Where the ruin of Green Lantern began at the dawn of the
1990s
by Avi Green
June 7, 2021
DC's Green Lantern franchise is something I really do appreciate.
Definitely much of the material leading up to mid-1988. And that's
why it's a terrible shame such a fine superhero creation was largely
destroyed afterwards.
Where did it all begin? In the pages of Action Comics Weekly, when
GL, following cancellation of the 2nd volume, became a feature there
for about 35 of 42 installments, at which time it was written mainly
by Christopher Priest, with some middle material written by Peter
David. And Gerard Jones, who of recent was
imprisoned for illegally downloading child p*** on his computer,
continued the harm when he was writing the 3rd volume, beginning
with the 2 Emerald Dawn miniseries (as well as a related short story
in Secret Origins during 1989, the first time he wrote anything
connected with GL), and into the 3rd ongoing volume, which he wrote
during 1990-93.
The GL feature in ACW was truly loathsome, what with the way Katma
Tui was slaughtered by Carol Ferris, still under the Star Sapphire
influence at the time, in a way most repellent, and it didn't even
seem like it was in order to give John Stewart “motivation”. Not
only that, the whole story looked like it was intended to set up
John as the fall guy in a subsequent story where he was accused of
stealing a diamond from a south African mine that had actually been
stolen by Hal Jordan in a very out-of-character moment, encouraged
into it by John himself. Yet John was the scapegoat, for the sake of
a very poorly written metaphor for the racist atmosphere in south
Africa at the time. The storyline was continued in a GL Corps
Special during 1988, where Hal gave John a new ring while he was in
a south African police station, practically being tortured over
Hal's out-of-character act, and John, getting hold of the ring,
demolished the police precinct. He then stayed at the home of some
presumed rebels against the apartheid system, little realizing they
were actually terrorists, who earlier murdered a white couple and
spray-painted graffiti reading as “kill whitey” on the bedroom wall
of the victims.
The problem with the above is: wasn't this supposed to be a focus on
anti-black racism in south Africa during the time this was
published? Yet writer Priest (who at the time was still called James
Owsley), went a morally equivalent route, dampening the impact the
story could've had it if weren't so contrived and illogical. It
practically ignored past history for the sake of its muddle.
Even the middle part of the ACW run written by David was dreadful,
given how it was an example of an absurd belief Hal's fearlessness
must be explained, in sharp contrast to Daredevil's, where nobody
had an issue. And when Priest came back, he wrote up an atrocious
story where GL and Captain Atom not only faced off against an alien
that had slaughtered people in a roadside diner, they even clashed
with each other over how to handle the exceedingly difficult foe,
who soon after took off into space again, and the storyline was
never finished. I don't doubt this run alone was what killed Action
Comics as a weekly format, seeing how it resumed monthly status
after 42 installments, and Superman's starring role as a whole. What
came later was no better. There was the aforementioned short story
by Jones from Secret Origins #36 from January 1989, telling Tom
Kalmaku's view of Hal, and what was ludicrous there was how it made
Hal look ignorant about racial issues after he said he'd like to
nickname Tom “pieface”, which had been what the Eskimo employee of
Ferris Aircraft was called at least until the end of the 60s,
because it was later considered a racial insult. Even the SO story
for Hal from the same issue was tedious, despite relying on the
origin as established in 1959, mainly because Hal later betrayed a
character who appeared in the story by the end of the 2nd GLC
special (and it was also relying on directions established in ACW at
the time). In hindsight, what's truly astonishing is that Gil Kane,
such a talented artist when he was around, would illustrate the
first few parts in ACW, and Denny O'Neil would edit them, though
Kane left rather quickly, presumably embarrassed by how the story
turned out.
John suffered more abuse soon afterwards as well, in the pages of a
3-part miniseries called Cosmic Odyssey, where he
unintentionally led to the deaths of a whole alien community. As
though what took place in X-Men's Phoenix Saga wasn't bad enough.
This left John traumatized, and it's regrettable that this
“development” carried over into the 3rd GL volume, which we'll get
to soon enough.
Following this, there came the badly developed Emerald Dawn
miniseries at the end of 1989, the first part co-written by Priest
with Keith Giffen, and Jones replacing Giffen for the remainder. I
thought the way it depicted Hal getting hauled in the test flight
module out into the desert clearing where Abin Sur's spacecraft
crashed was pretty poor, ditto the way he was seen in the costume
but without the mask on making a phone call back to Ferris Aircraft
base at a diner where a number of people watched in amusement. This
was just the start of a most peculiar flaw that turned up at least a
few times in Jones' writings for the franchise: if Hal was supposed
to have a secret ID as Green Lantern, he sure wasn't doing a good
job at it. The story of Hal having to battle a yellow alien lifeform
that came to earth just plain stunk, and was underwhelming. As was
the whole premise of Hal getting arrested for drunk driving, which
was insanely forced and contrived, all for the sake of giving Hal
flaws.
