Morrison's Green Lantern 1 Annotations

[Jody Garland]

It may be worth mentioning that the spider villain is probably a Spider Guild member (I remember Morrison mentioning them in interviews prior to the release).

What's your thoughts on the Microwave, X-Ray, Gamma, etc., Lanterns mentioned?

[Bored at 3:00AM]

Bored at 3AM:

Thanks for the quibble. As I noted, I have some catch-up to do with Hal's old stories, and it is wayyyy more manageable than reading all of Batman's old stories, but I haven't caught up yet. In fact, I have a gap of only about 30 issues between the last "old" one I read and the first "newer" one, but the events you describe fall right into that gap.

Hal's journey east started in 1967. Your other notes on his bio seem right on the money. When I first tuned in, Hal had lost his own/shared-with-GA title and was a backup feature in Flash #217-243 (perhaps other issues?). And as Hal's publication status was in limbo, so was his life inside the stories.

I'm glad you mentioned the art. I was wondering if anyone else thought that in a few panels, the art seemed to channel Neal Adams.

Agreed. This is best art I have ever seen from Sharp. Working with Morrison seems to have upped his game substantially. Not sure if he can keep it up this level of quality over 12 issues, but I think we're all going to enjoy seeing him try

In regards to Hal's beatnik period. An interesting wrinkle here is that this was Broome & Shwartz's attempt to "Marvelize" the character in the face of mounting competition from Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko's more grounded and relate-able characters. Had it not been for Marvel's success, Hal Jordan would have remained the same test pilot at Ferris Aircraft in Coast City he'd always been, and the character wouldn't have this interesting wrinkle to play with.

[LordUltimus]

It's also not just the Abin Sur of Earth-20 on that last teaser, there's Bat-Lantern, Bizarro Yellow Lantern, John Stewart from President Superman's Earth, and others from Multiversity.

Looking forward to more of this!

[vartox]

I found a list of the multiversal GLs from the teaser page and judging by the Multiversity guidebook it seems accurate, left to right:

Earth 50, Justice Lords John Stewart
Earth 16, The Just Kyle Rayner
Earth 36, Justice 9 Flashlight
Earth 23, John Stewart
Earth 6, Stan Lee's Just Imagine Leonard Lewis
Earth 32, Fusion League Bruce Wayne
Earth 20, Society of Super Heroes Abin Sur
Earth 12, Batman Beyond Kai Ro
Earth 47, Love Syndicate Magic Lantern
Earth 29, Bizarro Green Lantern

[LordUltimus]

Found some annotations Deep Space Transmissions made:
https://sites.google.com/a/deepspace...-1-annotations

[Rikdad]

Those DST annotations are great – very thorough!

[j9ac9k]

It's interesting that the DST notes included several admissions that the reviewer hadn't been reading GL lately so wasn't sure of more recent developments. I feel there's a lot of people coming into this that hasn't read GL in awhile because of Morrison and that's awesome. It's what you want to happen in a relaunch.

[Rikdad]

I feel there's a lot of people coming into this that hasn't read GL in awhile because of Morrison and that's awesome. It's what you want to happen in a relaunch.

I think it's interesting that Morrison had basically a free hand to write new continuity for Superman and Batman when he took those characters over, but with Hal, he really doesn't. It's almost a minor revelation to see him reference "New Oa" because it's in keeping with current continuity – not that I've ever seen him ignore anything blatantly in continuity, but he sometimes really downplays the last year or so of continuity. In fact, in his Batman run, he acknowledged everything from about 1994-2005 but only as it was regrettable trauma for Batman, as shown in montages of Bane breaking his back, Jason Todd dying, etc. Morrison seemed to prefer 1939-1964 versions of Batman to anything that had happened in the previous several years.

And here, we have a bit of that, sounding like Hal's backstory of 1967-1979 is what he lived most recently, scrunching his history after that into a shorter span of time, so we have to wonder what this version of Hal's timeline looks like: When did the whole Parallax thing and rebirth and Blackest Night, etc., happen, if he only recently stopped hitchhiking? When Ollie comes back into the story, did their journey across America even happen in this continuity? (Note: Roy Harper's heroin addiction was cited in Heroes in Crisis.)

Batman's timeline is demarcated most prominently by the succession of Robins. Hal doesn't have that. But, he's switched jobs, and Earth-vs-space residency, plus the whole death thing and being the Spectre (which Morrison highlighted in a strange Hal-based JLA story) and it's getting hard to imagine how this happened in ~15 years. If we get really into the details, Hal's debut ends up seeming like it should have happened later in life than is plausible for Superman and Batman, because he had to be a test pilot first, whereas nothing's strictly keeping Superman or Batman from debuting before they're 21.

When Morrison took over Superman, I was surprised to have him acknowledge his death at the hands of Doomsday, simply because it seemed like it complicated the timeline too much. I don't think we even had that timeline worked out very clearly before it was no longer in continuity.

Which raises a funny historical point: The very first published acknowledgment that DC's continuity was messy and required a clean-up was when Marv Wolfman answered a fan letter about Hal Jordan, way back in 1981's GL #143. Now here we are 37 years and a few reboots later and we're wondering how Hal's timeline should be written.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I think it's interesting that Morrison had basically a free hand to write new continuity for Superman and Batman when he took those characters over, but with Hal, he really doesn't. It's almost a minor revelation to see him reference "New Oa" because it's in keeping with current continuity – not that I've ever seen him ignore anything blatantly in continuity, but he sometimes really downplays the last year or so of continuity. In fact, in his Batman run, he acknowledged everything from about 1994-2005 but only as it was regrettable trauma for Batman, as shown in montages of Bane breaking his back, Jason Todd dying, etc. Morrison seemed to prefer 1939-1964 versions of Batman to anything that had happened in the previous several years.

And here, we have a bit of that, sounding like Hal's backstory of 1967-1979 is what he lived most recently, scrunching his history after that into a shorter span of time, so we have to wonder what this version of Hal's timeline looks like: When did the whole Parallax thing and rebirth and Blackest Night, etc., happen, if he only recently stopped hitchhiking? When Ollie comes back into the story, did their journey across America even happen in this continuity? (Note: Roy Harper's heroin addiction was cited in Heroes in Crisis.)

Batman's timeline is demarcated most prominently by the succession of Robins. Hal doesn't have that. But, he's switched jobs, and Earth-vs-space residency, plus the whole death thing and being the Spectre (which Morrison highlighted in a strange Hal-based JLA story) and it's getting hard to imagine how this happened in ~15 years. If we get really into the details, Hal's debut ends up seeming like it should have happened later in life than is plausible for Superman and Batman, because he had to be a test pilot first, whereas nothing's strictly keeping Superman or Batman from debuting before they're 21.

When Morrison took over Superman, I was surprised to have him acknowledge his death at the hands of Doomsday, simply because it seemed like it complicated the timeline too much. I don't think we even had that timeline worked out very clearly before it was no longer in continuity.

Which raises a funny historical point: The very first published acknowledgment that DC's continuity was messy and required a clean-up was when Marv Wolfman answered a fan letter about Hal Jordan, way back in 1981's GL #143. Now here we are 37 years and a few reboots later and we're wondering how Hal's timeline should be written.

I don't think Morrison is ignoring or truncating anything in Hal's history, rather than choosing to highlight the era he's interested in. Johns established during his run that Hal's life as GL caused him to neglect his life on Earth to the point that he didn't even have a driver's licence anymore. Since then, he's been almost exclusively in space, so Morrison's new status quo follows perfectly from that.