Alan Scott: The Green Lantern by Tim Sheridan and Cian Tormey (New Golden Age)

[CaptCleghorn]

Please point out those scenes in his history to me. Because I've never thought of Alan as a "hard ass" or a "bad ass." Maybe I just haven't read those stories.

I think a lot of people's opinions of Alan's characterization come from the scene in Robinson's Golden Age where Sportsmaster is saying Alan is the big guy of the JSA. That scene to me was a lot like seeing Wolverine rising from the sewer waters beneath the Hellfire Club saying "Now, it's my turn." back in X-Men 130 or so.

[Psy-lock]

Well, then, please point to the scenes where he's the hard ass bad ass ring slinger?

In his original stories Alan was a generic good guy. There was nothing particularly "hard ass" about him.

[The Cool Thatguy]

In his original stories Alan was a generic good guy. There was nothing particularly "hard ass" about him.

Yes, and that was true of 100% of the characters created in the 1940s.

But things have changed since then. Do you not notice?

[Psy-lock]

Yes, and that was true of 100% of the characters created in the 1940s.

But things have changed since then. Do you not notice?

My point is that the book is set in a time period in which Alan had no defined character, therefore he doesn't have to be the same person he's almost a century later.

[The Lucky One]

Please point out those scenes in his history to me. Because I've never thought of Alan as a "hard ass" or a "bad ass." Maybe I just haven't read those stories.

I’d probably stop short of calling him a hard-ass, but right around the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, some writers started contrasting Alan and Jay by establishing Jay as a bit more lighthearted and easygoing, and Alan as a bit more stodgy and straightlaced.

Just going from memory, there was that Peter David-penned Aquaman team-up where Jay said something like, “Oh Alan, don’t be such a Republican.” (To which Alan replied, “But I am a Republican.”) And in an issue of the “Flash and Green Lantern: The Brave and the Bold” mini, Waid and Kitson established that Hal and Alan have tension because Alan sees Hal as flighty and irresponsible, never able to hold down a job or a relationship for very long, while Hal sees Alan as uptight and a bit humorless. And in the ‘00s JSA series, Jay was generally depicted as the veteran who’d welcome new members in with a smile and a cup of cocoa, while Alan was more likely to keep them in line and remind them of their responsibilities.

People can quibble about whether that makes Alan a “hard ass,” but it’s definitely true that Post-Crisis, he was often portrayed as being kind of a traditional, old-school “just do your job and don’t complain” type. (But again, that was a prior continuity with a different Alan, the current iteration doesn’t necessarily have to share those attributes.)

[j9ac9k]

I’d probably stop short of calling him a hard-ass, but right around the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, some writers started contrasting Alan and Jay by establishing Jay as a bit more lighthearted and easygoing, and Alan as a bit more stodgy and straightlaced.

That was definitely my memory as well. I can see "straight-laced and stodgy" more than "hard-ass and bad-ass" but a lot of that was because he was a lot older by the point he was overseeing a huge group that included a bunch of whipper-snappers. This is young Alan hasn't even fully embraced the JSA yet. So any difference between these two depictions I can easily attribute to age and experience. This particular case is also striking a personal nerve, so that could explain acting a bit out of his usual character. So, for me his characterization doesn't seem so off-base.

[Refrax5]

I think a lot of people's opinions of Alan's characterization come from the scene in Robinson's Golden Age where Sportsmaster is saying Alan is the big guy of the JSA. That scene to me was a lot like seeing Wolverine rising from the sewer waters beneath the Hellfire Club saying "Now, it's my turn." back in X-Men 130 or so.

Alan was always a pretty stoic, imposing figure. Kyle Rayner once described him as "one tough old man." The guy was chosen for his will and strength of character. Alan was always portrayed as a tough, strong guy. I remember Hal Jordan once accurately predicting that Alan likes his steak rare before Alan ordered. I also recall Alan standing up to an angel and telling the angel to watch the tone he speaks to Alan in. Of course, Earth 2 was an alternate take, but it was basically just a modernized, youthful version of him and that guy was definitely a badass. Alan always had a strong, driven personality and an authoritative presence.

Either way, the Alan in this story doesn't have much of a personality at all. He's just kind of a generic guy that things are happening to.

[Refrax5]

In his original stories Alan was a generic good guy. There was nothing particularly "hard ass" about him.

Well, a generic good guy chosen due to his strength of character and will. This Alan just seems to have no real personality at all.

[JungleBatman]

The thing with Alan is that he's had to hide his homosexuality for decades and because of this, he has to keep himself calm, quiet and subdued because he knows what people can be around LGBT's, hell he saw Billie be lobotomized and you can tell that the image and the basically dead Billie being carted was seared permanently into her brain. That explains his calm personality and why his relationship with his own children was poor at best.

[andersonh1]

Either way, the Alan in this story doesn't have much of a personality at all. He's just kind of a generic guy that things are happening to.

Even if we go with the idea that this isn't the Alan we've been reading all these years (an approach I'm fine with) as I noted a few pages back, I'm not seeing the willpower that makes the ring work in the first place. Alan's main traits in the series are guilt and regret and uncertainty, not determination and certainty, which are traits the original version of the character certainly had in abundance, both in the modern day and in the original Golden Age stories. This version of Alan is not displaying the attributes necessary to be a Green Lantern.

