From the Beginning Until They Fly Again

As an unabashed Green LanternMade up of aliens from sectors scross space, the Green Lantern Corp. defends the universe against threats with the power of the Green Light of Willpower. fan I have collected many, many materials related to the superhero over the years. I jumped on board with comics around the time of Green Lantern: Rebirth (which we’ll get to eventually as I steadily work my way through the superhero’s history) but then I went back and picked up a number of older titles featuring the heroes, the team, the corps, and everything that goes well. I mean, hell, I’ve willingly watched the 2011 Green Lantern more than once. I love this character.

When you’re a Green Lantern fan you take the good and the bad. You can have the highs of Geoff Johns’s run from Rebirth through Brightest Day, but you can also have Green Lantern Versus Aliens. It’s a give and take, as is the case with many superheroes, and you have to decide if the bad at some point outweighs the good or if you can continue on with new writers, new ideas, and new changes to the status quo. Comics are ever shifting, and with the way DC loves to reboot there’s always a chance that a run you like on a book could go pear shaped very quickly when some new regime comes in.

That’s kind of what I find fascinating about a book like Green Lantern: The Greatest Stories Ever Told. It’s a collection of issues from 1959 (with Hal Jordan’s first appearance as the titular hero in Showcase #22) through 2005 (for a Geoff Johns penned, Darwyn Cooke drawn backstory about Hal in Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins) and it gives a wide swath of ideas about the hero. It shows his rise, his fall, his ring getting passed on to others, and how in each era the needs of the time and the ideas of the writer shaped this part of the DC Universe in interesting ways. The stories don’t always work (more often than not they don’t) but they’re interesting because of how much this character (and all the heroes around him) have changed as the years went on.

The collection starts with Hal’s origin story, told not once but twice. We see him dragged to the wrecked ship of Abin Sur, the Green Lantern of this sector, who crashed on Earth and is dying. He passes his green ring of power (not yet called a Green Lantern ring) and says that Hal is the one person on Earth capable of using it properly. It’ll be Hal’s job to use the ring and be a fair and just hero. Then Abin dies, and Hal is alone. He uses the ring to dress himself in a costume, and then calls himself “Green Lantern” (no reason behind it, and certainly not because there was a Golden Age hero also called “Green Lantern” that DC was rebooting) and the adventures begin. That Showcase issue then leads to “Planet of Doomed Men”, Green Lantern #1, where the whole original story is, quite literally, retold frame by frame again, but this time to the Guardians of the Universe on Oa so they can understand how Hal got the ring. Then he’s sent off to fight some worthless villain that doesn’t matter, and the series really has begun.

I get why the collection includes both issues here, giving us both the original debut of the hero as well as his first official issue, but this repetitive storytelling does the collection no favors. It’s the same story twice, with a little but tacked on the second time around, but for anyone trying to read through this book as a single series it feels both repetitive and redundant. “I just read this story. Why am I reading it again?” Well because the Showcase issue was from 1959, the Green Lantern issue was from 1960, and the publishers wanted to make sure the kids reading these stories (and at the time it was mostly kids) remembered who this Green Lantern guy was and why they should care. It made sense back then, but it sucks to have to sit through it in this book.

I wouldn’t exactly say things improved from there, either. Green Lantern #31, from 1864, gives us “Power Rings for Sale”, a tale where Hal gets brainwashed by aliens so they can use him to weaken the defenses of the planet and take over Earth. It’s an interesting concept, in theory, but it’s spoiled by a lot of Silver Age logic. Hal “weakens” the world by playing a lot of stupid pranks, the kind of skits that would cause SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s. to be called a “dick” in polite society (as the old website, Superdickery, commonly pointed out). But then it’s revealed that Hal knew something was going on all along and was only playing brain washed so he could really defeat the aliens when they least expected it. It’s a stupid twist that comes out of nowhere and makes no sense in the context of the story you’d just read. But then, that was the Silver Age of comics.

As an aside, in these comics Hal has a best friend named Thomas Kalmaku who is frequently referred to as “Pieface”. Much as you might expect it to be a racist term it kind of isn’t. Instead he has the name because Eskimo Pies were round and people with a round, empty face were often called “Pieface”. Even with that explanation, which people say isn’t racist (but kind of feels both offensive and racist all wrapped up in one), you have to wonder why Thomas remained friends with Hal because everyone else called him “Tom” and Hal continued to call him “Pie” or “Pieface”. Clearly, like Superman, Green Lantern could be a real dick.

From there we have a couple of issues that don’t really work out of context. In Green Lantern #74, “Lost in Space”, Hal wakes up in space with no memory of how he got there or even that he’s a Green Lantern. He quickly shakes this off, though, and comes back to Earth only to discover that Sinestro (with his yellow power ring) and Carol Ferris (as the Star Sapphire) have conspired to make Hal Carol’s love slave. This is all so Sinestro can be rid of his foe and be free to roam space on his own as a villain. It’s a story that might work better if the books had given us an issue about Sinestro before this, or an issue telling us about the Star Sapphire. Instead we’re dropped into the book and if you didn’t have any knowledge of these characters or their context you likely wouldn’t have cared at all.

Similarly we have “Beware My Power” from Green Lantern #87. This very 1970s issue (published in 1972) introduces a new alternate for Hal Jordan, John Stewart, the first black man to wear the ring. As we quickly learn, Hal already has an alternate if he’s ever injured or unable to do the job as a Lantern, Guy Gardner, but Guy gets injured during an Earthquake and a new backup has to be chosen. Making a black Green Lantern (and outside of him making a joke about how he should be called Black Lantern) is a big move. Or would be if he wasn’t an alternate to an alternate who might never get to wear the ring full time. We as fans of the heroes know that John will eventually get his own, permanent ring (as does Guy) but in the context of the book that never happens.