So too in fact was the sequel miniseries from 1991, where Hal was
sentenced to a few months in prison for his law violation of DUI,
where Sinestro was assigned to train him for the GL Corps job ahead.
A most silly element by far was how the bank robbers Hal arrested
while sneaking out of a police van taking him to jail (and he acted
surprisingly competent for somebody supposed to be a rookie) managed
to figure out his secret identity when they spotted him in the
prison dining hall after they too were incarcerated there. Sinestro
later erased their memories of Hal too. Equally absurd was the naive
view Hal took of Sinestro enslaving his fellow Korugarians, one of
which happened to be Katma Tui, who was fighting back. On which
note, there was a peculiar discrepancy here from the previous
miniseries: Katma was seen at the end of the 1st one, part of the GL
Corps, but this 2nd one depicted her as a rebel against Sinestro's
tyranny prior to her being a Lantern as though nothing had happened!
As though the awkward take on secret identities wasn't bad enough.
Now, let's turn to the 3rd ongoing volume for GL, written by Jones,
in what has to have been one of the most notorious cases of nepotist
employment at the time. If it was supposed to generate new interest
in the cast of characters, it got off to a very bad start. Hal
Jordan decides to take a trip by foot across the USA, supposedly in
a nod to Denny o'Neil's far superior work in the 1970s. But it's
only so they can set up what turned out to be a very left-liberal
premise for co-existence between various races, as Appa Ali Apsa,
the Guardian originally known as the “old-timer” when he first
appeared in 1970, suddenly goes insane and hauls only so many whole
cities to the planet Oa, in one of the most contrived storylines of
all time. Even before that, the first few issues established that
Appa murdered a character first seen in Priest's ACW run for GL, and
that's another error that truly sunk the book.
Even if that wasn't a fault, there were still plenty more that
destroyed the story, such as the lack of any true suspense, yet
never did Appa as a villain prove a serious threat to the GL members
in the story, and in the end, during the 8th issue, it wasn't even
Hal, John or Guy Gardner who defeated Appa, but rather, the
returning Guardians who did (for anybody in-the-know about the
Zamarons, they curiously went unmentioned in any of the material
Jones scripted during 1990-93). More specifically, they killed him.
And that just compounded how awful the setup for this volume truly
was. It all reeked of an insult to O'Neil's work on the brand,
considering Appa had been put on trial in a McCarthy-ish kangaroo
court those years before, was close to being executed by the insane
intergalactic judge, and now here, they insult that past storyline
by turning him into a crazed killer who's put on trial by his fellow
Guardian council, and then drained of his life by the same. And
neither Hal nor anybody else seems particularly devastated by Appa's
fall from grace. The implausible way the Tattooed Man showed up in
the 2nd issue, done for the sake of giving Guy somebody to battle,
was also galling, because Hal actually let him off the hook, despite
a serious crime the villain committed in 1981 (Tattooed Man murdered
a bank security guard before being gunned down by one of Goldface's
minions).
What followed soon after wasn't much better. There was a pathetic
tale where Guy goes on an adventure with G'nort, facing off against
the Weaponers of Qward, and if it was supposed to be funny, it fell
flat on its face. There was one part of this absurd story that
looked like it was lensed through the vision of a drug addict. But
the storyline from issues 14-17 titled “Mosaic”, which served as a
lead-in for the 1992-93 spinoff starring John, that was truly awful,
and made even the most questionable moments in O'Neil's run look
pathetically tame by comparison. Here's the problem: despite any
suggestions to the contrary, it made the white humans in the tale
out to look like the worst: sexist and racist, not to mention most
likely to act irrationally in reaction to attacks by aliens from one
of the other cityscapes hauled to the planet by the now deceased
Appa. When Rose Hardin, the single mom with a son transported to Oa
with her community, tries to assure her community that John is
trying to help defend them, she says she knows it because she “spent
the night with him.” But they take this to mean they think she had
sex with him, and condemn her as a whore. I thought this was
insulting to the intellect how it relied on the old hysterical white
folks stereotype, regardless of what time it reflected and was set
in.
