Casualties of Editorial Malpractice V: Hal Jordan

Hopefully, this column will fill in any holes I may have left in previous discussions of Hal Jordan-related issues. Forgive, if you will, the self-indulgence involved in bringing up the subject once again; however, given the theme of these columns, a sense of completeness inclines me to include one of the central figures that comes to mind when one explores the theme of characters harmed by bad writing and bad editorial decisions. If anyone qualifies, I would say that Hal Jordan does.

The evidence suggests that DC did a great wrong in its treatment of Hal Jordan, its second version of the Green Lantern character. This wrongness relates more to the how than the what - writers and editors who care can retire characters permanently, with storytelling honor, even when the premise of the tale involves the corruption of a hero - but this character received no such consideration. With the cascading results, including multiple returns as Parallax, and, ultimately, a quirky fusion of the character to the Golden Age hero the Spectre, leaves a product that one must fail to describe without resorting to long stretches of the character's history.

If this seems like flogging a dead horse, please forgive the redundancy. Hal Jordan intrudes into various topics that come up here, and to leave him out in this discussion of characters done over by editorial malpractice would mean an important - perhaps textbook - example would not appear.

Comics fans sometimes nurture obsessions over truly strange things, and we can't always rely on mass-behavior phenomena to identify flaws in the events which seem to have catalyzed them. However, when a story evokes so much outrage that it generates a lobbying group, we might begin to suspect that something has, indeed, gone terribly wrong on the production side.

Editorial malpractice best explains the current state of the character Hal Jordan. Not alive, not exactly dead, not Green Lantern, and, in some ways, not comprehensible - this inability to explain the character in his current form without an hour of preliminary exposition does much to implicate the role of editors, not writers. A writer might come up with this stuff, but editors exist to say "no" - and sometimes "Have you lost your mind?"

How to Trash Intellectual Properties, Make Enemies, and Influence People

"You can't please everyone all the time."

This idea has a great deal of relevance here, since a faction claims that objections to DC's treatment of one of its Silver Age linchpins mean little, inasmuch as any significant development - any change - to an established superhero will affront consumers who never want anything to change.

In my own case, I consider myself a disinterested party because a) it seemed like a good idea to have next-generation versions of superheroes such as Green Arrow, Green Lantern, and the Flash to keep the existing concepts from becoming hopelessly exhausted and b) I prefer Alan Scott, not Hal Jordan, as "the" Green Lantern. Nonetheless, DC did something bad enough that even disinterested parties can recognize the foulness of the maneuver. After all, we can recognize spoiled goods by their smell, whether we tended to buy the pristine version of the merchandise or not.

However, perhaps a description of what happened can clarify matters.

No Gold Watch

Comics can do excellent sendoffs for characters who have outlived their usefulness. For instance, DC sought to impart meaning to the extinction and elimination of characters like the Flash, the Superman of Earth-II, and Supergirl within Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Marvel Comics allowed Jim Starlin to play out the death of Mar-Vell, its first "Captain Marvel," to a graphic novel-length tale - and this for a character loosely tied to the central points of the Marvel mythos. Had Marvel simply refused to mention the character ever again, it would have made little difference in the books it published in the eighties.

Other redundant or exhausted figures got, at least, sentimental sendoffs. The Crimson Avenger, a figure perhaps from the first Franklin Roosevelt administration, got to go out heroically in a "Whatever Happened to..." story, piloting an exploding barge out where it would do no humans (besides his own doomed self) harm. A character who had become little more than a footnote by that day had little to complain about an ending of that sort.

Hal Jordan received no commensurate treatment. Though central to about twenty years of Justice League stories, though embedded in one of the rare classics of the slowly forming canon of comics (with Green Arrow), though present since the end of the fifties, he didn't even enjoy the kind of sendoff DC granted to the Crimson Avenger.

"Have him out in three issues" represents the essence of what DC told Ron Marz to do with Green Lantern in 1994. We on the outside understand Marz' instructions to have included the provision that this finishing off of the character should involve something so extreme that future writers couldn't bring him back.

