September 1976: The Short Flight of the Human Rocket

What do you get when you cross Spider-Man with Green Lantern? Nova, the Human Rocket.

Introduced by writer Marv Wolfman and artist John Buscema in Nova 1 (Sept. 1976), the character was an attempt to recapture the teenage superhero lightning of Spider-Man in a bottle 14 years later. 

But instead of a bitterly alienated science nerd, Richard Rider was an ordinary high schooler, good-hearted but not overly bright. As with the Silver Age Green Lantern, his super powers are transferred from an endangered and dying alien champion. 

But the dying Green Lantern of Space Sector 2814, Abin Sur, had time to find the bravest man on Earth, Hal Jordan, and to use his power ring to check that he was also honest. The mortally wounded Centurion Nova-Prime Rhomann Dey just picked a kid at random.

And that angle gave the feature something of a Greatest American Hero vibe, with Rider learning to use his super powers on the job. And those were the satisfying if typical Standard Operating Procedure powers for a superhero — flight, super-speed, durability and super-strength.

His first run lasted only an unimpressive 25 issues. But I always thought Nova had potential, and at least his exit was as stylish as his entrance — for the final issue, his cover tag line was altered from “He’s here! The Human Rocket!” to “He’s gone! The Human Rocket!”

January 1970: Power and Protest

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists Neal Adams and Jim Aparo helped bring Batman down from the “camp” ledge where the TV show had left him stranded.

In Detective Comics 395, for example, Adams and writer Denny O’Neil restored some of Batman’s old gothic horror in The Secret of the Waiting Graves.

The issue included a second artistic treat — Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson providing us an action-packed story about the emancipation of Robin. 

On his first day at Hudson University, the Boy Wonder investigates a campus protest riot instigated by fake cops in league with fake demonstrators. It’s all part of a communist plot to shutter America’s universities. 

The ongoing Vietnam War is, of course, never mentioned.

Kane simultaneously served up a fine issue in Green Lantern 74. One sequence has particularly stayed with me.

Battles with Star Sapphire and Sinestro have left the Emerald Gladiator in a state of collapse, barely able to crawl, with the last of his ring’s reserve power exhausted. Luckily, his old pal Tom Kalmaku is handy (“I bet nobody calls him ‘Pieface’ anymore,” GL thinks). Tom finds and brings Green Lantern his invisible power battery. 

In a beautiful, carefully constructed dramatic sequence, Kane shows us Green Lantern’s restoration from a state of abject defeat to a literal world-beater, with his pal’s admiration underlining the effects.

“(T)he stuff that I like to draw has nothing to do with any individual character,” Gil Kane once explained. “What I like to draw is some idea of power gathering itself, and all of a sudden the power is blocked and the power has to assert itself and strain itself and there’s an enormous resistance to it and all of a sudden the power breaks through and leaps free. That’s what I like to draw. That, in effect, is the essence behind my personality.”

July 1969: Toying with the Counterculture

By 1969, the American counterculture was inescapable, even in popular culture.

It slipped obliquely even into Green Lantern 70 (July 1969) in a story written by John Broome.

“Happiness was what the stranger offered the world … but all he brought it was … tragedy!” proclaimed the ad copy for the issue, with a cover showing a painfully thin, weeping figure astride the fallen body of Green Lantern (and wearing what appeared to be one of Captain Comet’s old discarded costumes).

In 1969, the idea of a naïve and well-meaning superhuman alien stranger had an obvious reference point: Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which had lately become a bestseller and something of a countercultural bible.

The novel had been based on an idea Heinlein got for his wife Ginny for turning Kipling’s Jungle Book into a “Martian Book.” What would Mowgli be like if he’d been raised by aliens?

The answer turned out to be Valentine Michael Smith, a painfully thin Martian-reared boy who gained telepathy and telekinesis from his extraterrestrial upbringing, but lost the human tendencies to be jealous and dishonest.

Green Lantern’s stranger turns out to be not a Martian but a toy. The defective and rejected robot from the planet Ghyra just wants make people laugh, but ends up causing a lot of trouble (His name is “Hilar,” as in “hilarious”).

Countercultural references are peppered throughout. Clearly, DC knew the this new youth culture was out there, but didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“First the mods -- then the hippies -- now this!” remarks a passer-by when he spots Hilar. 

A cop who tries to arrest the innocuous Hilar as a “student revolutionary” finds himself reflexively hurled aside by Hilar’s powers. 

Those powers prompt a criminal gang to recruit the innocent, a mess that requires the giant green hand of the Emerald Gladiator to sort it out.

