"I WAS a tight end; but NOW, I'm a WIDE RECEIVER!": A close encounter with the Green Latrine.
It's a humble, homely truism that you always prefer the stupid stuff you liked as a child to the stupid stuff you encounter for the first time as an adult.
As a child, for various reasons, I soon gravitated towards Marvel Comics' superheroes over DC's; though I was exposed to each company's comic books in roughly equal measure, by the age of six or seven, I had decided that Marvel's line trumped DC's. That this was the time of Peter Parker's near clinical depression and unfocused, barely controlled rage after the deaths of his girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, and the father of his roommate, Norman Osborn, secretly the Green Goblin, who caused Gwen's death, in Amazing Spider-Man (of course, Marvel's since resurrected Norman Osborn -- his son Harry is still dead, AFAIK -- and had a couple of faux resurrections of Gwen, but never mind), and, in The Fantastic Four, Reed Richards's/Mister Fantastic's near clinical depression in the wake of his turning his son Franklin into a (figurative) vegetable in order to save the world, if not the universe, from the effects of his vast and uncontrollable cosmic powers, which did bupkis for his chances of reconciling with his estranged wife, Susan Storm Richards/Invisible Girl, doubtless speaks volumes as to the peculiar bent of my mind, even at such a tender age. (That both titles were scripted by an astonishingly young Gerry Conway doubtless also speaks volumes as to the peculiar bent of his mind -- but that's another post.)
In short, I'm a relative late-comer to the DC Universe (or DCU): while I'm not wholly ignorant of it, my exposure to it is rather spotty, and what I know of its most recent iterations is largely thanks to the random availability of collected DC comics at the two public libraries nearest to me. (I haven't started working the inter-library loan thing for comic books yet, with the sole exception of Vol. 8 of Bill Willingham's Fables.)
A few weeks ago, I checked out The Green Lantern Archives, Volume I (1993), which collects the first appearances of the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, from Showcase #22-4 (Sept.-Oct. 1959 thru Jan.-Feb. 1960) and Green Lantern Vol. 2, #1-5 (July-Aug. 1960 thru Mar.-Apr. 1961); all of the stories were written by John Broome, pencilled by Gil Kane and inked by Joe Giella (with a few exceptions: two stories were inked by Murphy Anderson and one story had "divers hands" assisting Kane on pencils, such as Mike Sekowsky, Ross Andru, Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella, although Giella inked it). The DC Archive Editions are nice, hardbound books that are priced far outside of my range: the cheapest one retails for U.S. $49.95, and some go for quite a bit more. About the only way I'm going to be able to read these things is by borrowing them; since I have no friends who are comic book nerds, that means a library is required.
Turns out that I'm about as underwhelmed by Hal Jordan's earliest adventures as I was by The Sinestro Corps War. Broome's got a pretty big rep among comic book geeks as being a refreshingly adult writer, but I honestly don't see it based on the evidence here. Maybe he improved as he went along, but the stories here barely get a pass as time-killers, as far as I'm concerned; hell, I'd rather read some cheesy Doc Savage or Fu Manchu yarns than this stuff.
And while I enjoy Gil Kane's art, his true strengths -- his exaggerated, nearly Kirbyesque action sequences; his use of perspective to highlight the size differences amongst the various antagonists -- are nearly absent here. (Kane would subsequently design the best-looking of the Hulk's foemen over at Marvel: the Abomination, who debuted in Tales to Astonish #90. No one, IMHO, ever drew the Abomination as good -- as powerful, as menacing -- as Kane.) Again, this was early days; but Broome and Kane had been pros for a while by the time Hal Jordan made his bow, so this was a disappointment to me.
Granted, DC's Silver Age started a good three or four years before Marvel's did -- the Hal Jordan Green Lantern premiered over two years before Fantastic Four Vol. 1, #1 did; still and all, even the first six issues of the FF absolutely run rings (no pun intended...) around anything collected in GLA, V.I. The dialogue in the FF is stylized, true, but it comes closer to real life than GL in showing the main characters to be as antagonistic to each other as they are friendly to each other. Stan Lee (Marvel's legendary/infamous head writer, editor-in-chief, and, later, publisher) has often written how the superhero books at DC drove him crazy because everybody was so buddy-buddy all the time: seldom was heard a discouraging word, unless a character was being mind-controlled or had been tricked by a bad guy, and then everybody would have a big laugh together at the end. I'm not sure exactly when the cool kids who haunt the internet switched allegiance en masse to DC, even the earliest of Silver Age DC, but, based on my minimal exposure to it, I'll still take Marvel's early '60s titles over DC's any day of the week. (Even Doom Patrol.)
