Superheroes Behaving Badly V: Hal Jordan

Few superheroes have behaved as badly as Hal Jordan, in several guises, over their comics careers. Though he began as a superhero selected particularly for his virtues and rightness for the responsibilities he inherited from a dying alien, in the eighties writers began experimenting with ways to make the character more realistic (a difficult proposition) and more human (an easier task).

He enjoyed the ethos of the DC Silver Age hero, including particulars about humility and mortal violence that belonged to a package you had to swallow entire to don a costume in DC's comics. Some things a hero simply did not do; and a great many others a hero neither did nor mentioned.

Bit by bit, though, writers would push him away from the iconic hero model of the 1958 that produced him. So, by the eighties, one of DC's best and brightest had come to live a life that included increasing samples of a litany of offenses including boozing, womanizing, dissipation, murder, and finally a presumption of godhood (in the sense of a demiurge, or, more correctly, a cosmurge).

A number of steps carried him in the direction of his ultimate undoing in the age of Dooley and Marz. Most of these steps, individually, involved little more than a necessary investment of character flaws in a superhero that needed, sometimes, to appear more as a real and flawed human being. Together, though, they formed a primrose path, the dread "Slippery Slope" of cheap rhetoric; and small self-indulgences would culminate in this onetime hero intentionally destroying the known universe.

Every journey, it seems, begins with its first step....

Whetting His Whistle

After Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC did some - and probably not enough - reworking of central properties and concepts. Green Lantern did not receive a major makeover because he did not need one, but some new details did come to light in Hal Jordan stories between Crisis and Zero Hour.

Thus, as an incident of his reckless, preheroic youth, Hal Jordan, post-Crisis, had done at least an overnighter in jail over a DWI offense.

Losing His Job

Prior to the events in Green Lantern and Zero Hour that irretrievably disgraced the character, Hal Jordan's lowest point occurred during a period when the Guardians of the Galaxy had replaced him as a Green Lantern. In general, superheroes stripped of their heroic trappings don't make for compelling reading for too long. In the superhero comics game, you perform or you vanish.

DC Comics, though, had a problem. It had, by the late eighties, too many Green Lanterns. It had the original, who didn't play too much into the problem; but it also had three Green Lanterns for earth alone, thanks to stories in the sixties and at the turn of the seventies. Given that a Green Lantern, as originally conceived, served a wedge-shaped sector that supposedly represented 1 / 3600 of the entire universe, it seemed rather convenient that a backwater globe like earth should enjoy more Green Lanterns than some galaxies enjoy. First Guy Gardner, then John Stewart, appeared as understudies in the Green Lantern canon.

Lots of superheroes, however, have taken a break from the job. Consider these names (and causes): Captain America (angst); Superman (death); Batman (incapacity); Iron Man (alcoholism); the Hulk (cures); Green Arrow (self-reappraisal); Kid Flash (loss of powers); and too many others to bother researching and listing. In short, a superhero over twenty years old from creation to the present day who has enjoyed a relatively uninterrupted run of publishing during this time has probably taken a sabbatical from the job in his own book.

Did any run where a hero had laid aside his seperheroic persona ever receive recognition as a "classic?"

Robbing the Cradle

The "Arisia Incident" probably did not mean anything. During Steve Englehart's tenure on Green Lantern, before that title's final cancellation in the late eighties, said comics veteran put Hal Jordan in a bind. He paired him romantically with an extraterrestrial who seemed to belong in a category we sometimes describe as "jailbait."

Englehart probably meant only to cast some contrast on human versus alien biology and human standards versus alien ones. Axiomatically, if an alien reaches maturity earlier than humans do, both socially/mentally and biologically, to treat said alien as a minor requires a certain arbitrariness of definition or dogmatism of legal principle. None of this, however, would have saved Hal Jordan from a district attorney.

This particular romance may not have gone down in the annals of comics as "a timeless, tragic tale of forbidden love." The controversy that followed Hal's ouster from his own title in favor of a younger replacement with a trendier haircut became, at times, exceptionally acrimonious, which provided a window of opportunity and a motive to interpret the whole Arisia business in the most unpleasant terms.

