This post is Filed Under:
Home page Highlights,
Interviews and Columns
Robert Greenberger
by Robert Greenberger
The renewal brand traces its history back to Geoff Johns being handed the emerald Crusader and asked to revitalize green lantern for modern readers. His green Lantern: renewal helped scrape away the barnacles that constant reinvention left him with and got back to the core essence of Hal Jordan and what made him so special.
Green Lantern: The Silver Age Vol. 1
Readers can now revisit those initial stories that so captivated Johns, me, and numerous other readers. In a good affordable trade collection, green Lantern: The Silver Age Vol. 1 provides up Showcase #22-24 and Green Lantern #1-9.
By 1959, Editor Julie Schwartz and publisher Irwin Donenfeld saw they had a successful formula with taking the golden Age heroic names and using them for new characters. The Flash, after four sporadic appearances in Showcase, had earned his own title and was selling well. who was the next likely candidate? green Lantern, who back in the day headlined not only All-American Comics and Comics Cavalcade, but his own eponymous quarterly.
Schwartz felt the power ring smacked of science fiction and turned to writer John Broome to help figure out where the ring came from. Both men were familiar with E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen pulp stories for the 1930s and 1940s, and visualized the ring as the weapon wielded by a galactic police force. and now a human was called to join their ranks. Neither Schwartz nor Broome ever admitted direct connection but the influence was clear as evidence by Broome exploring similar territory with their earlier Captain Comet series.
What sort of human could answer the call? At the time, Schwartz was finding jobs that were “cutting edge” such as a police scientist and now a test pilot, who displayed the sort of fearlessness it might require to channel the emerald energies and safeguard mankind and beyond.
The editor turned to Gil Kane, no stranger to science fiction and with a keen design sense, and asked for a new uniform. Kane, who hated belts, developed the sleek black and green outfit that could easily be seen as a uniform with power battery chest emblem. Jordan was developed after actor Paul Newman, who had once been Kane’s neighbor.
Showcase #22
From the first story, we meet Abin Sur, the lantern of space industry 2814, who has crash-landed on Earth. Dying, he commands the ring to bring him a worthy successor and after a brief exchange, Sur dies and a new green lantern is born.
Jordan was flying for Ferris Aircraft, run by founder Carl Ferris’ daughter Carol, another in Schwartz’s strong female players in comics. While she had eyes for the handsome Lantern, she was all company with Jordan.
At this point, showcase had developed into giving new ideas three consecutive issues to test the waters and the sales were strong enough from the beginning to commission a new ongoing title. Unlike Flash which continued the original numbering, GL earned a new series from #1 and in that July-August 1960 issue, the science fiction quotient is ramped up with the introduction of the Guardians of the Universe, a cadre of identical-looking blue-skinned men (resembling Israel’s David Ben-Gurion) who oversaw the GL Corps. Jordan’s “energy duplicate” is brought to their base of operations on the planet Oa and given information but all memory of them is erased when the duplicate is returned to Jordan’s body.
Green lantern #2
While issue #1 give us the pedestrian Puppet Master as a foe, the second issue took us to the anti-matter universe of Qward and their deadly Weaponers, complete with powerful yellow thunder bolts (yellow, after all, being the required impurity in the power rings). The issue’s second story introduced us to Jordan’s chief mechanic and confidant Tom Kalmaku, an Inuit (Alaska had just joined the Union at this time) with the unfortunate nickname “Pieface”.
Interestingly, the Thunderers return in issues #3-4 rather than expand his rogues’ gallery which set is aside from Flash. issue #4, though, does gives us the origin of his mask in a story that was patched together by Kane, Mike Sekowsky, Ross Andru, Carmine Infantino, and Joe Giella, all tied together through Giella’s strong inks.
Hector Hammond, the powerful telepath, arrives in issue #5 in the title’s first full-length story. While cool, the second book-lengther, an issue later, demonstrates the series’ core concept. Tomar-Re, protector of the adjacent sector, needs reinforcements, he summons Hal Jordan, who makes his first extended trip into deep space.
Green lantern #7
Sinestro finally arrives in issue #7, stealing 100,000 people and isolating them on Qward in an effort to defeat green Lantern. His tragic backstory takes time to be revealed but it’s clear they hit pay dirt with his creation. Finally, the Guardians reveal their existenceto a conscious Hal Jordan.
Issue #8 introduced another recurring concept, that the people of 5700 A.D. needed a champion and brought green lantern forward in time to be their hero. He’s given a cover identity of Pol Manning and sent after the invading Zegors, a highly-evolved type of Gila monster.
The final issue ends things on a high note as Sinestro is back, amped up having stolen power from a number of green Lanterns – Tomar-Re, Xax, Chaselon, Larvox, Rori Stroh, and NautKeLoi – and is intend on exacting revenge on the Guardians themselves. Interestingly, there’s room for a second story which is far much more personal, as Hal’s brothers Jack and Jim are introduced. siblings were and remain a rarity in superhero comics and always helped ground this series.
There’s plenty of action, character, and high concept science fiction contained within along with numerous seeds that have gone on to form the foundations of the DC universe in whatever incarnation published.
Purchase
Green Lantern: The Silver Age Vol. 1
Classic covers from the Grand Comics Database.