[amerigo178]

In Golden Age never thought of him as the bad ass. Thought of him as the Superman analog since the Trinity wasn’t in it.
I thought Paul Kirk was the bad ass

[fatebuddy27]

I'll never understand why the majority of arguments on these forums are based entirely around vague, half-remembered memories when discussing cold hard facts about certain characters (i.e. the whole "Ladd" name topic from a while back, The Steranko History of Comics has very few sources whereas in Alter Ego #3 creator Mart Nodell specifically says he chose Alan's name by flipping through the phone book & Alan's middle name was revealed as Wellington in All-American Comics #38, "Ladd" came much later specifically because of that erroneous claim in TSHoC).

The fact of the matter is that Golden Age Alan Scott was not a generic good guy, quite frankly I'd argue that he had one of the most distinct personalities present in these early days of the medium. He was genuinely passionate about his day job as a radio engineer & later presenter and a large number of stories revolved around that (see: Green Lantern 1941 #20 & All-American Comics #73 as examples among many many others), and he was above all a sincerely angry young man to the point that there was an entire story revolving around having a bet with Doiby that he wouldn't lose his temper for one single day (Comic Cavalcade 1942 #19). That anger is something that persists throughout all of Alan's publication history, from moments like his Psycho Pirate-induced breakdown in All-Star Comics #64 where he threatens to blow up an entire airport to Infinity Inc #8-9 to the entire Sentinel era (special mention to Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #5).

He is, certainly, powerful enough to be seen as a Superman-type figure (which The New Golden Age proposes he is considering the reference to Action Comics #1 in the latest Jay Garrick: The Flash issue) but there's no denying Alan's complicated relationship with his temper and mental health. Above all, I also personally believe he's always been gaycoded to a remarkable degree -- Irene Miller quickly vanished into thin air once Alfred Bester took over writing Alan's Golden Age stories and Alan had consistently been shown as rejecting women while living with his best/only friend Doiby Dickles to the point that his later appearances in the Silver Age Green Lantern book keep him a confirmed bachelor with Doiby as his "man friday" (GL 1960 #40) and Paul Levitz explicitly wrote "he never married, because during the peak of his super-hero career he was too busy being a man about town. [...] He has no family, and his only friend is off on another planet. His company goes kaput, naturally he isn't far behind." (The Amazing World of DC Comics #16) when discussing his & Gerry Conway's take in the 1976 All-Star Comics run. Male companionship had been Alan's main social focus before Roy Thomas' retcons in the Infinity Inc Annual #1.

There are various instances of this coding in the Golden Age, among them: his disgust at marrying a woman in Green Lantern #33, the fact that he's immune to a mad scientist's daughter specifically created to be irresistible to men in All-American Comics #71, his violent rejection of the debutante in GL #13, refusing a date on the claim that his dog "really doesn't like girls" in GL #34, being explicitly shown to share a bathroom and a bedroom with Doiby in AAC #60, his and Doiby generally explicitly living together & changing in the same room as per GL #28, AAC #54, The Big All-American Comic Book #1, GL #34, as well as his oddly charged dynamic with a nightclub owner in Comic Cavalcade #23, etc etc.

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All this is to say that Alan Scott has always been a good but complicated man, and that the confirmation of his sexuality did not come out of nowhere. The Earth-2 version understood that, from his anger to his less heroic tendencies and his eventual character development. The problem with the current solo miniseries is that the character shown there has next to nothing in common with Alan Scott and that instead of working /with/ preexisting continuity and implications, it has cast aside any pretence of respect for the past 80-something years of publication history and chosen to show Alan as a blank slate deeply naive protagonist made to fit into a story that the 'canonical' Alan would not (which is practically confirmed as the writer talked about writing The Spectre intentionally out of character in his latest Word Balloon podcast interview).

[PrydefulHunts]

Has the Starheart's intangibility always been through fourth dimension time travel or is that new?

[fatebuddy27]

Has the Starheart's intangibility always been through fourth dimension time travel or is that new?

No, time travel has never been a factor in Alan phasing through walls. He has been shown as able to time travel previously in the backup story in Gotham Knights #10, which references his discovery of the ring's power as being pretty much endless way back in Green Lantern (1960) #61, but there has never been any need to explain his ability to walk through walls beyond the Starheart's other properties. The intro caption in all his 40s appearances usually mentions it along with his other powers ("by the strength of his own willpower, augmented by the ring's potency, he can streak thru walls, is immune to all metals [...]" for an example from AAC #39) and if you really want to expand upon it, it's obvious his intangibility is meant to invoke the thought of (vengeful) ghosts -- that's what Dekker's men assume he is in all versions of his origin and in his very next story in AAC #17 he outright pretends to be the ghost of a drowned man and calls himself "the little man who wasn't there"; it's clearly not sci-fi concepts like time-travel that are alluded to here.

[PrydefulHunts]

Issue #5 has been pushed back once again. Formerly releasing on March 12, 2024, now scheduled to release on March 19, 2024.