Actually Essential Storylines: Green Lantern Hal Jordan

The latest issue of 52 featured the origin of “Green Lantern” in the back-up feature, which in this case refers to Green Lantern II, the Silver Age bearer of the name, Hal Jordan.

As with each of the weekly back-up origin stories, it was written by Mark Waid, and the art was from a well-chosen art team—here, Ivan Reis and Oclair Albert, the latest of the three art teams to tackle the Green Lantern monthly series.

And, as with each of the weekly back-up origins, the story ended with “Essential Storylines,” suggesting where new readers can learn more about the hero in question.

As in our previous installments of Actually Essential Storylines, we’ll take a closer look and see if we can’t add to those storylines.

Here's what DC recommended:

Green Lantern Archives: And no wonder. At $50 a pop, I’m sure the company would be only too delighted if you’d invest in some of the archive collections, as would your local comic shop proprieter. For old school Green Lantern Hal Jordan reading, however, a far better investment would be Showcase Presents: Green Lantern Vol. 1, for which you’ll get about 500 pages of classic stories and change back from a twenty dollar bill. You’d have to be a Hal Jordan or GL fetishist to really invest in any of these though. Wonderful Gil Kane art aside, you’re going to be subjected to a lot of misogyny and casual racism at the expense of Hal’s sidekick “Pieface.”

Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn: The six-issue, post-Crisis miniseries is currently collected in trade, and tells the origin of Hal Jordan in more modern, long-form comic storytelling, undoubtedly a wise investment, but tread carefully with it’s sequel, as it was among the storylines singled out in Infinite Crisis Secret Files and Origins #1 for Superboy-Prime punch rejiggering.

Green Lantern: Rebirth: If you read only one story on this list, this is the one to read. Not only is it’s art among the most stunning—this is the miniseries that put Ethan Van Sciver on the map—but it also covers pretty much Hal Jordan’s history in quick, easy to digest form. Geoff Johns had to do quite a bit of contortionism to make this all work out, resurrected Jordan from the dead, restoring his Green Lantern status and absolving him of his crimes as Parallax, and while I don’t necessarily agree with the need to make Jordan a hero again (he was more fascinating as a villain, and Kyle Rayner and the other three Lanters were more than adequate successors), Johns gets major props for making all this crazy business work. Just don’t talk to me about the Batman punch-out scene, unless you want to read 1,000-word essay on it’s impossibility.

Green Lantern Corps: Recharge: This is a pretty decent read introducing a new status quo to the GLC (which is quickly changed during Infinite Crisis, when we lose Rayner), but I’m a little surprised to see it here.

Here’s what they missed…

The fall of Hal Jordan: Venerable Silver Age superhero Hal Jordan going nuts, turning into a killer and attempting to destroy and remake the entire universe is one of the most controversial storylines in DC history. Indeed, there were so many fans that just couldn’t buy it that it was eventually reversed, and some of those fans have played a role in that reversal (take Geoff Johns, for instance). We won’t get into the whole debate here, but for those curious in it, Jordan lost his entire home city in “Reign of the Superman” from the Superman titles (a storyline collected here) and started to go a little nuts with guilt. He went so nuts that he rebelled against the Guardians in “Emerald Twilight”, in which he fought pretty much the entire GLC and Sinestro—to the death. He then went on to fight Guy Gardner and the Justice League in the “Emerald Fallout” storyline in Guy Gardner: Warrior and, later, the entire universe in Zero Hour. He went on to fight his replacement as Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, in a few issues of Green Lantern, but was little used as a villain until he gave his life saving Earth from the Suneater in The Final Night. This wasn’t the end of Jordan’s starring role in seemingly every DC crossover event, however. In the Johns-penned Day of Judgement (what, was the phrase “Judgement Day” to clear and catchy or something?, his shade is freed from purgatory and bonds with the Spectre force, with Hal Jordan becoming the new Spectre. If there were any good stories to tell with Jordan as the Spectre, DC never really got around to telling them, as the company seemed confused in terms of whether anyone knew Hal was really the Spectre and whether he’d be a murderous spirit of vengeance or a more superheroic spirit of redemption.

Kyle Rayner: Rayner’s origin story is somewhat dated in the details—we first meet him dancing in a club to Nine Inch Nails—but his creator Ron Marz gave us a hero we could really relate to, and after eventually finding his footing, gave us a title that was focused as much on the Green Lantern legacy and the character of Kyle Rayner as it was on superheroics in general (together with Flash and Starman in the late ‘90s, Marz’s Green Lantern really brought legacies to the fore of the DCU). Highlights from Marz’s run on the title have been collected in Green Lantern: Baptism of Fire, which collects Rayner’s road trip seeking advice on the hero game from such diverse characters as Batman, Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman; Emerald Knights, which teamed Rayner with a time-lost Jordan; and a couple of team-ups with Connor Hawke, Green Arrow II.