 

March 1968: One Unlucky Guy

I enjoyed the first Guy Gardner story, which offered readers the same fantasy kick that Green Lantern’s debut in Showcase 22 provided.

“A friendly Guy Gardner was created by John Broome and Gil Kane,” noted Al Nickerson in Back Issue magazine. “Guy first appeared in Green Lantern 59 (March 1968), entitled Earth’s Other Green Lantern!”

“As he lay dying, the alien Green Lantern Abin Sur sought a replacement for himself in the Green Lantern Corps. Two people were Chosen — Guy Gardner and Hal Jordan. However, since Hal Jordan was closer to the dying alien, Hal was selected to be Earth’s Green Lantern.”

Kane’s artwork, admirable enough in 1959, was at a peak nine years later when he retold the Green Lantern origin story, substituting ginger-haired gym teacher Guy Gardner for test pilot Hal Jordan. And inker Sid Greene gave the proceedings a fine polish.

So once again, we readers could indulge in the fantasy of being found worthy of an omnipotent ring, of learning to fly by force of will, of smashing through the walls of criminal lairs…

But while stopping a war on Ghera, a planet inhabited by telepathic immortal children, Gardner discovers he has contracted the yellow plague that had killed all Ghera’s adults. Weakening, he orders his ring to find a successor, who, of course, turns out to be Hal Jordan.

Writer John Broome had slowly and deliberately developed Green Lantern’s cosmic mythology from the first, and Guy Gardner was another elaboration of that — the suggestion that someone could step in for Jordan as Jordan had stepped in for Abin Sur.

Gardner — Broome’s wink at fellow DC scribe Gardner Fox, perhaps? — was an example of a character who was dramatically altered in subsequent appearances. 

Acquiring a personality, he became an arrogant goofball to serve as a comic contrast to other superheroes. But his original appearance paved the way for human Green Lanterns other than Hal Jordan, and John Stewart followed four years later.

October 1966: The Man With the Midas Touch

Because of the lines around the block to see the movie, Goldfinger references were ubiquitous in the mid-1960s.

So teen idol Frankie Avalon fought Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, the Legion of Super-Heroes faced the menace of Starfinger and Green Lantern squared off against Goldface.

In The Elixir of Invulnerability! (Green Lantern 38, July 1965), the vacationing Emerald Gladiator had defeated Keith Kenyon, who’d used sunken gold to create an invulnerability potion. 

In Goldface's Grudge Fight Against Green Lantern! (Green Lantern 48, Oct. 1966), Kenyon returned with a shiny new identity and a “Fort Knox-mobile.” Plotting revenge, he broadcast his challenge through the gold fillings in Coast City’s citizens’ teeth (!).

The super villain was now armed with “super-auric energy” that could transform anything into gold — a particular problem for a superhero whose powers were nullified by the color yellow. 

But Green Lantern prevailed as usual in the Gardner Fox-scripted story. He avoided finishing up as a solid gold statue by surreptitiously ordering his power ring to solidify the air around him.

Inked by Sid Greene, Gil Kane’s art was hitting its peak of sumptuous lyricism, and — perhaps in response to Marvel’s growing popularity — the editors were permitting him to insert more freewheeling action into the proceedings. So that was all to the good.

“Kane excels at later images in this tale, showing figures against clouds of dust,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “The clouds make beautiful abstract designs behind the figures.’

We also saw Green Lantern dating Hollywood star Zu Zu Lamar (i.e., Zsa Zsa Gabor).

“If I’m a superhero, you’re a super-beauty, Miss Lamar,” Green Lantern says, grinning.

“Dahling — you say the dahlingest things!” replies the star.

It was just a ploy to make Carol Ferris angry at Green Lantern and therefore closer to his alter ego Hal Jordan. But Hal needn’t have bothered, because in the next issue Carol would tell the heartbroken Hal that she’d agreed to marry someone else. 

April 1963: In Brightest Day, In Swiftest Flight…

The Justice League teemed with teams within the team — Superman and Batman, Hawkman and the Atom, Green Arrow and the Martian Manhunter and a particular favorite, the Flash and Green Lantern.

“The third team-up between the two heroes was in 1963’s Green Lantern 20, titled Parasite Planet Peril,” noted John Peterson.  “When a phenomenon dubbed the vanishing plague causes people on earth to vanish over time, the Green Lantern and Flash team-up to try and prevent more people from vanishing. When the Green Lantern gets afflicted by the disease, he hands over his power ring to the Flash, hoping that the power of the ring could prevent (him) from vanishing.”

