Time and Green Lanterns

Yesterday I woke up late. Knowing I had one of the day’s eHows already in the bag helped me stay on track, so I was right. Of course, now I’ll need another backup article before too long …
So, moving on to another topic, I caught the Green Lantern trailer over Thanksgiving. Visually impressive (though it has the oddly unsolid look a lot of CGI does), but their handling of Hal Jordan as a smart-ass and (from the look of it) a bit of an idiot annoys me some.
Hal, as originally appeared, was a level-headed professional (like most of Julius Schwartz’s Silver Age characters) whose driving interest was getting his boss to date him in spite of the boss/employee relationship. As a Green Lantern, his motive was a sense of duty, something he took (and still does) very seriously.
Even rereading them now, the old books manage to convey a sense of awe: At both the power Hal wields, at the interplanetary Green Lantern Corps and at the Guardians, the immortals who created it. I don’t know how much awe we’re going to get.
Part of the reason is something Darwyn Cooke commented on when working on DC’s New Frontier miniseries: Most of the big-name heroes were created decades ago and they’re now operating in a very different time and culture.
Heroes, if they have any characterization at all, are rarely as together as they used to be: They’re driven, tormented, screwed up or cocky jerks who have to grow up (zero to hero, as Disney’s Hercules put it). The reason sometimes given for Superman not being as popular as he used to be is precisely that he has his act together (as Kevin Smith put it, Superman’s only angst is that he can’t be an even better Superman).
Likewise, the late-fifties/1960s handling of the Guardians—all-wise beings who genuinely know what’s best—no longer flies. Denny O’Neill’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow scripts from the late sixties showed them as out of touch with real life; the current Green Lantern comics show them as extremely fallible (Gerard Jones, who wrote the book a couple of decades back, said he liked presenting them as trustworthy and beyond question precisely because it’s such an atypical response to authority these days).
Even in the comics, you can see the same pattern at work. Roy Thomas’s All Star Squadron retcon series presented Hourman—who acquires powers from the wonder drug miraclo—as a drug addict, which he certainly wasn’t in the Golden Age; Marvel’s Mark Gruenwald pondered in a few stories if Captain America taking the “super soldier formula” was any different from steroids.
Bruce Banner’s work on the gamma bomb was replaced by biomedical research in the 1970s Hulk series, when building superweapons was unfashionable. And Tony Stark in the Iron Man film is haunted by what his munitions business has done more than he ever was back in the Silver Age.
Likewise, the image of a test pilot today is simply not as cool as it was back when Chuck Yeager and his cohorts were breaking the sound barrier and doing other spectacular feats (the same is true of astronauts, I think). So maybe it’s not surprising that Hal in the trailer comes off having more in common with Jack Black or a smart-ass comic actor than with the comic books’ Hal Jordan (I’ve no doubt that by the end of the movie, he’ll prove he has the stuff of champions).
But I have a strong suspicion I’ll wind up watching it anyway.