Laying Seeds of Destruction in "The Reign of the Supermen"

The premise for the destruction of Hal Jordan would occur, strangely enough, in a series of Superman event books. During the "Reign of the Supermen" stories, during which several pretenders to the role of Superman (and, in three cases, his very identity) squabbled amongst themselves, one figure revealed himself as an infiltrator, a subversive element out to ruin the reputation of the departed Superman by doing vile deeds while wearing his face. Together with Mongul, the Cyborg contrived to destroy Coast City, one of those fictitious DC cities originally created as a home town for a superhero; Hal Jordan attached to this one.

By this time, Hal Jordan had gone so many places, done so many things, and assumed so many roles and different jobs that he no longer really had a strong connection to Coast City beyond the connection any heroic man might have to several million needlessly murdered human beings. His friend Tom and his onetime lover Carol had moved on from the city some time ago as well.

From this nucleus would the madness of Hal Jordan germinate, and all that followed - all significant developments - would trace back to his inability to cope with the destruction of Coast City. From his desire to recreate the city, to his abortive recreation of the universe, to subsequent efforts to redeem himself in various ways, the whole thing began here.

Emerald Twilight: Three Issues to Rebuild

If you had spent thirty-five years in stories in DC Comics, and had served as a pioneer concept in the new superheroes of the Silver Age (specifically the reformulated Golden Agers remodeled for a later day), you might expect some kind of glorious sendoff when your publisher finally decided to scrap you. Of course, fictional creations don't expect anything in a real sense, but fans can note the sort of injustice that personification here attempts to insert into the nonexistent feelings of a creation of ink and paper.

At Marvel Comics, an obscure character created as a monster in Fantastic Four received an excellent send-off, far outstripping what the frequently silly and usually pretentious character deserved. "The Strange Death of Adam Warlock," including the story arc that led up to this culmination, represented a fine example of how the disposal of a superhero could mean something.

DC, evidently, missed the point altogether. When it decided to replace Hal Jordan as Green Lantern with a newer, more 1994 version, editors instructed Ron Marz to dispose of the longest-tenured Green Lantern in a mere three issues. Nor did Hal Jordan have no place in the DC mythos; stories by Maggin and Englehart had increased the importance of the Green Lantern mythos in the DC universe over the decades. Getting rid of Green Lantern and the support elements - the Corps, Oa, the Guardians, and all that - meant drastic surgery, not the simple bursting of an annoying storytelling pimple. The risk results from the very nature of an integrated, shared universe model.

In essence, Hal Jordan went bad because he desired to recreate the destroyed Coast City. Initially attempting to do so with his ring, he found that the new city would not outlast the power ring's charge. From there, he entered a dispute with the Corps and the Guardians about the policies he violated in attempts to resurrect a dead city and its residents, and this resulted in a fight between Hal Jordan and the entire Green Lantern Corps. Jordan slaughtered, directly or indirectly, most of the existing Green Lanterns, left a few others powerless, and exterminated all but one of the Guardians. Then, with the collective energy of the Corps itself, he remade himself as the badly-costumed and absurdly named Parallax (as yet, I still can't decipher what he has to do with the perceived visual shift of an object at a distance when viewed from two or more varying locations).

Given time to develop, and forced to adhere to more rigorous standards of quality control, this "Emerald Twilight" debacle could have become a classic piece belonging to a canon of must-read comics. However, DC never gave the time or resources necessary for this. Following a policy of "Get him out, ruin him, and replace him in three issues," Marz wrote a story that achieved little reader loyalty - to my knowledge, few among even die-hard Kyle Rayner fans cared much for the circumstances leading to Kyle's role as Green Lantern.

As a subsequent affront, DC had Kyle Rayner become Green Lantern through a dubious scene in which the surviving Guardian, Ganthet, evidently took the last Green Lantern ring and selected a random human to bear it. Hopefully a future reinterpretation of this scene will make this exercise in random granting of gifts of power to strangers acquire some meaning.

The Howls of Outrage

You probably know, by now, that a certain subset of Green Lantern fans howled like a wolf dunked in a deep fat fryer at the aforementioned developments in the title. For myself, I fortunately would remain on hiatus from comics for another few years and therefore managed to miss it altogether. The howls, at first, fell on deaf ears, and then on ears increasingly hostile to the criticism. Firstly, superhero comics do not represent a democracy where fans vote on the outcome of stories, and the pro-Hal Jordan faction seemed to fail to understand this; secondly, comics enjoys a clientele that can sometimes entertain a dubious variety of passionately-held obsessions, which often perplex the people who create comics, in spite of most pros' origins as fans. Many dismissed the complaints, rather simplistically, as a decadent fannish resistance to any kind of change.

