Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Green Lantern

New for Patrons: Guide to Hal Jordan, Green Lantern

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It’s time for the biggest of the Green Lantern guides for ALL Patrons of CK – and I’m certain there isn’t another one on the internet anything like it!

Hal Jordan, Green Lantern – The Definitive Guide

Working on comic guides is a curious chicken vs. egg situation. Do I start the guide because I’m fascinated with a character’s history, or do I become fascinated with a character’s history because I started the guide?

In this case, I’m firmly in the latter camp.

Part of what was causing me to drag my feet on this guide was that Hal Jordan didn’t seem at all fascinating to me. He was a space cop, went mad with power, and then got redeemed because people love their Silver Age dudes. Plus, that last bit has been obsessively covered by many other websites who actually like this character.

What more was there to know? What could I possibly add?

I found that both of those questions were answered by the same two facts.

First, because Hal Jordan wasn’t altered much (if at all) by Crisis on Infinite Earths, the internet is not obsessed with dealing with his Post-Crisis retcon chronology. Yet, there’s actually an interesting sequence of almost a dozen series published after Crisis that fit prior to his 1990 ongoing return.

I didn’t think it would be too big a deal to list these in story order with some context attached, but I just skimmed five of the top Green Lantern guides on the web and none of them have these details in full.

Second, Hal’s transformation from Lantern to Parallax to The Spectre back to Hal. I only saw a single guide get close to really nailing this story order – and it didn’t give any context!

I’ve never understood this sequence of events before and it’s never been collected succinctly in one place. I assumed that DC wanted to rehabilitate him and just rammed him into their spot as The Spectre so he could atone for his many sins.

That’s not quite how it happened. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Hal Jordan, Green Lantern

New For Patrons: Guide to The Green Lantern Corps

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Today I have the first in a series of long-awaited and much requested DC guides for ALL Patrons of Crushing Krisis…

Green Lantern Corps – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

I made my first serious try at creating a Green Lantern guide almost exactly a year ago this week.

It took me over three hours just to make an outline.

Green Lantern doesn’t have the most comic titles or comic appearances of the many major stars of the Big Two. What it does have is the most characters we could be referring to when we simply say “Green Lantern.”

Spider-Man? It’s Peter, Miles, or maybe Ben Reilly. Batman? Usually Bruce, unless it’s Azreal or Dick. Wolverine? Laura or Logan, because none of us seriously called Daken that. There are a lot of Flashes, but “Flash” almost always means Barry or Wally. Even Robin usually refers to Dick, Jason, Tim, or Damian – four isn’t that many. It’s probably Captain Marvel who creates the most confusion, but these days it almost certainly means Carol Danvers with little room for ambiguity unless we’re in a flashback.

But who do we mean when we say Green Lantern? Do we mean the Golden Age Alan Scott? The classic space cop Hal Jordan? Upstart Guy Gardner? The cool, collected Jon Stewart? The sudden hero Kyle Rayner? Jessica Cruz? Simon Baz? Jo Mullein? Tai Pham? Kilowog? Sinestro?!
The problem I was having was that a guide simply titled “Green Lantern” had to mean all of them, or else it wouldn’t be useful.

I chipped away at it month after month, each time hoping I’d have a new guide to deliver and each time barely making a dent. While I gradually put in enough work hours to make my way through all of the many Green Lanterns and their titles, the guide just became more and more gargantuan in the process.

This weekend, I decided that one way or another this Green Lantern guide was going to get done before a new week began. I researched. I linked. I found images. After a full 12hrs of nothing but Green Lantern, I finally finished. And the guide was unreadable. It wasn’t quite the mess of my legendary Spider-Man guide, but it was close. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: Guide to The Green Lantern Corps