The Green Lantern, Before the End

If The Green Lantern is to be Grant Morrison’s last work writing a monthly title for DC, the final two issues should be a grand gesture, long remembered. With twenty-five of the issues behind us, what can we say of Morrison’s love letter to Hal Jordan? Where has this journey led and how will it finish?

In some regard, Morrison’s earlier runs with Batman and Superman (on Action) are two of a kind, with this Green Lantern run as the third in a set. These are not just runs that start with a story, followed by another story, then another, until there’s a last one. Morrison builds a structure. His Batman run had, primarily, three arcs, with a Big Bad lurking in the shadows until late in each run. His Action run, the shortest, had just one such season, with one primary Big Bad, Vyndktvx. Morrison’s run, thus far, organized around three distinct titles of 12, 3, and 12 issues, has had one clear Big Bad in the first, but the third has not, so far, suggested any one central villain lurking.

All of these plot lines have rosters of villains backing up the main one; sometimes they are underlings of the boss, and sometimes they are parallel, lesser, but unrelated threats. The Batman stories had Doctor Hurt and Talia as the central villains, but Ra’s al Ghul, the Joker, and Darkseid’s Hyper-Adapter and several others played major roles. In Action, Vyndktvx was the central villain, but Super-Doomsday was pivotal, the muscle in some respect, to Vyndktvx’s brains. And in The Green Lantern’s first twelve issues, the Qwa-Man, Hal’s antimatter double, is something like that for Commander Mu.

The structure even for Season One (the first twelve issues, not formally named as a season) was more complex than “seasons” of Morrison’s other runs. It appeared, near the end of issue 6, as though Commander Mu’s plan had reached fruition, and he had just about built the machine at the center of his master plot, hinted as far back as issue 1, and then… he was killed, by Alanna, no less. Furthermore, Hal and the universe as a whole were at death’s door along with him. But then, late in #12, we found out that Mu had not died (and perhaps could not die), and the plan suddenly went forward just exactly twice as far into the story as when it had seemed to have been halted the first time. And just as before, Hal was faced with imminent death. Just as before, creating, and giving to Mu, the miracle machine (Geh-Jedollah, the very same ultimate wishing machine from Final Crisis) seemed to be the only way for Hal to save his own life. And then, once again, Hal feigned compliance but at the end of the three-issue mini-season, Green Lantern Blackstars, it turned out that Hal had a massive ruse going, letting the Blackstars win in a different universe. Belzebeth believed that she would be able to fight back, but, once again, Mu had turned out to have escaped death and perhaps to be beyond death. Even fifteen issues in, the run had turned out to be a sort of Möbius Strip of repeated subplots. Has Mu won? Has Hal? Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes.

For Hal, too, being on the verge of death, and actually dying, has occurred three times so far: around the midpoint of each season, and then at the end of the first. Everything is cycling; the run is not only a flashback to each of the major themes of Hal Jordan’s publication history, but a repetition of them. Old girlfriends come up early in each season. The Qwa-Man and Zundernell come up in both seasons. Marriage comes up near the end of each season. Each season has a buddy team up with a Silver Age JLA member important to Hal’s lore: first, Green Arrow; then, the Flash.

And, of course, as with Morrison’s Batman run, this run features plenty of alternate Green Lanterns; what the League of Heroes and other imitation Batmen were in that run, the Green Lantern Corps and Green Lanterns of other Earths in the Multiverse (no pair being more memorable than Batman Green Lantern and Hippie Green Lantern) are in this one. Hal succeeds where Superman and the JLA fail in Season One, manipulates and bests Superman in GL Blackstars, fights and ultimately bests the Superman surrogate Hyperman in Season Two. Repetition is everywhere, until even Hal, in Season Two #2 (two twos like Harvey Dent is behind it) says, “Feels like I’m trapped in my own history.” Morrison’s Green Lantern run is a carousel ride, repeating Hal’s history while it also repeats itself. Girlfriends, Silver Age -style sci fi plots with aliens, coming back to Earth, going back to space, buddy team-ups, the anti-universe, death, weird doppelgängers, his Guardian bosses, betrayal, defeat, victory. It all repeats, then repeats again. Morrison’s GL run is a microcosm of Hal’s publication history, but it’s also a microcosm of itself, loops upon loops.