In between missions to protect Earth from alien invaders, Barry Allen and Hal Jordan had time to relax together with their girlfriends Iris West and Carol Ferris, providing a cozy, cheerful view of young adulthood in the Camelot era.

To a child, this seemed like an ideal way to grow up.

Nor did it seem strange to me that all four were young professionals — a police scientist, a test pilot, a magazine photojournalist and the owner/manager of an aircraft manufacturing company. 

Of course women would want to have lucrative, challenging and creative careers, just like men. Why wouldn’t they?

Call it the Schwartz Effect. The comics Julius Schwartz edited took the emancipation of women for granted, consistently sending the young readers a message that didn’t seem to be a message at all.

Another fact about these stories that jumps out at me now is that while Hal calls his Eskimo pal “Pieface,” Carol addresses him respectfully as “Thomas.”

Good for you, Carol.

April 1962: The Omnipotent Pawn

Writer John Broome cooked up an idiosyncratic recipe to make his Green Lantern stories work. For example, for all his apparent omnipotence, the superhero was frequently the unwitting puppet of forces greater than himself.

He was empowered by the Guardians, who communicated with him unconsciously at first in giving him his instructions as their cosmic police officer. But he was also periodically summoned to the far future, with his memory wiped, to help out the people there.

In The Challenge From 5700 A.D. (Green Lantern 6, Sept.-Oct. 1961), Hal Jordan is drawn through time and given a new, contemporary identity so that he can fend off an alien invasion.

Though sometimes used as a pawn, the Emerald Gladiator frequently created doppelgangers to use as pawns in his battles against evil. In the first dozen issues, he turned his pal Pieface into a flying duplicate of himself, conjured up multiple duplicates out of the heavy air of an alien world and transformed a statue into a fighting surrogate.

That happened six issues after the first “Future Lantern” story, in Green Lantern's Statue Goes To War (Green Lantern 12, April 1962).

“The second story has a good opening, in which Green Lantern finds a small fragment while combing his hair, and he begins to have subconscious memories,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost. “He begins to piece things together, using the sort of reasoning that is frequent among Green Lantern characters. The small fragment from the future recalls the flower brought back by the Time Traveler in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895).”

“The best part of either tale is Gil Kane's art in the second story, especially his depiction of a futuristic plaza surrounded by an elevated circular walkway,” Grost wrote. “This is a splendid conception; it shows up on both the cover and the later sections of the story. Green Lantern is also shown against circular backgrounds here, making for interesting geometric compositions in the art.”

March 1962: Let’s Give the Villains a Hand

Early in their runs, the jet age Flash and Green Lantern had already developed surprisingly elaborate mythologies.

Barry Allen’s centered on his highly colorful, idiosyncratic “rogue’s gallery,” which ranged from would-be ladykillers (Captain Cold) to unscrupulous advertising gimmicks (Captain Boomerang).

And foremost among them was Grodd, who added an entire secret city of super gorillas to the mix. By Flash 127, the sinister simian was already making his fifth appearance in the title.

“Grodd sought to overthrow (the super-gorilla chief) Solovar through his impressive psionic powers, which included telekinesis, mind control, telepathy and mental projection,” observed Keith Dallas in his Flash Companion. “He was also a brilliant inventor, constructing various imaginative weapons and gadgets, like the one that caused the Flash to absorb so much moisture from the surrounding air that he turned into a 1,000-pound fat man (The Flash 115, Sept. 1960).”

In this John Broome/Carmine Infantino story, Grodd chooses the unusual weapon of love, using “neo-magnetic radiation” to make anyone who sees him adore him. Cheekily, he even running for governor.

In the next issue, the 64th century stage magician Abra Kadabra would also compel applause, but only because he was a hopeless ham.

The Emerald Gladiator’s mythological superstructure was well displayed on the cover of Green Lantern 11, which featured not just Hal Jordan but an array of masked aliens in vivid and verdant costumes, including a bird humanoid, a fish humanoid, a tree humanoid, a robot and a tiny grasshopper Green Lantern.

Here, Hal’s most formidable foe and opposite number, Sinestro, engineers his exile from the Green Lantern Corps to the evil antimatter universe of Qward. But he succeeds in proving only that the resourceful Hal Jordan can use anything — even the water vapor from his own breath — as the means of escaping a trap.

And of course, as close friends and frequent partners, Flash and Green Lantern were also a part of each other’s mythologies, adding to the fun for fans.

September 1960: Refugees from an Evil Universe

Comics historian Michael E. Grost points out the significance of the Emerald Gladiator’s excursions into the parallel universe of Qward — for example the John Broome/Gil Kane story The Secret of the Golden Thunderbolts (Green Lantern 2, Sept.-Oct. 1960).