And that wasn't the only problem. Even biased allusions to Israel
turned up. More specifically, one of the few whites depicted as
“sane” was an Arabic man who claimed to be from “Palestine”, the
Roman-era name for Israel that was put to use in the mid-20th
century by antisemites for delegitimizing Jews' rights to their land
of origin, and claiming that there was ever supposedly a
“palestinian people” of Arabic/Islamic background. Along with a
moment in Jones' 1989-91 El Diablo series, which ran 16 issues, and
the 9th issue of Mosaic, this was some of the earliest material I
could find drawing from something that's as offensive to the memory
of the Jewish founders of comicdom as it is to the populace of
Israel itself, including Golda Meir, who refuted the lie Jones built
his story upon.
It should be noted that for a group allegedly dedicated to justice
in the universe, the Guardians sure acted very bewilderingly
out-of-character when they refused to immediately return the
human/alien populations to their respective homeworlds, apparently,
in the words of John when he confronted them, for the sake of
putting them all in a coexistance experiment. But how does that
justify keeping them on this new planet against their wills, or at
least those who're innocent? Wouldn't the Guardians in some ways be
guilty of enabling terrible situations right on the very planet
they're headquartered upon, where people end up dead by failure to
act properly and enforce laws for safety? And then, there are
inevitable questions how their homeworlds like Earth can't possibly
be missing them, if only because, despite any suggestions to the
contrary, it didn't seem like there was any scandal unfolding on
planet Earth where people missed cities and towns like Evergreen and
Desolation, which had been snatched by Appa to be placed upon Oa. I
like surrealism, but when it's all as contrived and stilted as this,
it becomes implausible, mainly because it allegedly serves as a
metaphor for “real life” issues. Yet in the end, it all rang phony.
The 18th issue, where Guy met up again with Kari Limbo, the Roma
girl he'd once dated when seen in the Bronze Age, and here wound up
dumping her, was equally insulting, as the battle here with Goldface
was uninspired. The 19th issue was better, one of the few writings
Jones ever did that was more tolerable than others, but that's
probably because it was connected with an event of the time
(Armageddon: Inferno), or because he may not have actually written
that issue, or both.
I didn't find the following few issues (20-25) very good either,
because, while Carol Ferris was rescued and freed of the Star
Sapphire influence here, they still connected it in some way to the
ill-advised ACW storyline where Katma was killed. There was even one
point where Olivia Reynolds, a girl Hal once knew in 1969 when he
was working in toy marketing, turned up, and in that issue, Jones
wrote what looked like a mockery of O'Neil's run (an alien asks him
why he wasn't helping the “blue skins”), which Jones didn't show any
true respect for. The part where he attempted to explain why
Tattooed Man showed up again failed to impress either.
Issues 26-28 were somewhat better – and some parts of the latter end
of the run were more tolerable than the first 18 issues – though
truly, it was only the part where Carol is shown recovering from her
bizarre space journey that impressed me. While I get the idea this
is another story that might not have been written by Jones per se,
the way Goldface just fled from a fight and didn't seem to remember
Hal's secret ID, which he'd known about during the early 80s, was
dismaying. All just so Goldface could later be defeated by Guy, when
his solo spinoff began in late 1992, and it was one of the worst
Jones could've written, even if he co-wrote it with Will Jacobs. The
subsequent GL storyline “the Third Law”, was a cop-out, as it seemed
to be for little more than getting the New Guardians out of the way,
shunting them onto Oa just like all the humans and aliens were in
the first 8 issues. A total cop-out.
Let me also take a moment to note that the short-lived spinoff
series Mosaic, launched as it was as an excuse for Jones to continue
what he'd begun so terribly in the flagship series' first 18 issues,
and starring John as overseer of the colonies now located on Oa, was
quite terrible, saddled with more of his left-liberal propaganda
tactics (yes, that includes making nearly all whites look like the
only real problem), and there was also a disturbing scene in the 5th
issue where it looked like John was sexually harassing Rose. That
she later had a brief affair with him is no excuse, and the ending
to the series – which saw many of the humans and aliens alike
deciding to remain on Oa – was simply laughable.
Now, if you want to know of some more stories from the latter part
of the Jones run on the flagship book that were at least a little
better, there was the crossover with the Flash, “Gorilla Warfare”,
but that's mainly because it looks like another story where Jones
may have been credited in name only. The part where Hal and Carol go
to visit his family for Christmas was also okay, though I can't help
but point out it conflicts with what had been established by the end
of the 2nd volume, where Susan Williams-Jordan, Hal's sister-in-law,
had long accepted that his brother Jim was not Green Lantern, unlike
Hal. And, it's strange, but both Jim and Jack Jordan had children
who'd never been established as having before. Certainly not Jim.
