Hal Jordan: The Green Lantern Appreciation 2022

[Robanker]

By all means if you really want to make the characters older go right ahead, but don't have only one or two looking older and leave everyone else of the same generation still looking young. Hal looking 15 years older than a guy who raised 4 generations of Robins makes no sense no matter how you try to suspend your disbelief.

Johnny, have you ever been happy with Hal Jordan's lot in life outside of a small section of the Johns run?

I agree, Hal going grey when nobody else did was a weird move, but it's not like aging isn't weird across the board, re: Nightwing, Wally West, Oliver Queen and so forth. For all we know, Hal started being GL in his thirties and, believe it or not, some men bald or go grey earlier. It's not impossible for him to grey on the sides earlier than the rest. Not saying I like the move, but this is something that happens all the time in real life.

[Johnny]

Johnny, have you ever been happy with Hal Jordan's lot in life outside of a small section of the Johns run?

I don't understand this question. What gives the idea that I'm perpetually unhappy with what DC does with the character just because I point out past creative decisions I happen not to agree with.

I agree, Hal going grey when nobody else did was a weird move, but it's not like aging isn't weird across the board, re: Nightwing, Wally West, Oliver Queen and so forth. For all we know, Hal started being GL in his thirties and, believe it or not, some men bald or go grey earlier. It's not impossible for him to grey on the sides earlier than the rest. Not saying I like the move, but this is something that happens all the time in real life.

That's fine but the founding Leaguers are usually portrayed as being around the same age, so even if Hal did become GL in his 30s and the League formed shortly after, that doesn't explain why he was the only one to visibly start looking older earlier. Considering this isn't real life it seems odd to give him a more "realistic" take while keeping everyone else the same. The fact that some men go grey early is also unrelated to my point about the marketing and lack of longevity aspect of going in that direction.

[Johnny]

JL TBATB Funko Pop coming soon.

[Refrax5]

Johnny, have you ever been happy with Hal Jordan's lot in life outside of a small section of the Johns run?

I agree, Hal going grey when nobody else did was a weird move, but it's not like aging isn't weird across the board, re: Nightwing, Wally West, Oliver Queen and so forth. For all we know, Hal started being GL in his thirties and, believe it or not, some men bald or go grey earlier. It's not impossible for him to grey on the sides earlier than the rest. Not saying I like the move, but this is something that happens all the time in real life.

My temples are gray and I'm in my 30s, so that doesn't seem too odd to me. Hal was still treated like a respected hero and a guy that men wanted to be and women wanted to be with, so he never came across as lame or over-the-hill to anybody other than Guy Gardner at the time. When I was young, I always thought the gray streaks looked cool. I know you weren't complaining about that. Just thinking out loud.

[Johnny]

Well, I don't recall saying giving him gray hair made him lame, I said making him older in general when every single one of his peers aside from Ollie were still looking young, gave him a shorter shelf life and put him into a corner where he had to be portrayed in a specific way. Again, this isn't real life, real people get older, happens to all of us, but when you age up characters like these, you limit both your storytelling possibilities and the overall audience you can market them towards. I'm sure there are young folks who'd have no issues with gray haired Hal Jordan, but he would surely stick out like a sore thumb in comparison to his peers that stand alongside him. There's a reason why most comic book characters, particularly those owned by big corporations such as WBD or Disney, rarely ever show signs of age. They have a target audience. In any event, there's really nothing more for me to say about this. I just don't think it's a very wise business decision in general to age up some of your important characters, that's all.

[Refrax5]

Well, I don't recall saying giving him gray hair made him lame, I said making him older in general when every single one of his peers aside from Ollie were still looking young, gave him a shorter shelf life and put him into a corner where he had to be portrayed in a specific way. Again, this isn't real life, real people get older, happens to all of us, but when you age up characters like these, you limit both your storytelling possibilities and the overall audience you can market them towards. I'm sure there are young folks who'd have no issues with gray haired Hal Jordan, but he would surely stick out like a sore thumb in comparison to his peers that stand alongside him. There's a reason why most comic book characters, particularly those owned by big corporations such as WBD or Disney, rarely ever show signs of age. They have a target audience. In any event, there's really nothing more for me to say about this. I just don't think it's a very wise business decision in general to age up some of your important characters, that's all.

Never hurt Reed Richards or Dr. Strange. Hell, half the Marvel actors are middle aged and kids love 'em. I just find that kind of an ageist and generally inaccurate appraisal.

[Johnny]

Never hurt Reed Richards or Dr. Strange. Hell, half the Marvel actors are middle aged and kids love 'em. I just find that kind of an ageist and generally inaccurate appraisal.

Reed Richards and Dr. Strange didn't spend 30 years as younger guys before being aged up out of nowhere for no reason with all their peers remaining looking young. There's nothing ageist about pointing out DC doing things that made little sense.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

Reed Richards and Dr. Strange didn't spend 30 years as younger guys before being aged up out of nowhere for no reason with all their peers remaining looking young. There's nothing ageist about pointing out DC doing things that made little sense.

While I agree that the age up didn't work out the way DC had originally hoped, it did make some sense at the time.