And what is the story of Hal Jordan? Limitless talent, limitless self confidence, limitlessly prone to screwing everything up and then getting it all back again. He works as a pilot and is on the hot seat. He works for the Guardians and is on the hot seat. His knack for disobeying authority makes him the ultimate inside agent to bring down the Blackstars from the inside. He faces death and survives. He even dies and comes back. He wins over the lady and then blows it. His real romance as Green Lantern is with the power ring, personified as Pengowirr in Season One. His big scary enemy, the (yellow!) Zundernell, he shrinks down into a harmless joke. He’s a little bit comfortable in absolutely every situation and at home nowhere. In Season Two, the big universe-ending Crisis on Infinite Earths gets remixed and turns into another riff. Morrison didn’t invent any of this – it all goes back to the dawn of the Silver Age. Morrison simply refines it and repeats it. And this is the perfect time to pause and consider the story before its final arc because in the last story line, a proposal to Carol Ferris just might break the loop couldn’t do that because, as Carol said, “In the end maybe but it’s not – it’s not the end… not yet.”

This isn’t just the story of Hal Jordan. It’s also a work – potentially his last DC work, potentially a touchstone work – by Grant Morrison, and it may be following one long, slow-developing story that is taking perhaps the medium and perhaps the author on a path towards disenchantment.

After Final Crisis, Morrison’s three high-profile series have been Action, Multiversity, and The Green Lantern. FC and Superman Beyond delivered a message of optimism about the medium, that Superman was bigger than the writers, bigger than any of us, and the story of Superman drew so much power from its optimism that it was destined to go on forever. But in the three subsequent runs, we see this optimism undercut by metatextual messages in the stories as Morrison works in subplots that are about the superhero medium and the superhero as merchandise. In Action, perhaps the most ominous foe faced by Superman is Superdoomsday, “a brand” with “maximum cross-spectrum, wide-platform appeal, a violent, troubled, faceless anti-hero... a global marketing icon.” In Multiversity, The Empty Hand, symbolizing the economic pressures on the publishers and The Gentry, symbolizing the market and market forces that pervert the heroes, often, into something darker and more sensational, reinforce the message that marketing and branding would lead to something violent and troubled. And while I didn’t see it at first, I feel sure that it is significant that the agents of The Empty Hand, seemingly sweet and benign but dark and possessed were the Little League of Earth-42. Above all others, these are the versions of the DC characters aimed directly at the youngest, most innocent readers. And is there a common thread here? Yes, definitely: The Little League first met darkness when Superdoomsday from Earth-45 arrived and killed their Superman. And by the time we see them in Multiversity Guidebook, they are evil, possessed, red-eyed agents of marketing as perverted into darkness.

And now, in The Green Lantern, two subplots echoed and built upon this pessimism. First, the darkly satirical metatexual opening to GL Blackstars #2 amplifies the grim tone of Heroes in Crisis, the Dark Multiverse, and other works, with a Depressoverse, culminating with a clearly Batman Who Laughs -inspired Batmanson who is infectious, making the real Batman, the paragon of conviction in the DC Universe, “give in.” Later, quite parallel to the Little Leaguers, the team-up with the Flash in TGL Season Two #4 introduces Hal and Barry and Olivia Reynolds to an enemy world of toys. The world itself is a toy, smelling of “canned plastic” and ultimately, Olivia’s career expertise in toys allows her to defeat them, but not before we see how dark these toys are in a very modern way, “beta-testing” the heroes, play until they break, and when the lead toy, Quing, is broken, how unsympathetically he is replaced with one of the others as the new Quing.

In all of this, we see the underlying optimism – an affirmation of the superhero medium – turn to a darker metatextual comment with marketing as the enemy that may corrupt superheroes for once and for all. And it may not be coincidental that this message has picked up pace now as Morrison is, perhaps, moving on.

And so, a run that is full of repetition is going to stop repeating soon, because the end is coming. The big finale (#11 and #12) will take place on Athmoora, a world first shown in two panels of GL #16 back in 1962. Morrison places Hal on Athmoora in Season One #9, where Hal visits just for the fun of the adventure of brawling in combat where his ring is weakened. That is one of astonishingly many times in the run that Hal has voluntarily forsaken the security of his ring, confident in his ability to face danger in any circumstance. Now he returns to that danger again. If we have just two issues left of new Morrison monthlies to enjoy, I will be enjoying them and looking forward to seeing on what directions he takes Hal and us in his finale.