Sure, the romantic sub-plots of Thor in Journey Into Mystery -- nurse Jane Foster fantasizing over ironing her hubby Thor's cape and nagging him into getting a Don Draper-type haircut, never realizing that her boss, Dr. Don Blake, to whom she's spieling her daydreams, is Thor -- are cringe-inducing; but Hal Jordan's love interest, Carol Ferris (who is also his boss, as she's running Ferris Aircraft Company during the absence of her father; don't get too excited, though, all you armchair feminists: she has to get permission from her father to marry Green Lantern, IN CASE he proposes), telling him about a dream that she had that she married him in order to make Green Lantern jealous, hoping that GL would swoop in just before she said "I do" and whisk her off to his Lantern Loft, is even more groan-worthy. (To quote a bit of movie/audience by-play from The Rocky Horror Picture Show: "Oooohhhh, Bra-haaaaaad!" / "Ohhhh -- SHIIIIIT.")
It was also pretty tiresome for the super-duper Green Lantern magic ring to be introduced with a teensy little flaw -- it's utterly ineffective against any form of matter or energy colored yellow -- and then have EVERY. SINGLE. OPPONENT. or WEAPON OR DEVICE USED AGAINST HIM colored YELLOW. (This was by SHEER COINCIDENCE at this point, since none of his enemies had sussed out this weakness of GL's yet.) It was enough to make me long for Woozy Winks Doiby Dickles, the Brooklyn cabbie who was the sidekick of the first, Golden Age Green Lantern, Alan Scott (who is my favorite Green Lantern).
Still, reading GLA, V.I wasn't a total loss: it had a small example of the (mostly) DC-produced craziness and, um, suspicious artwork that has since made "Superdickery" a household word. Herewith I present, for your edification (?), panel 3 from page 12 of "The Secret of the Golden Thunderbolts!," originally published in Green Lantern Vol. 2, #2 (Sept.-Oct. 1960), appearing on page 130 of The Green Lantern Archives, Vol. I:
Um, yeah, Hal, I think that little move would take most men "out of the closet game."
At least until they'd had a cigarette and stopped the bleeding.
Gah-DAMN.
(And would someone please explain to me why Marvel Comics, which was published in the 1950s and 1960s by a man who also published various skin mags, doesn't seem to have as much "What were they THINKING?!"-type art from that era as DC does..?)
As a child, for various reasons, I soon gravitated towards Marvel Comics' superheroes over DC's; though I was exposed to each company's comic books in roughly equal measure, by the age of six or seven, I had decided that Marvel's line trumped DC's. That this was the time of Peter Parker's near clinical depression and unfocused, barely controlled rage after the deaths of his girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, and the father of his roommate, Norman Osborn, secretly the Green Goblin, who caused Gwen's death, in Amazing Spider-Man (of course, Marvel's since resurrected Norman Osborn -- his son Harry is still dead, AFAIK -- and had a couple of faux resurrections of Gwen, but never mind), and, in The Fantastic Four, Reed Richards's/Mister Fantastic's near clinical depression in the wake of his turning his son Franklin into a (figurative) vegetable in order to save the world, if not the universe, from the effects of his vast and uncontrollable cosmic powers, which did bupkis for his chances of reconciling with his estranged wife, Susan Storm Richards/Invisible Girl, doubtless speaks volumes as to the peculiar bent of my mind, even at such a tender age. (That both titles were scripted by an astonishingly young Gerry Conway doubtless also speaks volumes as to the peculiar bent of his mind -- but that's another post.)
In short, I'm a relative late-comer to the DC Universe (or DCU): while I'm not wholly ignorant of it, my exposure to it is rather spotty, and what I know of its most recent iterations is largely thanks to the random availability of collected DC comics at the two public libraries nearest to me. (I haven't started working the inter-library loan thing for comic books yet, with the sole exception of Vol. 8 of Bill Willingham's Fables.)
A few weeks ago, I checked out The Green Lantern Archives, Volume I (1993), which collects the first appearances of the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, from Showcase #22-4 (Sept.-Oct. 1959 thru Jan.-Feb. 1960) and Green Lantern Vol. 2, #1-5 (July-Aug. 1960 thru Mar.-Apr. 1961); all of the stories were written by John Broome, pencilled by Gil Kane and inked by Joe Giella (with a few exceptions: two stories were inked by Murphy Anderson and one story had "divers hands" assisting Kane on pencils, such as Mike Sekowsky, Ross Andru, Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella, although Giella inked it). The DC Archive Editions are nice, hardbound books that are priced far outside of my range: the cheapest one retails for U.S. $49.95, and some go for quite a bit more. About the only way I'm going to be able to read these things is by borrowing them; since I have no friends who are comic book nerds, that means a library is required.
