribute to take a look back at where it all began.

All-American Comics #16 has a cover date of July 1940 but according to that wonderful reference source Mike’s Amazing World of Comics the issue actually hit newspaper stands on May 21, 1940.  The book was a collection of humour and adventure romps that included original stories alongside reprints of older strip comics.  The cover art of most previous issues promised readers a rollicking good adventure but nothing compared to the thrilling noir of a masked, cloaked Alan Scott leaping perilously across an exposed girder straight into the muzzle of a loaded tommy gun.  The character’s origin tale is a whistle-stop tour of everything that ever went into a ‘boys’ own adventure’.

The Green Lantern opens with an explosive train crash orchestrated by a crooked businessman seeking revenge after losing out on a new construction contract.  The only survivor of the crash is his rival who is protected by the supernatural light emanating from a mysterious green railway lantern. The lantern speaks to the survivor, Alan Scott, in “an ageless, toneless voice”, recounting the details of its own magical history.  It first came to earth as a flaming meteor with prophetic abilities and was duly carved into a lantern shape by Chinese lamp maker with a reputation for sorcery.  Fearing the lamp was cursed, the lamp maker’s associates killed him and burned his possessions own to meet their only dreadful end to the mystic green flame.  The lamp next turns up many years later to grant sanity to a patient in a mental asylum.  The patient remoulds the lamp into a modern railway lantern which finally passes into the hands of Scott during that fateful train journey.  The lantern imbues him with extraordinary powers and recruits him to fight evil.  All this this in 3 pages of a comic book!  They don’t write ‘em like that anymore…

Despite the many developments and new directions introduced with Green Lantern over the course of the last 75 years it is pleasing to note some of today’s core character traits were established in this very first story.  The Lantern explains the nature of its gift to Alan, “Power shall be yours if you have faith in yourself.  Lose that faith and you shall lose the energetic power of the Green Lantern, for will power is the flame of Green Lantern”.  Without these words, penned by legendary writer Bill Finger, Geoff Johns might never have created the emotional spectrum and the landscape of the modern day Green Lantern universe might look very different indeed.  How could artist Martin Nodell have know, when he devised this character at the age of 25 under the pseudonym Mart Dellon, that it would go on to become his most famous creation. Nodell didn’t want his works in comics to stigmatise his chances of an advertising career.  And while we are discussing credits, much respect should be paid to Sheldon Moldoff for bringing us the gripping noir cover mentioned earlier. 

Under the green flame’s instruction Alan Scott fashions a ring from its metal that manifests his powers for 24 hours before being recharged at the green flame’s lantern source.  His first act as a newly appointed superhero is to swear vengeance on the saboteur responsible for the tragic deaths of his fellow train passengers.  The ring immediately flies him through the air to the villain’s hideaway.  It spirits him straight through the wall where he confronts the crook and his startled henchmen.  The flames protective green aura renders Alan impervious to bullets and a steel blade but he unwittingly discovers the green energy’s ‘Achilles heel’ when he is struck over the head by a simple wooden billy club.  This flaw in Green Lantern’s power set was published a full 3 years before Kryptonite was officially introduced to the Superman mythos and would be the forerunner to the Silver and Bronze Age Green Lantern Corps’ weakness to exert the powers over anything coloured yellow.

Of course, the hero was not down for long and Scott immediately bounced back with a flying kick that Bruce Lee would be proud of and a round of good old fashioned fisticuffs that soundly took care of his would be attackers.  Powered by his ring, he whisked the criminal’s leader high into the sky and threatened do drop him.  Not surprisingly the bad guy spilled everything and signed a confession before promptly dying of shock.  Poetic justice is served and Alan feels destiny pulling him towards a life fighting evil wherever he finds it.  The saga ends with our protagonist declaring he will become a dreaded figure sporting a costume so bizarre that he will never be forgotten.  With that he dons the famous Dracula cloak and the red and green swashbuckling garb that has been the original Green Lantern’s signature style ever since.

But what would Green Lantern be without his oath?  The traditional GL oath has seen some changes and variations over the years but the solemn vow to shine brightly over evil has its roots right here in All-American Comics #16, “…And I will shed my light over dark evil… for the dark things cannot stand the light… the light of The Green Lantern".

I’m sure Martin Nodell and Bill Finger could never have imagined how far Green Lantern would go.  All of his earliest appearances pitted him against hoodlums and petty criminals.  He stared down the barrels of revolvers and machines guns and slugged his way to victory with a tasty right hook.  It seems another world from the cosmic level dramas of Zero Hour or Blackest Night, from Kingdom Come or Lights Out.  But all of these stories owe a huge debt of gratitude to an 8 page pulp adventure from 1940 that intrigued and delighted its young readers and kept them coming back for more.  Then again, maybe the journey from street level vigilante to galactic peacekeeper is not so unpredictable after all.  For even in this very first story the mighty power of Green Lantern came from a meteor that crashed to Earth from space.  Perhaps it’s only fitting that one day it would return to the stars once again.

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You can enjoy the early adventures of Green Lantern for yourself in DC Archive Editions: The Golden Age Green Lantern, Volume 1, available from Amazon and all good comic book stores everywhere.

If you enjoyed this post please do keep coming back to Flodo’s Page through June and July 2015 when we will have some other great surprises to celebrate 75 years of Green Lantern.

If that isn't enough for you (and let's face it - why would it be?) be sure to check out these other amazing Green Lantern fansites and podcasts who will be celebrating GL’s 75^th birthday right along with us:

Blog of Oa

The Lanterncast

Green Blogger's Site

The Brighest Day, The Blackest Night

For more anniversary awesomeness with everybody’s favourite Emerald Gladiator make sure search the hashtag #GL75TH across social media platforms.

Until next time, “Beware Our Power!”

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!