As others have pointed out, Ollie was also being depicted as middle aged so doing the same for Hal wasn't exactly a crazy thought. Granted, Ollie's age up also ended up in his getting replaced by a younger hero.

However, that was mostly due to the change in editorial regimes from Dick Giordano to Mike Carlin, who, like yourself, hated the idea of older superheroes so much he cancelled the JSA's book and killed off or retired most of them.

Giordano had a different perspective. Since comics fans were aging, He thought having some heroes age a bit further past the perpetual 29 could be worthwhile. Carlin quite obviously disagreed and changed course, just as Didio reversed many of Carlin's edicts once he took over, which is how we got Hal back as GL back in the first place.

Having Hal & Ollie a decade older than the rest of the founding JLAers made sense, as those two were often a step apart from their teammates. Hal was a war veteran and, at that time, the last war America had fought in was Vietnam, so that pretty much required Hal to be older.

Of course, these days pretty much all contemporary DC superheroes of the Silver Age are middle aged, but no one draws attention to it by giving them any signs of aging, which is probably the safer approach. No point drawing attention to the fact that these heroes are older if they might potentially turn off readers who wouldn't want to be reading about a character they'd deem...ew...old.

[Gaius]

JL TBATB Funko Pop coming soon.

As an NFT also unfortunately.

So everyone do their duty and right click and save...

[Frontier]

While I agree that the age up didn't work out the way DC had originally hoped, it did make some sense at the time.

As others have pointed out, Ollie was also being depicted as middle aged so doing the same for Hal wasn't exactly a crazy thought. Granted, Ollie's age up also ended up in his getting replaced by a younger hero.

However, that was mostly due to the change in editorial regimes from Dick Giordano to Mike Carlin, who, like yourself, hated the idea of older superheroes so much he cancelled the JSA's book and killed off or retired most of them.

Giordano had a different perspective. Since comics fans were aging, He thought having some heroes age a bit further past the perpetual 29 could be worthwhile. Carlin quite obviously disagreed and changed course, just as Didio reversed many of Carlin's edicts once he took over, which is how we got Hal back as GL back in the first place.

Having Hal & Ollie a decade older than the rest of the founding JLAers made sense, as those two were often a step apart from their teammates. Hal was a war veteran and, at that time, the last war America had fought in was Vietnam, so that pretty much required Hal to be older.

Of course, these days pretty much all contemporary DC superheroes of the Silver Age are middle aged, but no one draws attention to it by giving them any signs of aging, which is probably the safer approach. No point drawing attention to the fact that these heroes are older if they might potentially turn off readers who wouldn't want to be reading about a character they'd deem...ew...old.

Ollie always struck me as older than anybody. Particularly with Dinah.

[Refrax5]

While I agree that the age up didn't work out the way DC had originally hoped, it did make some sense at the time.

As others have pointed out, Ollie was also being depicted as middle aged so doing the same for Hal wasn't exactly a crazy thought. Granted, Ollie's age up also ended up in his getting replaced by a younger hero.

However, that was mostly due to the change in editorial regimes from Dick Giordano to Mike Carlin, who, like yourself, hated the idea of older superheroes so much he cancelled the JSA's book and killed off or retired most of them.

Giordano had a different perspective. Since comics fans were aging, He thought having some heroes age a bit further past the perpetual 29 could be worthwhile. Carlin quite obviously disagreed and changed course, just as Didio reversed many of Carlin's edicts once he took over, which is how we got Hal back as GL back in the first place.

Having Hal & Ollie a decade older than the rest of the founding JLAers made sense, as those two were often a step apart from their teammates. Hal was a war veteran and, at that time, the last war America had fought in was Vietnam, so that pretty much required Hal to be older.

Of course, these days pretty much all contemporary DC superheroes of the Silver Age are middle aged, but no one draws attention to it by giving them any signs of aging, which is probably the safer approach. No point drawing attention to the fact that these heroes are older if they might potentially turn off readers who wouldn't want to be reading about a character they'd deem...ew...old.

Yeah, Hal was specifically stated to be a Vietnam veteran in Emerald Dawn 2, which was the canon origin at the time.

[NathanS]

Right I wrote like 99% of this yesterday. Then my browser crashed. I am now re-writing it in a word document because I need to learn to never NEVER write more than like a hundred words in a browser window directly. Its never worth the risk. Course I didn’t know it would end up so long… but I am me so I really should have expected it.

Anyways. To rejigger the order of my points a bit. No they weren’t trying to lean into Hal’s morality with aging him up it was far more mundane and less thoughtful than that. The editor didn’t want to reboot Hal’s history in the wake of his new post-crisis origin, though the writer wanted to. The main reason was Guy. The editor was also the editor of JLI where Guy was key member. And if you reboot Hal you need to reboot Guy. Well the writer had a plan to get both Guy and John into their rings really quickly the editor didn’t want the headache. So they needed to make it clear that Hal had been at this for awhile so all of his past adventures could be reasonably squeezed into this new timeline.