Turns out that I'm about as underwhelmed by Hal Jordan's earliest adventures as I was by The Sinestro Corps War. Broome's got a pretty big rep among comic book geeks as being a refreshingly adult writer, but I honestly don't see it based on the evidence here. Maybe he improved as he went along, but the stories here barely get a pass as time-killers, as far as I'm concerned; hell, I'd rather read some cheesy Doc Savage or Fu Manchu yarns than this stuff.
And while I enjoy Gil Kane's art, his true strengths -- his exaggerated, nearly Kirbyesque action sequences; his use of perspective to highlight the size differences amongst the various antagonists -- are nearly absent here. (Kane would subsequently design the best-looking of the Hulk's foemen over at Marvel: the Abomination, who debuted in Tales to Astonish #90. No one, IMHO, ever drew the Abomination as good -- as powerful, as menacing -- as Kane.) Again, this was early days; but Broome and Kane had been pros for a while by the time Hal Jordan made his bow, so this was a disappointment to me.
Granted, DC's Silver Age started a good three or four years before Marvel's did -- the Hal Jordan Green Lantern premiered over two years before Fantastic Four Vol. 1, #1 did; still and all, even the first six issues of the FF absolutely run rings (no pun intended...) around anything collected in GLA, V.I. The dialogue in the FF is stylized, true, but it comes closer to real life than GL in showing the main characters to be as antagonistic to each other as they are friendly to each other. Stan Lee (Marvel's legendary/infamous head writer, editor-in-chief, and, later, publisher) has often written how the superhero books at DC drove him crazy because everybody was so buddy-buddy all the time: seldom was heard a discouraging word, unless a character was being mind-controlled or had been tricked by a bad guy, and then everybody would have a big laugh together at the end. I'm not sure exactly when the cool kids who haunt the internet switched allegiance en masse to DC, even the earliest of Silver Age DC, but, based on my minimal exposure to it, I'll still take Marvel's early '60s titles over DC's any day of the week. (Even Doom Patrol.)
Sure, the romantic sub-plots of Thor in Journey Into Mystery -- nurse Jane Foster fantasizing over ironing her hubby Thor's cape and nagging him into getting a Don Draper-type haircut, never realizing that her boss, Dr. Don Blake, to whom she's spieling her daydreams, is Thor -- are cringe-inducing; but Hal Jordan's love interest, Carol Ferris (who is also his boss, as she's running Ferris Aircraft Company during the absence of her father; don't get too excited, though, all you armchair feminists: she has to get permission from her father to marry Green Lantern, IN CASE he proposes), telling him about a dream that she had that she married him in order to make Green Lantern jealous, hoping that GL would swoop in just before she said "I do" and whisk her off to his Lantern Loft, is even more groan-worthy. (To quote a bit of movie/audience by-play from The Rocky Horror Picture Show: "Oooohhhh, Bra-haaaaaad!" / "Ohhhh -- SHIIIIIT.")
It was also pretty tiresome for the super-duper Green Lantern magic ring to be introduced with a teensy little flaw -- it's utterly ineffective against any form of matter or energy colored yellow -- and then have EVERY. SINGLE. OPPONENT. or WEAPON OR DEVICE USED AGAINST HIM colored YELLOW. (This was by SHEER COINCIDENCE at this point, since none of his enemies had sussed out this weakness of GL's yet.) It was enough to make me long for Woozy Winks Doiby Dickles, the Brooklyn cabbie who was the sidekick of the first, Golden Age Green Lantern, Alan Scott (who is my favorite Green Lantern).
Still, reading GLA, V.I wasn't a total loss: it had a small example of the (mostly) DC-produced craziness and, um, suspicious artwork that has since made "Superdickery" a household word. Herewith I present, for your edification (?), panel 3 from page 12 of "The Secret of the Golden Thunderbolts!," originally published in Green Lantern Vol. 2, #2 (Sept.-Oct. 1960), appearing on page 130 of The Green Lantern Archives, Vol. I:
Um, yeah, Hal, I think that little move would take most men "out of the closet game."
At least until they'd had a cigarette and stopped the bleeding.
Gah-DAMN.
(And would someone please explain to me why Marvel Comics, which was published in the 1950s and 1960s by a man who also published various skin mags, doesn't seem to have as much "What were they THINKING?!"-type art from that era as DC does..?)