Hell, John doesn’t show up again in this collection at all, so you might wonder why this issue is included here to begin with. Guy’s first time with the ring isn’t depicted, nor is the first time Kyle Rayner gets the ring (although considering his girlfriend dies in that series… maybe that was for the best). I get it, they wanted to make a point that this was John Stewart’s origin story and John is a prominent Green Lantern now. It just would have been nice for the collection to do more with that character instead of featuring him once and then wiping its hands of him.

“Judgment Day”, from Green Lantern #172 (1984) is yet another issue with no context around it. Here we find Hal wrapping up a one year mission where he wasn’t allowed to return to Earth. Why? We’re told that he spent too much time on Earth and ignored the rest of his sector but there aren’t any issues that give us the context for that. Regardless, Hal wins his appeal before the Guardians and they let him go home so he can start his life back up and, I guess, ignore his sector again. I don’t feel like this issue really tells the story it was supposed to, and lacking any of the context around this tale means that his winning the judgment has no emotional resonance in the moment. I’m a big Green Lantern fan and I don’t even know if this was a major arc for the character or not. It’s tossed off here like it was but the collection fails to deliver on the why of it all.

But then we get to the worst issue of the book, “Sound and Fury” from Green Lantern #3 (after the issue numbers were rebooted) from 1990. Here Guy Gardner tracks Hal down while Hal is on a walkabout around Earth (see, ignoring his sector once again). Guy doesn’t understand why Hal is off walking the world and the two get into a fight in a small town diner, eventually getting themselves arrested. Stupidly they both took off their rings for their fight, and a couple of hillbillies get the rings and end up using them for nefarious purposes. Hal and Guy have to fight back and get their rings, proving that hillbillies should never have power rings.

And I’m left asking, “why?” What is even the point of this story? It makes fun of small town people, likening them all to schmucks and hillbillies, and it also violates basic concepts of the rings. Hal and Guy don’t have their rings, but the rings are bonded to them so they could summon them at any moment… and don’t. Meanwhile, you have to have real willpower to use the rings and only a select few can do it. Two random hillbillies in a small town are able to do it and they’ve never gotten the call from the Guardians before? That seems really unlikely. Oh, and this is only the second time we’ve seen Guy and he’s a real dick here. That might be true to his character by this point in the series (it is true, in point of fact) but in the context of the book you are left wondering why he was made Hal’s alternate, and then presumably a full-fledged member, at all. This is a bad story that absolutely didn’t need to be included in this collection and I’m confused why it’s here at all.

Next up is “Lightspeed” from Flash & Green Lantern: The Brave and the Bold #2 from 1999. While a light and simple story, it is at least fun. It sees Barry Allen, Wally West, and Hal Jordan team up to defeat a pair of their villains, Mirror Master and Black Hand. The two want to steal Green Lantern’s power, but instead end up stealing the speed force from Wally. This forces Barry and Hal to team up to fight them and get Wally’s power back, but in the process Hal lends Wally a power ring tied to his own power, creating “Kid Lantern”. It’s all very silly, and it feels like something that would have easily fit into the Silver Age stories from the 1960s. That’s not really bad, though, since it’s enjoyable even if it’s also kind of disposable.

The next to last issue is “Tomorrow’s Hero”, a tale about Kyle, Hal, and Alan. Hal by this point is gone, having gone mad, become Parallax, and died (although this issue doesn’t tell us any of that, nor does anything in this collection). Alan tells Kyle about a time that a very powerful foe of the Guardians, Krona, was looking to tear into the very fabric of the universe and gain a power that would unmake everything. Alan and Hal had to work together to fight the villain, but Hal was dismissive of the older Lantern, considering him a retired hero long past his prime. Each learned a little lesson about humility and teamwork, which is all fine and good… but it also doesn’t match anything we know about Hal from the previous stories we read in this book. Plus, this is also the first time we’re seeing either Kyle or Alan and this issue really doesn’t explain either of them all that well. Again, context is important and this collection lacks it. It’s not a great story, but it’s even worse without all the context we’d want around it.

Thankfully we do end on a high note as we get “Flight” from Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins, 2005. Written by Johns and drawn by Cooke, this is the one story with real life and verve in it. We learn that as a little kid Hal loved and adored his dad, a test pilot who would fly in the early mornings and show off for his son. After Hal’s mother found out about all this she put a stop to it, but his dad snuck him out of the house one night and let him fly in the plane while his dad piloted. It was magic. Hal then used the same trick on his first date with Carol, and it was magic again. And then, to break in the new guy, Kyle Rayner, Hal took him up for a flight, no rings and no powers, to let him experience it first hand. And yes, it was magic.

This is a simple story that gets its message across very well: even before he became a Lantern, Hal was destined to fly. Of course, this takes place after Green Lantern: Rebirth and there’s still no explanation for how Hal is now back, but that also doesn’t really matter. This is a tight, concise story that does more for Hal, Kyle, and the rest of this universe than any other issue in the collection. Frankly we could have had Showcase #22, “Beware My Power”, “Lightspeed”, and “Flight” in a collection and that would have been enough. Everything else, start to finish, is filler that doesn’t need to be in this collection at all.

Overall this is not a good set of issues. I’m glad I have it just for the sake of having such a wide swath of stories, but I can’t see any normal reader really enjoying these tales. But as a look back at how this series has evolved over many issues and multiple volumes, Green Lantern: The Greatest Stories Ever Told does show us just how far the series has come. These really aren’t the greatest stories, for the most part, but some of them are fun and they’re all kind of fascinating. If you really love Green Lantern you might want to check it out. It’s a historical curiosity, to be sure. Most other readers, though, should pick up a collection with good reviews and skip everything else.