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Green Lantern Storytime part 5
It's nice to see Hal enjoying flying planes. It's not something we saw a lot of back in the day.
Huh. Well, that's new.
And the tradition of Hal going ringless either by circumstance or choice starts.
Just using a jet to fuck up a car, as you do.
Another slight redesign to the ring.
Kane really liked that index finger poking out look when drawing the ring.
This is subatomic worlds that people can just, live in we've bumped into
Old west robots in the sub-atomic world
dis nigga bugged out
Robot-on-robot violence, you hate to see it.
GL needed a cool secret hide out like Superman/Batman
Always the best man huh Hal?
And here we get where Hal's oath came from, before it become more universalized among the GLs.
Of course this version of the oath really stated with Alan Scott in Green Lantern v1 #10 three or so years after Alan's creation. And also three years before his cancellation as superheroes fell out of favor.
Gotta give to these guys they commit to the bit of old-time train robbers.
Funny to think how much meaning will later be added to 'Darkest night' when their first crack at coming up with a meaning for it is this.
Test pilots and the first astronauts were popular heroes of that era, Hal's occupation was a good choice by editorial. Tom Wolfe's THE RIGHT STUFF is a fascinating read about the subject.
Well, the three robberies are fairly easily dealt with, given they are normal crooks and Hal has a power ring, they did a few interesting ring uses out of the whole thing.
Though test pilots having fallen out of pop culture have been used as 'evidence' that Hal is outdated.
I'm not an expert on procedure, but I'd think Hal would need authorization to drop his assigment like that and just take off after a mystery plane. Landing in an unapproved terrain and placing a multi-million dollar jet at risk would be frowned upon by his controllers.
Then again, this is Hal Jordan. He makes Maverick from TOP GUN look like a rule-abiding little angel.
Just standing around as GL, you know as he does.
Born without fear, or much common sense. Then again, super-heroes with nothing other than the costumes they wore had been running at gunmen since the late 1930s and very few of them had gotten shot.
Ahhh when the Guardians trusted the GLs to look after their own affairs.
Doc Savage pulled this trick more than once. In a late 1940s story, he used the exhaust from a jet to start a shack on fire and flush the crooks out of there.
As time went on, the power ring's capabilities expanded into pure miracles. Gardner Fox in the Justice League stories had it doing anything short of making galaxies spell out Hal's name.
Personally, I like it when the green energy was more limited and the constructs took more concentration to create, But I'm an Alan Scott fan,
I wouldn't say they did much expanding over time in the Silver Age. Hal was doing all sorts of things with it REAL quick and then they spent a long time pulling it back in till it was mostly a construct machine.
Your classic DC Silver Age cover. Where Marvel covers emphasized drama and impending action, DC tended to show puzzling situations which made the readers curious. Why does the Flash have a grasshopper head? What's going on with Batman arresting Bruce Wayne, of all people? And kids were lured into plunking down their dimes,
I suppose one could see it that way. But it still makes sense to me as that occupation demands as lot of the traits that a good super-hero would find useful.
The narrative that Hal was just inherently outdated was one pushed HARD by Kevin Dooley and was kind of picked up uncritically by some. That the argument had a distinct tendency to shift in specifics often went unnoticed.
Damn it!
There seems to be a popular misconception among fans that Alan's oath remained the early "And I shall shed my light over dark evil." But a quick skim of Golden Age stories shows otherwise.
Sci-fi author Alfred Bester (who wrote the great THE STARS MY DESTINATION) is credited for originating this oath.
And Sin's already back. There's a period where he is the only reoccurring enemy.
The robots remind me of an old Challengers of the Unknown villain from a robot planet.
Likely due to him going back to the original to differentiate him from Hal, and it's treated in-universe as if that's all he ever used. So if you don't read his old stuff you have no reason to think he ever used anything but the "shed my light' version.
You know a spear power ring, as everyone has.
Gee I wonder if there's anything about this room GL's should maybe take note of.
I don't remember him ever even trying a headquarters of his own. But then, neither did Barry Allen.
More chemistry to the rescue!
Judging by the earlier stories where he's dating movie stars and society debs, that probably suited him fine. Falling for Carol Ferris seems like a classic case where he only wants what he knows he can't have,.
In an issue of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, Hal inhales a mouthful of chlorine gas to protect himself against Amazo's power ring. Kids, don't try this at home.
Of course, Hal had in earlier stories shown the ability to just turn anything into anything else, so why the need for a middle stage here is more or less, 'for drama' and 'we like throwing in some chemistry.'
Well, I'm sure that's that.
in the real world, it took FOREVER for even plastic GL rings to be a thing. As a kid, I made some from paper and tape.
Its a real good thing the ring has the whole protection from mortal harm thing, or this could be very bad for that kid very easily.
More Hal going in minus ring.
It's a tiny bit of trivia but Green Lantern's stringless mask was held on by his power ring, so this would have been a problem for him.