But also they wanted the famed Hard Travailing Heroes to still have happened in the 70s. Now at the time DC was using real world dates. That is if a comic came out in 1990 then the in-universe year was 1990 and they weren’t afraid to reference that fact. GL volume 3 first came out in 1990. Which means 15 years ago referenced in the first issue puts Hal becoming GL in 1975. Plenty of time to compact his 60s adventures into a year or two and have Hard Travailing Heroes happen in the mid-to-late 70s.

Thing is… they didn’t think through the repercussions of this. Because Guy is just as old as Hal. If Hal is supposed to be getting up there in the years… so shouldn’t Guy. Just because he got his ring much later than Hal doesn't change their ages are roughly the same. They eventually papered this fairly gapping hole over by saying Guy used his ring to keep himself young. The other issue never gets resolved till Zero Hour pushes Hal’s first appearance to ‘ten years ago’ as part of a sliding time scale. Hal during this brief window was the first major hero to appear. You can’t pull the ‘works from the shadows’ thing you do with Batman to let Superman still be the first Superhero the public really knows about. Hal is a GL, he flies around and makes giant green constructs. But of course for put-of-universe reasons they are never going to actually not treat Superman as the major figure and first Superhero of the modern age. So that massive gap in logic is just… there.

And of course, once Hal is positioned as showing up after Superman in the ‘ten years’ sliding scale him being so much older than everyone else makes even less sense. But as noted that's part of the Carlin being aginst older heroes. So making Hal older left him a target through no fault of the character or even how well that age was handled. You'll notice in the mid-90s or so a LOT of 'hip young' heroes are introduced.

So let’s go back to where I first started my response. Hal’s relationship with Guy. Namely it wasn’t written any different before or after the aging. Hal as the seasoned pro was his dynamic as soon as he, John, and Guy were all made GLs at the same time. And with Guy he was the self-centered rebel who refuses to be told what to do. (Well also feeling everyone should do what he tells them what do, and that living your life in a way he doesn't approve is objectively wrong) So he would be rash and cause problems well Hal tried to reign him in.

Now the gray temples and that he is being written a world-wise man might change the perception of his response. And there is an element to how he is written. He was at his best in that era written well with a keen eye for character. Thing is at the time the average age still leaned more towards 16 to 18 or so and the better stories done at the time were less likely to land with them.

Gerard Johns is the first writer to pick up on the Jack Kerouac take on Hal started by Broome and continued by O’Neil. And might be the only one until Morrison. The result is, in particuler in the first arc. One that’s real intersting. Hal dealing with trying to get back in touch with living a normal life, figuring out who he is when he’s not doing GL stuff, but all of it covering that’s he’s running from his past, letting it control him.

… But boy I can see a 15 years-olds and even 20 years-olds bouncing off it hard and walking away feeling he’s ‘boring.’ Heck I can see some older fans bouncing off it just because they want more action in their superhero story and not a character study where the MC is spending the early part of it avoiding Superhero action. Now The Road Back did well, and the decline in sales didn’t hit till later. So my guess is the quality of story telling overcame the difficulty for a lot of average readers of the period to get into it. But odds are still younger readers weren't coming away impressed with Hal. He was a complex character with a lot going on, but when he’s avoiding super heroics and his personality isn’t as large and in your face as Guy… well its a recipe to bore younger readers.

Now after Road Back gets into gear there’s lots of action and that holds steady, but the real strengths when Johns writes tends to be characterization and a more mature approach. Stuff that if your looking for straight ahead action can maybe feel like its getting in the way.

And Hal deals with a lot of the same issues Kyle will, his love life, dealing with his job, struggling to find where he fits in. Its just for the younger audience the story of a man putting his life back together is likely far less relatable than of a young man making a life.

The real issue Hal ran into was when the quality of the stories dropped. We started getting covers hyping up the return of Olivia Reynold. Someone with a grand total of three appearances and was last seen in 1969. Just over two decades ago! Now bringing her back and doing something with her is fine, but you can’t use that as a selling point for an issue! How many people who even read the stories she was in even remembered her? Much less the utter non-event her appearance would be for new readers.

Then we get stories about a demon taking over a football game. It was fine but nothing amazing and well the exaction saves it, I doubt it got many people’s excited to see what happened next. A building storyline about Reynold’s U-mind taking over a toy of Sinestro, (ET happened before that thrilling plot went anywhere) The Predator being a demon that got Star Sapphire pregnant (but not Carol when she switches back to being Carol ber baby bump goes away) as part of a plan to get back at the Guardians and the Zamarons. An okay crossover event with LEGION and Darkstars. Just nothing that got anyone thrilled. And again if you were young or looking for really big huge personalities then the handling of Hal well deeply interesting to some of us (Hi!) was likely to mean your last memories were ‘well he was boring’

[Johnny]

Has Hal's music taste ever been mentioned before. He feels like an AC/DC type to me.

[StarSpangledMan]

Man, could you imagine if the 2011 movie was actually good and managed to kickstart a successful DCEU? Green Lantern would be a juggernaut of a property.

[Johnny]

The superhero landscape in general would've been a lot different if WB actually had its act together.