Books : Showcase Presents: Green Lantern, Vol. 1

In association with Amazon.com

Rating:

- DUMBNESS DUMBNESS DUMBNESS
Hal Jordan is a brave test pilot for the Ferris Aircraft Company who spends most of his time trying to bust a move on the daughter of the company's founder, Carol Ferris. She sees any potential relationship as an abuse of the subordinate-boss relationship when she is left in control of the company after her dad decides to travel the world for two years. While Hal is testing a training simulator that he designed the sim is ripped from the floor and enveloped in some sort of green energy as he is flown to the site of an alien spaceship crash. There he meets a dying Abin Sur who identifies himself as a "Green Lantern", a sort of intergalactic policeman whose power ring is only limited by the willpower of its wielder. Before he dies, Abin Sur passes on his responsibilities to a dumbstruck Hal Jordan to fight evil not only on Earth but its surrounding planets. A further complication in Hal's life occurs when Carol begins to show more interest in Green Lantern than Hal Jordan, not knowing that the two are the same.

I'm a big Green Lantern fan and I was really excited to pick up this huge book for $9.99 numbering over 500 pages because I had never read any of these early stories. Imagine my disappointment when I was confronted by some of the most horrible writing I have ever encountered in my brief life. I will discuss a few stories which were indicative of the low quality of plot that turned this from an awesome piece of nostalgia to an unintentionally comic burlesque.

In one story, Green Lantern and Carol go out on a date, yes, that's right, they go out on a date with Hal in full costume. In fact Green Lantern actually is a social gadfly in some of these early stories, romancing all the rich and beautiful women in Coast City. When Carol actually has the nerve to propose marriage to GL, our quick-thinking idiot summons a huge Godzilla-size creature with his power ring to wreak havoc in the city so he will have an excuse to get away from Carol, a creature that looks like a R. Crumb crossed with a underwear clad bum! Just at that moment a model airplane that some kids were flying in the park hits GL in the head and knocks him out, leaving his creature to wander around the city, charting a course to the military's atomic stockpiles! What kind of superhero INTENTIONALLY creates a monster that could take millions of lives to get out of a marriage proposal!!!??? And what kind of superhero gets taken out by a model plane??? Oh, the humanity! In fact, GL gets the snot kicked out of him a lot, runs his power ring too long, and constantly runs into buildings and walls. Maybe he has a death wish. Or maybe this was the beginning of the insanity that would plague him later on.

One of the other representations of bad comic book scripts is issue 8 of Green Lantern, the cover of which hypes the story as "Presenting the FIRST of a series of stories which we confidently predict will make comic book history!". In it, GL is kidnapped through time to the year 5700 AD to be a "Solar Director" to fight a menace that has emerged from under the Earth. What menace, you might ask? It seems that around 2000 AD, Gila Monsters, yes, those ugly red and black lizards that inhabit our American deserts, disappeared. Little could mankind know that the Gila monsters were hatching an insidious plan beneath our planet's surface, willing themselves to evolve into biped belt-wearing, pistol shooting, eye-beam ray weapon advanced civilization would-be conquerors of the Earth!! I don't know much about evolution, but 4000 years seems a little short for a species to evolve so radically. Maybe there was a black monolith down there. And why were Gila Monsters chosen above other animals. Why couldn't it have been lemurs? Or dung beetles?

Have you heard enough? These are only two stories in this large book, but they are pretty representative of the quality you're going to get here. Don't even get me started about a trip to Venus in which GL has to help cavemen fight pterodactyls! And the charming adjectives that are used to describe his "greasemonkey eskimo" assistant Pieface, a name which itself seems to invoke a racist minstrel show title. Yes, we do have the first appearances of Sinestro and Star Sapphire, but Sinestro's stories always end up with GL leaving him in a state that will end in a slow and horrible death. The Star Sapphire story is also marred by dumbness as aliens come to Earth seeking a new ruler for their galactic empire. How do they choose a new ruler? They scour the universe for somebody that looks like their previous ruler! Pretty advanced method.

These stories are awful. It makes you wonder how this character was able to survive for all these years if this is how it started. I mean, who would actually have bought this trash? The only thing that kept me going was that the stories were mildly amusing and I wanted to see just how far the dumbness would go. Even at $9.99, this book was a complete waste of money. If you see it at a garage sale, maybe THINK about buying it.

Rating:

- best of the golen age
Similar to the Marvels Essentials same format-black and white and a similar number of pages-
This volume includes Green Lantern 1-17 published between 1960 and 1962, and Showcase 22-24 published between 1959 and 1960.

Rating:

- Best Showcase so far
Here's where the "green" Green Lantern gets started. The character of Hal Jordan develops throughout this tome that brings back to life the most mature plotting and themes of any early Sixties DC comics. Because of the interesting writing, this stands out among the Showcase and Marvel Essentials, and so it survives the harshness of black and white.

It is a shame that color is apparently prohibitively expensive. I'm sure, especially with a character whose NAME IS A COLOR, the publishers held their breath when they released it. Yes, I miss the color A LOT, but this and a few of the other Showcases have enough nostaliga and entertainment value to make for good bedtime reading. Plus some of the key background material for Infinite Crisis originates in early Green Lantern mags.

Put it all together with the value, and this is a very satisfying purchase. (Great marketing too--buying a few of these Showcase volumes prompted me to buy a few of the more expensive premium products DC has put out.)

Enjoy!

Rating:

- Real nice nostalgia and good drawing
I was too young to read Green Lantern in the years (1959-62) covered by these reprints, but they are charming, imaginitive and amusing. Gil Kane's pencil work is the epitome of clean, sylish DC econmy and class- so unlike today's overworked, overcrowed junk. The inking, mainly by Joe Giello, is really smooth, sophisicated and reserved. That was a great era. Innocent, morally uplifting stories are nonetheless tinged with mind-expanding sci-fi concepts- surprisingly dream like and sometimes downright psychedelic.

Rating:

- Silver Age goodness!
First, this is a great bargain. Only $9.99 for all these great old GL stories, what's not to love? The only disappointment is that the interiors are Black & White. Still, to keep the price under $10, I assume this was a necessity.
Gil Kane's art stil shines and shows why he IS THE Green Lantern artist. These stories are the start of the silver age GL's history and it's great that DC has chosen to reprint them now with Hal Jordan having recently returned to the Green Lantern fold.
Now, if only they'd do the Flash....

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