“This tale deals with, among other things, a group of refugees from Qward, who want to come to Earth to live,” Grost wrote.

“They are very sympathetically, even heroically presented. Refugees rarely appear in popular culture. It is hard to understand why: the need to support refugees is among the most significant on Earth. The principle of host countries always accepting refugees is the most important principle protecting human rights on the planet. Without it, terrible tragedies would take place.”

The Flash was almost a team-up title in The Flash 115 (Sept. 1960), with some other superhero character often included. Here, the back-up story is The Elongated Man’s Secret Weapon.

Meanwhile, in the cover story, the Flash has suddenly gotten fat. I wish I could blame a ray gun fired by a telepathic super-gorilla disguised as a bald guy when I put on weight.

July 1960: The Power Ring of Imagination

Though tricked up as a science fiction revamp, the jet-age Green Lantern — with his virtually omnipotent lamp and ring — was a modern Aladdin. His adventures included a thousand and one wonders, just like the Arabian fairy tales.

“(W)hat the ring does perfectly is link Green Lantern’s imagination to the reader’s own,” wrote Alex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci in their book Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture and the Canon of Superhero Literature. “It is very easy to imagine wearing a power ring and dreaming up items to defeat bad guys.”

Even if the bad guys are gigantic, ray-gun-wielding clown puppets, as in this house ad for Green Lantern 1 (July-Aug. 1960).

An omnipotent hero is a dramatic problem, but writer John Broome balanced that in a subtle thematic way in the early issues of the title.

Despite his seeming omnipotence, Green Lantern is often the pawn of forces beyond his understanding. That begins even in his origin, when the flightless trainer he’s sitting in is whisked away to the alien stranger Abin Sur. Hal Jordan knows nothing of the Guardians, who will empower him, nor of the people from 5700 A.D. who will periodically kidnap him to help them out.

November 1959: The Destroyer Within

“Are you sure that what you wish is what you want?” asks Cinderella’s mother/tree in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

As a science-fictional variation on the Aladdin theme, the Silver Age Green Lantern was wish fulfillment with a vengeance. But wishes can be scary things, something writer John Broome understood and explored in more than one story.

“The first superheroes, of course, are the parents themselves,” observed children’s television host Fred Rogers. “There is a very natural stage in the development of the human personality in which we believe that we ourselves are omnipotent, and that our parents are omnipotent, and that we’re able to do anything. But we have to help children gently along the way to realize that nobody is omnipotent … Because even though children would love to think that they could take on the world and win, it can also be very frightening to they to think that they are omnipotent — and that what they think will, indeed, happen.”

The idea that the unconscious mind could make such powers immensely dangerous was the premise of the film Forbidden Planet, and tripped up Green Lantern more than once. Hal Jordan’s errant wish created a giant monster (The Leap Year Menace, Green Lantern 3) and his dream turned his mechanic pal into a seagull (Wings of Destiny, Green Lantern 7, July-Aug. 1961 ).

And in The Invisible Destroyer (Showcase 23, Nov-Dec. 1959), the Emerald Crusader confronts an elusive caped super villain sprung from the unconscious mind of scientist Dr. Phillips. This energy-projecting tulpa, which feeds on radiation, plans to obliterate Coast City in a nuclear detonation. Luckily for Green Lantern, his wish-fulfilling ring can create anything, including “anti-energy.”

“Green Lantern's powers were unusual in that they could explore the inner workings of the human mind,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “Many stories center on the ring's exteriorizing people's thoughts, giving them bodily shape outside a person's mind.”

September 1959: This Lantern Earth

Throughout the 1950s, cinemas and ubiquitous drive-in theaters featured numerous science fiction movies, and it’s safe to say that DC Comics staffers Julius Schwartz, Gil Kane and John Broome saw some of them.

And I’m betting that one of those was This Island Earth, a critically praised 1955 Universal International film that starred Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue and Rex Reason and was based on the novel by Raymond F. Jones. Prominent elements of the film would be paralleled in DC’s revival of the Green Lantern character in Showcase 22 (Sept.-Oct. 1959).

Nor I am the first to note that. Film buff Heath Holland observed, “As a lifelong comic book fan, I’m struck by the similarities in this story to the comic book title Green Lantern, which follows the adventures of test pilot Hal (versus this movie’s pilot Cal) who commands enormous power with his Green Lantern ring (this movie features a powerful green energy beam) for an alien race (Cal’s adventure leads him beyond Earth’s boundaries).”