One can preemptively dispense with objections to change as mere desires to calcify the familiar and thereby foreclose the danger of having to learn anything new. However, this begs an important question: Does the simple newness of something justify it? Important questions remained unasked as fans shrieked objections to the ill-treatment of Hal Jordan, since claiming that neophobia explained the entire phenomenon made it unnecessary to ask what motivated the anger, the denunciation, and the out-of-scale reactions from some fans.

The neophobia theory, however, doesn't completely explain it. If simple neophobia caused one very vocal subset of fandom to reject the new Kyle Rayner Green Lantern, why had no similar resistance met the replacement of Barry Allen as Flash with his protege, Wally West, almost ten years previously? A desire to fix everything in amber would have covered both cases, not just Green Lantern's. But here we can see a case of shoddy goods; of large events railroaded through books contained in small stories. Consequences, logically enough, included resistance among fans to the results of these tales.

Dooley seemed to have pulled a fast one, and fans had called him on it. Between persistent abuse from increasingly organized and increasingly angry Hal Jordan fans calling for his head and other visible conflicts between talent and himself, including a dispute over Aquaman that would drive away Erik Larsen and thereby garner Larsen considerable sympathy and Dooley himself increasing hostility from his surly anti-admirers, something would trigger in the man the notion that he had enough of the comics business. Dooley left the industry altogether by 2000.

Zero Hour and Swarms of Evil Future Selves

From his decline, Hal Jordan would make his next important appearance - in terms of significant character developments - in the Zero Hour title and related crossover tie-in pieces.

One might see in Zero Hour the maturing and culmination of the problems in some previous crossovers, including the "Armageddon 2001" crossover that generated the disposable villain Monarch (who would return as Extant and ultimately meet a much-deserved - on aesthetic grounds alone - demise in JSA) and Crisis on Infinite Earths itself.

Zero Hour had going for it a peculiar interrelationship between various supervillains, including Monarch / Extant and the Time Trapper. As the revelations in the Zero Hour books went, all villains had originated as heroes-gone-wrong. However, Hal Jordan - as Parallax - took the role as Villain of Credit on this piece, dismissing or destroying rival villains as they outlived their usefulness within the story. Using the power he had stolen by slaughtering the Green Lantern Corps and taking their rings and sucking dry the central power battery, he had gone on to figure out how to deal with the problem of recreating Coast City. He enjoyed what software developers call "scope creep" as his plan expanded beyond its original parameters; ultimately, he reasoned, to achieve everything he wanted to, he needed to destroy the universe and recreate it as a multiverse. Then, his arguments went, "Everybody wins," because somewhere things remain the way someone wants them.

Some particular problems of definition, as well as the expected ones about ethics, attend such an agenda, but Parallax, the ultimate overachiever, nonetheless went ahead with great abandon and great relish, which brought the variegated superheroes of the DC universe together to thwart him. However, this defeat took long enough that Parallax had recreated the universe anyway - albeit as a single one - and done the editorial housecleaning DC had intended as the real purpose of this event anyway.

Final Night

Mark Twain wrote, as a humorous piece, a tale where a princess masqueraded as a prince to assume her rightful role as leader of her country, a masquerade which, if exposed, would make her eligible for beheading. At the end of this tale, a young noblewoman accused this queen-disguised-as-a-king of getting her pregnant, forcing her a) to take this lying shrew as a spouse or b) expose her imposture and get her head cut off.

Rather than resolve the problem, Twain just ended the story with a note that he had got his characters into so much trouble he had no idea how to get them out again, and left it at that. While we can laugh at reading this kind of stuff, sometimes I wonder if Twain hadn't simply taken the honorable way out: dropping a story instead of picking at it, like a scab, until it becomes so nasty and infected no one would want to have to look at it.

Perhaps a less graphic metaphor might better serve those of you with delicate digestion. However, the entire business of attaching new resolutions to badly-worked stories, to a certain degree, resembles the ugly business of opening a wound which has begun to knit (whether cleanly or not).

