The Green Lantern: Last Chapter

 The End?

With one issue and less than two weeks until the end of Grant Morrison’s 28-issue The Green Lantern, it’s clear that we’re headed for a climactic finish, quite a bit like the final two issues of Batman, R.I.P., where the hero is facing a carefully-prepared trap made just for him. It’s not just a tank of piranhas or some walls squeezing in or a vat of acid. This finale is not just about one particular gizmo or one particular scenario. This will be an existential crisis, with multiple enemies. And it’s big enough that we can’t see the broad edges around him: What will he face? Who is behind it? And is it unrelated that the Guardians have just told him that his time as a Green Lantern is basically up after this mission, and that the very way he has always operated is anathema to them? Hal Jordan is facing total doom. After all, he’s already escaped death multiple times in this run, and not just by dodging death, but actually coming back from it. The stakes in the finale are not comic book death but the total destruction of Hal Jordan.

If you’ve ever read or watched anything about the superhero genre, what I’ve just said may not move you. You know what to expect. He’ll pull victory out of nowhere. He’ll will a power ring to do something it’s never done before. He’ll defeat six entire corps of enemies with a wooden spoon. We’ve seen Morrison’s JLA give the whole human population super powers. We’ve seen Morrison’s Batman climb out of a grave. The hero wins at the end. That’s how this works, right?

Maybe. But in fact, Hal was killed out of DC Comics once before and it lasted for quite a while. And in fact, the April solicitations for DC hint that we may not be seeing any Hal comics in the coming era. When Trilla Tru says, in #11, “You okay, Jordan? It’s like you’re saying goodbye,” in fact maybe he is.

The Money Plot: Mass Consumption, Mass Destruction

There’s another thread to this story, one bigger than just Hal Jordan, that goes back to Morrison’s works early in the last decade. There’s a meta-story, as with most good DC events from the better writers over the past thirty-six years. Morrison has assiduously laid out a theme in which the bright, happy superheroes really are in trouble. There really is a threat to them, and Morrison believes it. There is a sharp turnaround from Final Crisis and Superman Beyond in which the irreducible optimism of Superman – as a fictional character – overpowers any threat on the printed page or off of it. Beginning with Action and Multiversity, Morrison depicts a real threat off the page to optimistic superheroes, one in which depressing stories prove more marketable, and we may really see these market forces in the real world put an end to the like of Hal Jordan.

I commented in my last post about TGL Morrison’s theme of this meta-enemy they associate with “mass production, mass consumption, mass destruction” of the DC superhero franchise, but I’m returning to it here because it’s hard to say anything about the run – at least since TGL Season One #9 – without putting this theme front and center. What I mentioned about this theme in my last post comes up so centrally from the first page of TGL Season Two #11 (“worthless toys… and those towers of shining glass”), and I gave the whole series a re-read looking for how this abstract theme interacts with the specific plot of TGL, to see how the former drives the latter.

First, Morrison takes many, many of the most light-hearted characters from the most light-hearted era of Silver Age comics and turns their stories dark, making some of them into psychopaths, and others into victims. The Hyperman family is the most prominent example of happy, sappy heroes turned into killers, but we also see the death of Vartox and the ghosts of the Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman of the “perfect universe” Earth-15. We see the now-wicked Powerlord (once Power-Boy) pledge allegiance to a “Great Lah!”, a reference that confounded me until I finally, with head-slapping clarity, realized that “Lah” is “Hal” spelled backwards. We later learn that the Qwa-Man’s name is Qwa-Lah.

The meta-message is hammered home in TGL Season Two #4 when the Golden Giants of Neo-Pangaea declare that a court is in session, overseen by judges in the colors magenta, yellow, azure, and black. That’s a strange set of colors, isn’t it? Not four colors you’d likely see come up in any combination except that those are the four colors of printing – magenta, yellow, cyan, and black. These judges order Hal to submit and be destroyed and he escaped them back in #4, but their kind, the Nomad Empire, is back now, and as we’ve been warned, Hal’s going to face a worse version of them in #12. The specific reference to printer’s ink colors tells us that Morrison’s not referring to an abstract sci fi entity but something in the real world – the publishers of the comic book themselves.

Another meta-message made clear in #11 is when we, and Hal, find out that the new Young Guardians will surprisingly be leaving and be replaced soon, right after they were born and after a short reign. Hal notes, “But they’ve barely been here! You mean they changed everything and we’ll be left with the consequences?” I think here Morrison is commenting on many of the lead writers at DC in the 2015-2020 era. And throughout this run, Morrison has used the Antimatter Universe as a comment on the dark themes of the Dark Multiverse, the Joker Who Laughs. In the Hal Jordan storyline, antimatter has meant opposite and evil since the first mention of Qward in 1960. In TGL, the light-hearted Power-Boy who turns into the dark Powerlord now worships Lah – Hal spelled backwards, a representative of the evil antimatter world. Morrison has created a central plot line in this run about money, but it is about what money in the real world is doing to the comics industry.

