Hal Jordan, Green Lantern, Delineated.
Core Genre: Science Fiction. Space opera mainly though not always, and shading towards the Original Star Trek horrorish take, under Geoff Johns in particular.
As the architect of Jordan’s return from the dead, and the principle GL writer for a number of years, Johns is going to be the major influence on this post. He’s done more than pretty much any other writer to show us who Jordan is, and what makes him tick.
I’m not keen at all on the characterisation of Hal Jordan as, essentially, a thick ignorant prick. Hal Jordan Internet Joke is somewhat played out. Let’s accept he has a somewhat privileged, conservative mindset, evidenced by an alpha male jet jockey backstory and as originated during the Hard Travelling Heroes era. Is he small- or narrow-minded? Of course not. As Johns has gone to lengths to show, he’s focused. This is both a positive and a negative character trait. He’s as precise and instinctive and as you’d want in a test pilot or, indeed, a space cop, but this does lead to missing some of the surrounding detail of a given situation. It makes him stubborn, and single minded, but this is a world away from being narrow minded. Gardner, on the other hand…
There’s a recklessness about the character too. But a certain kind of recklessness, not the same as Oliver Queen’s, for example. He’s honest and fearless, as all Green Lanterns are, with the formidable will that goes along with that. Marry that to precision and focus, not to mention confidence, and you’re going to get a character who does rush in.
Funny, but some of the first posts at the Journal were about what makes a Green Lantern’s tick. At the time, I mentioned that I prefer GLs to simply not know fear, rather than to know fear but be able to overcome it. Johns has again made explicit that overcoming fear is the important thing, as seen in fearful new GL recruits who are still vulnerable to yellow. To be fair, I’ve been happy to change my viewpoint on this, as Johns has built some great work from this foundation, in particular as regards the different Corps he’s been creating.
I’m still fond of the idea that GLs are honest because they have no fear of the consequences of the truth. There’s been nothing to contradict this either. In fact, I think it makes a lot of sense, with Jordan in particular. Focused, willful. Damn straight he tells the truth, and he’s not scared to do it either. Not in the slightest.
Let’s take a second here to talk about the Guardians. They work best when portrayed as grumpy space-bureaucrats. Galactic police captains who want Jordan’s god-damned badge and gun because he’s gone too damn far this time. Unfortunately, they’ve been known to drift too far into big blue sky daddy territory. This doesn’t work as well, because then they become DC’s Odin to Hal Jordan’s Thor. A conflict between child and parent, an endless cycle of replacing the father. They leave the kids to fend for themselves, then they come back, then they die, then they come back, now it looks like they’re on the way out again. Wrong way of looking at it. They shouldn’t be nurturing their adoptive children to take over after they’re gone. They should be your cosmic boss, hypertensive and pissed off that you haven’t finished the monthly spreadsheet yet.
This post’s about Hal Jordan specifically rather than Green Lanterns generally. That’s because I think there are factors that are specific to getting his character right that don’t quite transer to other Lanterns, Kyle Rayner in particular. The first two factors, however, are the classics (and due to this there’s a lot in a GL’s character that will overlap with other members of the Corps):
A) Honest.
B) Fearless.
C) Power ring that creates things willed into existence. Is green. Obviously. Need recharging.
D) Blue cosmic bosses.
D) is the primary way in which a villain is located and put into context. Clunky kind of exposition via briefing, perhaps, but if it worked for Hill Street Blues then it can’t be completely inelegant. GLs aren’t really detectives, anyhow, and a GL story is different to a Batman story for this reason. There are, of course, exceptions, and this is when the power ring comes in. GL drinking game: everytime they “scan” something with the bugger. You’ll be plastered before DC Nation.
You know, having said they’re not really detectives, I have to admit I quite like the times where we’re reminded that the Corps isn’t so much a group of superheroes as it is a group of coppers. You know,w hen they make reports, or refer to sentencing procedures and breaches of intergalactic law. I like how it grounds the incredible. Jordan using the ring at one point as a CSI-style scene of crime scanner (for an autopsy, I think) was pretty cool. I like the way it suggests GL rookies are taught specific complicated construct patterns or designs that there’s no way they could come up with themselves.
The ring, then, becomes both a tool of location and the primary means of interaction. Honesty is a mode of interacting with their world, either through action or communication. A lack of fear informs this too, as well as shaping the way a Lantern locates an antagonist.
Conclusion: There’s not much to sum up, in that the personality of a Green Lantern is clearly delineated already in the central concept, not to mention the job Geoff Johns has done in exploring what makes Jordan tick. The last thing I’ll say is that although the job requirement means a Lantern has to be a certain way, I’ve always liked the way the different characters are shown to be very different too each other. Honesty and fearlessness does not automatically make you a good person, after all. Gardner’s obnoxious as hell, and honesty and a lack of fear only exacerbates his worst tendencies. I may return to this later, as I suspect both Gardner and Kyle Rayner’s profiles would be fairly different to Jordan’s.
