Showing posts with label Gil Kane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gil Kane. Show all posts

Monday, 3 August 2015

Good Times in the Silver-Age - 75 YEARS OF GREEN LANTERN

July is over and the Green Lantern 75th anniversary celebrations with your favourite GL blogs and podcasts have officially come to a close.
 
Bur DC Comics aren't celebrating the event until September with their variant covers and their 75 Years hardcover collection.
 
And that's all the excuse I need to throw one more party favour at you before we wrap up warm for the long walk home!  And speaking of party spirit, read what you will into this one...
 


Exhibit A:
Hal Jordan taking on the bad guys in his first ever outing as Green Lantern in Showcase #22, published 1959.


This new  clean cut action-adventure hero was brought courtesy of the creative team of writer John Broome and artist Gil Kane.

Then the sixties happened.  That's right.  Those sixties...

Now, I'm not saying that Broome or Kane ever indulged in the many psychedelic delights that were reputed to be widely popular in 1960s America.  I have no way of knowing that.  All I'm saying is the sixties happened.  And in 1970 Broome and Kane were still writing and drawing Green Lantern comics.


Which takes us to Exhibit B:
Hal Jordan taking on the bad guys in (appropriately enough) Green Lantern #75, published 1970.


I know what you're thinking!  I'm thinking it too.

All jokes aside, it is fair to say that Green Lantern has always moved with the times.  Nodell and Finger gave their audience a hero who shone his light over evil during a very dark period in history.  Next, when the world wanted a champion for the space-age generation, Broome and Kane's GL was there to give it to them.  When they called for gritty liberalism Hal Jordan popped up with his old friend Green Arrow to take on the Man under the pen of O'Neil and Adams.  And years later still, when the world craved zombie after zombie after zombie, Geoff Johns filled the whole universe with the living dead in the epic crossover event, Blackest Night.

Where the world goes, Green Lantern goes with it... even if that place gets a little trippy from time to time.






 
 

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

THE MASTER OF MONSTERS

Any Green Lantern fan worth a lick of salt knows the important debt of gratitude we owe to Gil Kane.  Gil was the artist on virtually every Green Lantern comic book throughout the first 10 years of our favourite ring-slingers' existence.  He is responsible for laying the foundations on which the GL universe was built.  Much like the constructs formed by our heroes' power rings, the weird and wonderful world Hal Jordan and his fellow Corpsmen explore is limited only by  Gil's imagination.

Of course, Green Lantern Corps recruits come in every shape and size but what does a legendary picturesmith do when he needs a break from drawing six armed aliens and eyes on stalks?  Well... monsters of course!

Here are five fearsome beasties who escaped from the mind of the monster master:


 1. Raarrr! Does this belt make me look scary or what?!

Green Lantern vol.2 #8 (1961)


2. Would you believe me if I said I was vegetarian?

 
Green Lantern vol.2 #34 (1965)
 
3. Shape-shifters - because one monster is never enough. 

Green Lantern vol.2 #38 (1965)
 
4. Nothing says evil like a brain on a stick... 

Green Lantern vol.2 #55 (1967)
 
5. Tentacles of Doom! 'Nuff said! 

 Green Lantern vol.2 #70 (1969)