This begins in Season One #10 when Hal says, “Some profiteers kick a hole in the antimatter border.” An Illegal antimatter mining operation blows a planet to pieces, and destroys many of the happy, positive Silver Age heroes while turning others of them evil. This is not the offhand creation of a plot device to make the story go. I suggest that this is a comment on writers (recall the printer’s ink) mining dark themes, which is lucrative (higher sales) but destructive (e.g., Vartox is killed, Hyperman and Hyperwoman become psychopathic killers). The central plot of Season Two is a critique of the direction of DC’s output over the past few years, a critique earlier seen pointedly during the Green Lantern: Blackstars interlude with the Depressoverse spawning a Batmanson whose evil, laughing Bat-family was “infectious now.”

But Morrison’s first invocation of this theme was in 2012, with Superdoomsday. The language that Morrison used then was “maximum cross-spectrum, wide-platform appeal.” This sardonic celebration of business values is echoed in TGL Season Two #2: “all-out opportunism” and the toy plot of #4, then picked up again in #11, in Samandra’s vision of “wild trolls chained to moving belts building worthless toys… and those towers of shining glass.” If the Dark Multiverse inspired Morrison to parody it as the Depressoverse, it was a development confirming the direction they saw coming well before DC: Metal began in 2017.

Moore of the Same?

In my 2018 analysis of Final Crisis, I expounded at length upon the many elements of Alan Moore’s work echoed and commented upon in FC. There, Morrison took a very different trajectory from Moore’s pessimism, particularly 1986’s Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? Now, in 2021, we see a few elements from Moore’s late-1980s work arise again.

Strikingly, Moore’s unpublished Twilight of the Superheroes had as its pivotal event a royal wedding between two “houses” of superhero, particularly involving the son of Superman to a powerful princess, Mary Marvel Jr. In TGL Season Two, the pivotal political event was a royal wedding between Hyperboy – the son of a Superman knock-off – and a powerful princess. In Moore’s story, this event would make the two families so powerful that other parties planned to start a war to prevent it. In TGL, the groom-to-be’s identity as the son of a Superman surrogate is parallel, and there is also a sense that the marriage will guarantee the power of the two families, in both cases a Superman Family to be feared, and a fear in turn, by Hyperwoman, that revelation of Hyperman’s criminal activities would cancel the wedding, and so she has to kill Hal Jordan before he can arrest Hyperman. As it turns out, the trial and conviction of Hyperman and the arrest of Hyperwoman fail to halt the wedding, which falls apart on its own. In Morrison’s story, the “success” of the dark family is doomed of its own sterility, with Hyperboy rejecting and insulting his “Shadow-Princess” bride-to-be at the altar and the two of them vowing war against one another. Mining the darkness of antimatter – or in comics – is not to be successful in the long run after all.

To return to the potent influence of WHTTMOT, the entire arc of Season Two has led us there. In Moore’s story, light-hearted Superman characters like Bizarro, Toyman, and the Prankster become homicidal. In Morrison’s, light-hearted Superman characters like Hyperman and Power-Boy become homicidal. At that point in WHTTMOT, Superman asks, “If the nuisances from my past are coming back as killers… what happens when the killers come back?” He is soon answered by the arrival of an array of his killer villains. Hal, at the end of #11, is stunned to see that the Nomad Empire, at Hyperwoman’s request, has gathered a collection of his more serious foes, including the Shark (deadly), Black Hand (virtually synonymous with death). The final attack on Superman in WHTTMOT is led by a Brainiac-possessed Luthor, featuring a weird composite of their heads, and lo, the leader of this final attack on Hal is led by Hector Hammond, with a weird superimposition of Sinestro over his head. Coincidence?

Chiaroscuro

Earlier in Season Two, we saw Hal in a seemingly fatal jam, falling from the sky at the end of #3,  when his bird-sidekicks caught him in midair. By issue #11, they have already grown to maturity and seem to leave him, and Hal is notably saddened. A family of birds referring to their guardian as “Unca Hal” – this is a lighthearted echo of Huey, Louis, and Dewey. They’ve saved him in the past. But for now, they have left him. This is the light…

…and subsequently, the dark: Hal has found himself in the most dire of circumstances. His bosses want to end his time as a Green Lantern. His foes have planned his annihilation. The entire setup on Athmoora is modeled on the darkness of Game of Thrones, from the comically parallel issue title “Contest of Crowns” to the map of multiple kingdoms and Hector Hammond saying, “Hyperwoman sends her regards” paraphrasing a key line in Game of Thrones, “The Lannisters send their regards.” In both stories it is a threat. Like Batman in Batman, R.I.P., Hal is in a trap made just for him, with a new villain asking his old villains to participate. Like Superman in WHTTMOT, this is to be Hal’s final fate.

Or will it? We know the pattern in which the hero pulls out the win at the end. We might suspect that Hal’s bird nephews will bring the light aspect of comics to him and save him once again. This is the R.I.P. ending. But how will Morrison’s view of real world “mass consumption… mass destruction” play into this? And we already know that this series ending will not be followed by another series with Hal right away. Maybe according to Morrison’s final GL issue, maybe according to the plans of the writers who take over next, this really is a grim fate awaiting Hal Jordan.