There then came a story I really hated, a 2-parter guest starring
Adam Strange, because it went by the status quo set up by the
loathsome Man of Two Worlds miniseries from 1990, written by Richard
Bruning, that saw Alanna Strange put to death. It was apparently
written just as another excuse for Jones to rehash the story with
Olivia Reynolds from 1969, depicting the lady as possessing a
powerful force that the Qward empire sought to exploit. And here,
they even abducted Adam's daughter Aleea in some bizarre plot to
channel said energy through her. If memory serves, the story
contained another allusion to Jones' repulsive mindset, rendering
this another story I didn't like at all.
There were 2-3 more parts after this that were tolerable, the
semi-crossover with the Flash's Secret of Barry Allen story, and the
story where it's established that the Predator from the mid-80s,
who'd first been depicted as a supposed product of Carol's
imagination combined with energy from the Star Sapphire gem, was
really an alien being who possessed Carol. This story was another
that didn't look like it was written by loathsome Jones, and if not,
that's fortunate.
However, the last few parts were where it once more took a plunge
into fiasco. For example, a story where Itty, the alien being whom
Hal originally thought was a simple plant-like entity in the mid-70s
when he acquired him, returned to Earth seeking help in saving a
colony of other such alien hatchlings, and around this time, Hal's
power battery was noticeably destroyed by enemy aliens, strongly
indicating writer/editors alike had planned to get rid of Hal for
the sake of Emerald Twilight in advance. The damage was compounded
through the pathetic Trinity crossover of 1993, which seemed written
as an excuse to prepare Maltus, the planet where the Guardians
originally came from, for writing out of use, and even a pointless
subplot where Lobo and an alien woman end up having sex in a trailer
while all the fighting is going on...except that whatever battle did
was lazy. After the crossover with Superman, which saw Coast City
destroyed, another moment proving Emerald Twilight was all more than
totally planned, there came the 47th issue and finale to Jones' run,
and it was by far the worst of all the cop-outs Jones could've
brewed up at the time. It turned out Carol's mother was nuts, and
somehow came in possession of firepower that she tried using to
scare away Hal, for reasons that were totally absurd. This story
also saw a reunion with Green Arrow, all for naught. The cast,
including Tom Kalmaku, split up at the end and went separate ways,
for whatever reason I haven't a clue. All I know is that this was
some of the worst writing ever in recent history, and was
regrettably overlooked all these years, because Emerald Twilight
took attention away from how bad this was for a run preceding it.
With all this told, that's why I want to make clear what I think
should be shunned within this whole run, and what's tolerable enough
from an artistic level, for anybody who can separate art from artist
on the condition it's readable enough. IMO, if there's anything to
avoid like the plague, it's the first 18 issues, which were simply
insufferable in all their politics or just plain failed attempts at
humor with Guy and G'nort. So too should issues 20-25 be avoided
(did I mention that big alien woman named Boodika had a very
irritatingly scripted personality? Jones struck again, what a
surprise). Issues 29, 32-35, 37-39, and 44-47 should also be
avoided, due to their misuse of Olivia Reynolds, the New Guardians,
and even decidedly a character or three who'd first appeared in GL
during the mid-80s. Oh, lest I forget, the first 2 annuals from
around this time should also be shunned, and certainly bore the
stench of Jones. The ones I'm willing to say are okay to read –
mainly because I assume they weren't written by Jones – include
issues 19, 26-28, 30-31, 36, and 40-43 (although again, 43 was where
Hal's power battery was destroyed, and that's why it otherwise wound
up appalling). There's also several short-stories in the GLC
Quarterly's 8 issues from 1992-94 that're either worth reading, or
better avoided. The latter most definitely includes those written by
Jones, such as a fishy-looking tale about Arisia. Some of the ones
credited to different writers are better, and that's why it's a
terrible shame they were victims of bad timing. If they can ever be
reprinted separately from Jones' work, that'd be a good thing. Oh,
lest I forget, all GL stories from ACW should be shunned like poison
too, along with 2 GLC specials from 1988-89, and the Mosaic spinoff
of the flagship 3rd volume should be avoided entirely, as should the
Guy Gardner spinoff.
So in the end, I think it's regrettable such a fine creation as the
Green Lantern had to fall victim to abuse in the worst ways
possible. Certainly the Ron Marz run was worthless, but anybody
dismayed at how that turned out should consider what preceded it as
well during the 90s. A real shame.
Copyright 2021 Avi Green. All rights reserved.
Home FAQ Columns
Reviews
Links
Favorite
Characters Special
Features Politics
Blog Comics
Blog Food Blog