Other great Kyle Rayner stories occur throughout Grant Morrison and Mark Waid’s runs on JLA, and in Green Lantern: Circle of Fire, which created six new GLs and teamed them with Rayner and a random assortment of DC characters (Firestorm, the Atom, Adam Strange and Power Girl)—it was written by some guy named Brian K. Vaughan (Wonder what ever happened to him?)

Justice League of America: Hal Jordan’s role as a founder of the Justice League lead to some of the best Jordan stories, like Mark Waid and Barry Kitson’s superior maxiseries JLA: Year One (which, unfortunately may not even be considered in continuity post-Infinite Crisis), and it’s semi-sequel The Brave and the Bold, which focused on Jordan’s friendship with Barry Allen, the Flash. Jordan’s early days with the League were also show in the first few issues of the criminally uncollected JLA: Incarnations maxiseries, and the also uncollected Waid-masterminded series Silver Age, in which the Silver Age JLA and their many allies of the period face off against the Secret Society of Supervillains and a new villain with bizarre powers.

While Jordan was with the League through the end of the “Sattellite Years,” he had relatively little to do with the Justice League post-Crisis. Guy Gardner became the League’s Green Lantern throughout the long and influential run by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, though Hal Jordan would step in to lead first Justice League Europe and then Justice League International after Giffen and DeMatteis concluded their run with the epic “Breakdowns.” That was his last stint with the League, though ever since he’s returned from the dead, he’s been hanging around the Watchtower and sticking his nose in League adventures. Brad Meltzer seems to be poised to make Jordan's place on the League official in the relaunched Justice League of America.

The Classics: Of all the Hal Jordan stories, the ones that are best-known, even by people who have never even read a Hal Jordan story, are his team-ups with Green Arrow, in which a young turk of a writer by the name of Dennis O’Neil tried inserting some Marvel-style, real world relevance into the DCU. Read today, as the two volumes of trade paperback collections DC currently has in print makes easy to do, the stories are wildly dated and incredibly awkward, but they go down easy thanks to some sensational art by the likes of Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson, Dick Giordano and others. It’s not a Hal Jordan story, but one of the more clever and revered Green Lantern stories is by Alan Moore, and it’s collected in The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore, and entitled “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize.” Finally, prestige format special Superman/Green Lantern: Legend of the Green Flame unearthed a long dormant script featuring Superman and Jordan by Neil Gaiman, of all people. It was illustrated by an all-star line-up of artists, and told a story that was deemed out-of-continuity because one of the plot points it turned on—Jordan and Superman knowing each other’s secret identities—was wiped out of continuity by Crisis on Infinite Earths. Of course, with everyone seemingly having always known everyone else’s secret IDs during the tumultuous period of light retcons that occurred between Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why this wouldn’t be in continuity anymore.


Other universes: Mark Waid and Alex Ross played coy about who the Green Lantern in Kingdom Come was exactly (it could have been Alan Scott or Jordan), but Ross’ love for Hal is unequivocal in the Rossiverse, as Hal is the Lantern in JLA: Liberty and Justice, and the current maxiseries Justice. In the DKU, Jordan was said to be off-planet during The Dark Knight Returns, but he returns in a big way during The Dark Knight Strikes Back. Jordan played a fairly major role in Alan Davis’ silly but well-drawn Justice League of America: The Nail, which posits a world in which the Kents never find baby Kal-El and DC history rockets forward without a Superman. The just as nutty Elseworlds special Batman: In Darkest Knight is well worth seeking out, if just to see how Batman and Hal Jordan’s worlds are spliced together within. And speaking of splicing Hal Jordan’s world with that of another hero, in the midst of the historic DC/Marvel crossover that gave birth to the mixed universe known as “Amalgam Comics,” Jordan and Tony “Iron Man” Stark were fused into…wait for it…Iron Lantern! For even greater cognitive dissonance, try tracking down the DC/Dark Horse Comics crossover, Green Lantern/Aliens, in which the space cop Jordan and some fellow Green Lanterns come across the acid-spitting killer monsters from the Alien movies. By far the best alternate universe Hal Jordan story, however, if not the best Hal Jordan story in any continuity, is Darwyn Cooke’s sensational period piece The New Frontier. Hal Jordan has seemed less and less relevant the further he’s come from his Cold War setting and roots, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise then that Cooke made him work like never before simply by returning him to the 1950’s.


Other media: Hal Jordan was the Green Lantern that my generation grew up with, thanks to his placement on the League during the various incarnations of the Superfriends cartoons. Kyle Rayner was the Lantern introduced on Superman: The Animated Adventures, however (though Rayner’s origin was basically just a reappropriated version of Jordan’s), and John Stewart would become the League’s Lantern on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited (Jordan would get cameos, however). He also had a cameo in an episode of the Duck Dodgers, in which he has his laundry mixed up with that of the titular character, leading to 20 minutes of Daffy Duck as a Green Lantern fighting Sinestro alongside Kilowog and the others.