The whole sub-controversy centering around Hal Jordan and his erstwhile youthful girlfriend demonstrated a principle that might equally apply to public figures in general: Act rightly, but more important yet, appear to act rightly.

Going Postal on the GLC

DC, in the past seven years, has developed a disturbing inclination to destroy the imaginary cities with which it populates its imaginary earth. Most recently, DC has shaken Gotham City, Batman's turf, to rubble; in the year or so previous, DC detonated a walking nuclear bomb in the territories that the Fawcett/DC Captain Marvel inhabits; and it began this particular urban bloodbath with its imaginary California metropolis Coast City, which a Jim Starlin villain nuked with a kind of low-yield nuclear saturation bomb with which said villain carpeted the city.

Unless one wishes to commit to a good year (at least) of stories dealing with the public and superheroic reaction to the destruction of a city, a writer should generally eschew dropping nuclear bombs on the cities superheroes patrol. Such events create either an environment in which bad writing becomes a strong temptation, or instead a situation that compels all writers to participate in the consequences of living in a shared universe. Nuking a city, say I, would make a lot of things happen.

Some months after DC did this to Coast City as an imprudent detail in the "Reign of the Supermen" storyline, Hal Jordan started to show a reaction in his own book. He decided to repeal the decision of causality. He decided to rewrite the script. He decided to recreate Coast City and the millions who had died therein, and this probably represented his last attempt at a heroic act befoe DC pushed him off the deep end to make a vacancy for a younger, and hopefully hipper, replacement.

Unfortunately, the working details of his tool - his ring - played against his intentions. The ring ran on a twenty-four hour charge that ignored the laws of thermodynamics but watched the clock down to the second. This meant that his reconstructed city would vanish at the expiration or recharge of his ring. This did not sit well with Hal, and he decided to escalate the issue by taking it up with his bosses, the Guardians, who had invested him with his power in the first place.

The Guardians said no, but Hal Jordan didn't care to listen to this answer, and he decided to take the necessary energy for his project in urban renewal by force.

At this point, Hal acted really badly, by conventional standards. He killed all the other Green Lanterns and, furthermore, all but one of their bosses the Guardians. Not even Julie Schwartz and the Comics Code Authority could stop him any more, if, in the height of their power, they had ever had the ability.

This crime may not receive quite the same disapproval we could expect from his earlier instances of doing things like walking away from duty and sleeping with underaged extraterrestrials of the opposite (or a complementary) sex. Nonetheless, we can make a case for discouraging this kind of activity. In very few professions could one kill both everyone he works for and everyone he works with and still escape all taint of moral reproach.

Remaking the Universe in His Own Image

The Mann Act couldn't stop him. The Green Lantern Corps couldn't stop him. The Guardians couldn't stop him. Julius Schwartz and the Comics Code Authority couldn't stop him. It just kept getting worse, especially after Hal got godlike power from taking all the Green Lantern rings and siphoning all the energy from the central power battery on Oa.

Ron Marz and Kevin Dooley might have had the power to stop him, but they loyally followed orders, and led their Silver Age marionette, remade as one of the truly atrocious and overbloated cosmic(k!) villains of an admittedly decadent era of comics, to greater offenses against his original concept, against the readers, and against the DCU Universe itself.

Once upon a time, Superman could have handled a situation like this, either by using one of his own ridiculously inflated abilities or a new one cobbled for the occasion. But DC did not intend to let its own universe off easily; DC intended housecleaning and Hal, in his ludicrous guise as Parallax, was to serve as the Great Janitor of Continuity.

DC hasn't quite gleaned the idea that a messy and all-encompassing crossover event doesn't always provide the best cure for previous messy and all-encompassing crossover events. To work at their best, these events must first get rid of or resolve the bad old stuff and secondly not introduce any bad new stuff. Failure to observe both of these stipulations can cause terrible things in the future, especially the dreaded all-encompassing crossover event.