Even more pointedly, both science fiction adventures begin with a plane, or something resembling a plane, being seized and transported by a powerful alien force.

A mysterious green glow saves Cal Meacham’s life as his Lockheed jet is about to crash in the 1955 film, and whisks Hal Jordan’s flightless trainer away to meet the dying interstellar patrolman Abin Sur in Showcase 22.

To retool the magically powered Aladdin-like superhero of the 1940s into the streamlined jet-age Emerald Crusader of the 1950s, the creators built science fiction elements into the concept, including a corps of alien police officers commanded by a lofty, dispassionate race of “Guardians”  — an idea borrowed from a 1952 Captain Comet story in Strange Adventures. 

Inspiration for both the Captain Comet and Green Lantern stories can be traced to Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith’s 1930s Lensman series of SF novels, which featured telepathically powered space patrolmen guided by “guardians” in the form of the peace-loving, staggeringly ancient Arisians.

December 1943: When Green Lantern Met the Shadow (Sort Of)

Comic book readers must have had an odd sense of déjà vu when they tuned to The Shadow on the Sunday afternoon of Dec. 10, 1944.

In the episode The Immortal Murderer, they heard invisible avenger Lamont Cranston confront a Neanderthal museum exhibit come to life, a 100,000-year-old super-villain who called himself Adam Cain. 

Explaining that he had effectively been made immortal by radioactive gases, Cain reveals that he knows the Shadow’s secret identity and offers him a partnership in plundering the world.

But wait a minute.

That was virtually the same plot as DC’s Green Lantern 10, the Winter 1943 issue that had appeared on newsstands a year before. 

Like Cain, the million-year-old Vandal Savage became immortal by inhaling weird gases. Like Cain, Savage offered the superhero a villainous partnership and, like Cain, his long experience had given him the smarts to figure out the superhero’s secret identity.

“You know!” exclaimed the nonplussed Green Lantern.

“But of course!” replied Savage. “I have been watching your movements for some time. The mere application of symbolic logic to the 6th degree led me to that inevitable conclusion.”

The inevitable conclusion that the listeners might have reached is that both stories had been dreamed up by the same person, and they’d have been right. The writer was Alfred Bester, later a celebrated science fiction author, who had recycled his Green Lantern story for The Shadow.

Bester appreciated the springboard comics gave him. “The comic book days were over, but the splendid training I received in visualization, attack, dialogue and economy stayed with me forever,” he recalled.

Cranston locked himself into an airless bank vault with Cain in an attempt to destroy them both, but luckily Margot Lane turned up to accidentally shoot the Neanderthal through the heart. Green Lantern’s ring drilled a bottomless pit beneath Savage’s feet, but unlike Cain, the million-year-old monster returned many times to menace humanity.

Vandal Savage returned in the early 1960s.

November 1940: When You Wish Upon a Ring

Beyond all that claptrap about “will power,” Green Lantern’s ability was one he would share with all his readers — the power to wish for things.

So Martin Nodell’s concept for his character — a superheroic Aladdin complete with lamp and ring — was an excellent one.

The “will power” business was, I suppose, a nod to the Protestant work ethic, a term that was coined in 1904 but a concept that had been knocking around at least since the 16th century. 

Doesn’t do to have things too easy, even if they’re magical.

But when I finally read the original GL’s earliest adventures decades later, I found Alan Scott’s original costume attractively garish, with its sweeping collared cape and dominant purples and reds. But I was disappointed in the stories.

Beginning with the hero’s origin in All-American Comics 16 (July 1940), the art seemed crude, the opponents pedestrian. His vast, fantastic powers seemed to be deliberately played down, as if dullness was supposed to be the point of the stories.

As with many DC Comics superheroes, the stories produced after World War II, in the twilight of the Golden Age, were much better. The whole tone of the comics improved considerably.

With talented writers like John Broome and the Hugo Award-winning Alfred Bester and accomplished artists like Carmine Infantino, Alex Toth and Irwin Hasen, Green Lantern now faced memorable menaces like the unstoppable swamp zombie Solomon Grundy and the cheeky rogue Harlequin, who diverted GL’s crusade against crime into a battle of the sexes.

In recent years, writers have sometimes connected Green Lantern’s power to nature magic and the Gaia hypothesis, but it’s interesting to note that the concept was suggested right in the 1940 character origin. 

“For I am the flame of life. Green, as are the plants, the growing things!” the magic lamp tells Alan Scott. “The light of the Green Lantern must be shed over the dark, evil things for the dark things cannot stand light!”