From The Amazing World Of DC Comics #16

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Each of the JSAers is a tremendously complex creature, you see. Their individual series were among the best of the forties, and the total number of tales they've appeared is almost beyond reckoning … and certainly beyond reading. At least in the limited time I had available. So I had to capsulize each one's background. When that was done, I discovered a common denominator—each of their character bits was related to what the passing years had done to them. I felt like I had just adapted Passages to comic book form.

Take Green Lantern, for example. He started out as an engineer, building bridges. Then he discovered the magic lantern and started on his way to fame and fortune. Within a couple of years he was a radio star, and by the time he was into middle age he was the President of Gotham Broadcasting. He never married, because during the peak of his super-hero career he was too busy being a man about town.

When his crisis came, it totalled him.

Here's a 57 year old man, who has put his whole life into two things: a company and a non-profit career as a super-hero. He has no family, and his only close friend is off on another planet (everybody does remember Doiby Dickles, don't they?). His company goes kaput, naturally he isn't far behind.

Paralleling what happened to GL is The Flash, in sort of a "might have been" situation. Flash is a little younger—maybe 55 years old—he continued with his career in science. No matter how fascinating the super-heroics got, he still put a portion of his life on the bedrock of his own talents. The Keystone Research Lab was founded about the time he got married, just after he hung up his winged boots in the fifties. There's a solid confidence to this man that few JSAers can match.