Making Amends

Twice, or maybe three times, Hal Jordan has attempted to redeem himself after his little self-indulgent binge of murder and universe creation. Immediately after Zero Hour, he appeared to his successor, Kyle Rayner, and attempted somewhat to justify himself. One might do well to avoid even imagining the line of argument one would use ("Well, yes, I did intend to destroy and recreate the universe, and I guess some people didn't like that much. But how do you think I felt?"). So, shortly thereafter, DC attempted to solve the loose cannon problem it created by note leaving Hal dead at the end of Zero Hour. With Final Night, DC contrived a crisis that threatedned all life on the earth, in order to allow Hal to redeem himself by sacrificing his life to rekindle the extinguished sun. The comic book had him reciting his old Green Lantern oath, but perhaps the finale number from "Pippin" would have fit better ("Think about your life, Jordan...").

Uncharacteristically, DC let Hal stay dead after this sacrifice. Death, though, meant that Hal wandered around in a poorly lit place with no flowers and groaned sullenly with other extinct DC properties in a comic-book version of the "Limbo" afterworld from which Johann Tetzel used to sell reprieves (much to the ire of Martin Luther).

Some flavors of theology allow redemption for almost anything as the expression of the limitless resources of a Redeemer, but comic books, even the theology-heavy and often weird works of angel-infested late 1990s DC, don't get into the matter that deeply. Redemption generally requires no more than a heroic sacrifice of self to make up for past crimes. Hal, however, had passed beyond the point of stunt-redemption; the Final Night business didn't cut it, so DC had to step in with its theological big guns.

We can really dispense with the moralistic arguments against the wishy-washy attempts at redemption for a character who had gone far, far off the deep end some years ago. DC didn't stay with the first two deaths of Hal Jordan because readers wouldn't let them. After his death in Zero Hour, he returned almost immediately. Then, after Final Night (which DC proably intended to represent "Fimal Death," a year or two passed, then came Day of Judgment, which improbably cast Hal Jordan in the role of the Spectre, a godlike superhero composed of an angelic beings (who represents the Wrath of God) and a human anchor.

Coming Back

Solutions that attempt to satisfy multiple, mutually hostile, factions tend to overreach the abilities of those who attempt to create them. Too many interests wanted too much in regards to Hal Jordan. One faction wanted Hal Jordan to return, in good standing, to the Green Lantern Corps, which Marz and Dooley had him slaughter some years back. This would require something like a Crisis-styled event to turn back time, or a measure equally drastic. One faction wanted to retain continuity, with or without Hal Jordan in a heroic role. One faction wanted to cork the complaints about the current status of Hal Jordan.

Did one person decide to make Hal Jordan the Spectre, or did a committee come up with this? Aspects of it suggest a decision by committee, in that it addresses the problem with a proactive strategy that leaves all principals unsatisfied and even contains something to annoy the disinterested. DC had plenty of other materials from which to construct a solution, but ignored them all. For instance, Hal-as-Parallax intended to wipe the timestream and rebuild a multiverse that satisfied everyone; this implicates him as a character capable of time travel. As Marvel has shown through the convoluted history of its time traveling nemesis Kang the Conquereor, such characters often have the problem of dealing with diverging timelines that spawn rival versions of themselves. A little editorial sophistry following this train of thought could have solved much of the Hal Jordan problem. Alternatedly, an unresolved thread involving a rogue half-human Green Lantern named Lord Malvolio could have explained much; when last Malvolio appeared, he had sent Hal away wearing his own ring, and portended that Hal had played right into his hands. But DC remains committed to a few things, including the removal of Malvolio from canon (he last appeared five years before th last major crossover retcon event, Zero Hour) and the primacy of Hal's replacement, Kyle Raynor, as Green Lantern.

So, therefore, as a character DC portrays as the Vengeance of God, we get a disgraced superhero who has thousands of murders to his name and who attempted to destroy the universe in order to build something he liked better. It suggests elements in the book Catch-22, where the generals consider that Yossarian's offenses require them either to court-martial him or to promote him. They decided to promote him, and DC pulled a similar maneuver with Hal Jordan.