Final Night dealt with the extinction of our sun, and the efforts of various superheroes to prevent, cope with, and undo this unfortunate development.

Day of Judgment

From "Emerald Twilight" to Final Night, we saw Hal Jordan fall, by his own doing, into disgrace. We might here use the term disgrace to describe both the moral aspects of his behavior and the aesthetic aspects of such an ad hoc downsizing of a DC franchise. In Final Night, on the other hand, DC attempted some degree of moral redemption, though doing away with the character in the process, as he gave his life to rekindle the sun.

This left Hal redeemed but dead. And, as they intended, would have provided an excellent stepping-off place from which they could choose to say no more about the character and worry the wounds created in his roles in "Emerald Dawn," Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, and Final Night itself.

In this piece, on can see th dangers inherent in attempting to placate two factions with incompatible agendas. One faction which declares Kyle Rayner the single and unique Green Lantern, now and in perpetuity, and another that demands the restoration of Hal Jordan to such a role, perhaps also with the attendant baggage of the Green Lantern mythos itself, can't really come to an agreement.

DC, however, seemed to want to offer something to bereaved Hal Jordan fans. No warning bells went off to remind them that, in each successive stage, attempts to revise Hal Jordan had gone terribly wrong: Hal as rogue Green Lantern, Hal as Parallax the destroyer of universes, and Parallax as martyr to the sun had all failed to satisfy and tangled the concept further at each step.

Day of Judgment, at the time, seemed a further step into folly. It offered this to Hal Jordan fans: He would return, in some kind of heroic role, to DC Comics. It retained this of the original decision(s): Hal Jordan would not come back from the dead (by comics definitions, a ghost has not returned from the dead in the same sense of the average superhero that shrugs off death as easily as a head cold) and he would not reassume the role of Green Lantern.

DC, as you probably know already, recast Hal Jordan as the Spectre. While nothing about either character precluded, by definition, such an amalgamation, nothing suggested a connection, either. Furthermore, in the Spectre's role as Wrath of God, a divine agent of vengeance that used to cut people in half with giant scissors in Weird Adventure Comics, one sees a certain problem of conflict of interest. With Hal Jordan having murdered some 3600 or so souls, plus a small assortment blue-skinned bald guys in red dresses, we see a more likely victim of the Spectre than host.

Rather than gloss this over, however, DC chose somewhat to invert the Spectre concept itself, adding, in a daring stroke, a dangerous redemptive element that could make or break the new incarnation in the short run. At this point, DC could drop the ball or could achieve a touchdown. We don't yet know which it will do.

Making Lemonade?

With the previous explorations of just where DC seems to have gone wrong in handling the Green Lantern concept, one might suspect that this column might continue on to reproach the new Spectre series for ill-use of the character. However, no such thing will happen here, partially because the two issues of Legends two subsequent issues of Spectre have some appeal to them, in spite of the storytelling calamities that made them possible. The new Spectre book has some promise as a thoughtful and moody piece, in spite of the risks it faces concerning falling into a formula rut - Hal attempting to redeem himself could give way to the good deed of the month tale - and, so far, worth reading.

If J. M. DeMatteis and successors can take the Hal-as-Spectre premise and run with it, however, we should view this less as a measure of the strength of an idea and more as a success on the part of talented and dedicated writers with the vision to get something out of a troubled and awkward concept.

Nonetheless, factions such as H.E.A.T. ("Hal's Emerald Advancement Team") can make plausible claims that DC has further betangled the Hal Jordan character with this reinvention. Melding the central object of their attention with a superhero who seems to produce a failed series about once per decade since the Silver Age, and taking him away from his space-opera background into the territory of metaphysics might seem, to them, more like teasing than appeasing.

For the rest of us, freed by detachment from the desire to engineer some kind of Lord Malvolio escape hatch that would make everything return to a previous, more palatable state, we can mainly watch and wait. Other characters have returned from the editorial equivalent of gulags to rise in both commercial success and aesthetic credibility. Perhaps this new version of a much-abused superhero can achieve some new plateau. It rests upon us to let it happen if it will.

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Column 240. Completed 18-Mar-2001.