Retro Review: Identity Crisis

By a DC tradition going back to 1963, the word "Crisis" is used in the title of a story to indicate that the story is about interdimensional travel and a threat on a cosmic scale. It may seem, then, that the title of 2004's Identity Crisis, a seven-part miniseries that had no inter-dimensional dynamics, is a misnomer. Figuratively speaking, however, Identity Crisis did indeed rework the DC Universe, though it did so with physically and psychologically brutal events and unsettling, disturbing themes, rather than the science fiction notion of parallel worlds. The dark deeds around which Brad Meltzer centered this work set the tone for much of the next decade, and unquestionably had an impact that is still being felt today.

The plot of Identity Crisis – those events occurring in the present time – is a simple whodunit. Someone is murdered in the first issue, and the murderer's identity is revealed in the last issue. Along the way, there are red herrings that fool the heroes and attempt to fool the readers. There are, of course, suspects who turn out not to be guilty – at least, not guilty of the crime at the center of the whodunit – and there are false crimes, even extraneous subplots, along the way. It turns out that the false crimes were planned by the killer, but the murder itself was something of an accident, an assault leading to involuntary manslaughter. There are many twists and turns to complicate the mystery. Yet, the story is not remembered because of a death that takes place in issue #1, nor even the several deaths that take place thereafter, but because of the flashbacks that tell of events that took place several years before the time of Identity Crisis. Those events are still remembered as some of the most shocking in a mainstream comic book, and still help frame the code of morality for superheroes – and their creators.

From the beginning, there is a shroud of secrecy that hangs over the story. In the first scene, there is a box with something inside and we don't know what it is. Heroes and villains alike are trying to get information. The narration refers to events taking place before some mysterious "Now" and the reader doesn't know at first that the reference time is the death of Sue Dibny, the wife of the Elongated Man, Ralph Dibny. As the story goes on, the mystery format makes it natural that the reader doesn't know everything, but what is hidden is not so much the story of a murder as a story of disintegration as Meltzer breaks down the ethical binaries of the DC Universe. First, Meltzer makes the villains worse than they've ever been before. Then, he tears away at the moral unanimity of the heroes. He doesn't, to be sure, bring the heroes low as he does the villains, but he replaces the moral framework in which heroes are generally of one mind regarding acceptable conduct and creates one divide among them, then another divide, and finally a complex series of factions and facades, and thereby the DC Universe is irrevocably changed.

The first dark event to set the story in motion is the killing of Sue Dibny. Meltzer goes out of his way to make this hurt – we learn all about the love that Ralph and Sue shared and how special it was. We learn, also, that Sue was pregnant, which doesn't stop her killer from saying, with ambivalence, "Goodbye, Sue…" as a flamethrower is used to torch her body. At her funeral, Ralph is unable to speak, as his sorrow turns his face into a rubbery mess that makes a mockery of the tragedy and the solemnity.

Remarkably, the shocks have at that point just gotten started. Identity Crisis #2 presents the most shocking and controversial revelation, that the villain Doctor Light had years earlier raped Sue Dibny during a break-in of the Justice League Satellite; the rape is shown, partially concealed, on-panel. Arguably more unsettling is the way Doctor Light narrates the rape, mockingly, to the Justice League, making obscene taunts and threats after he is caught. The heroes are upset, and the readers were as well. Sue Dibny's rape was a bombshell, earning Identity Crisis attention in the mainstream media and infamy among some readers.

After the story had thoroughly darkened its villains, it was the turn of the heroes. Immediately after Sue's funeral, Wally West and Kyle Rayner learn that a group of older, Satellite Era, Leaguers have a dark secret. This leads to one reveal connected to the Doctor Light case, then another, and yet another. What is unveiled is that the JLA used Zatanna's magic to remove Doctor Light's memory of the rape. Then, to prevent him from repeating such a vile crime, they narrowly vote to alter his personality. This, they do, but with the alteration turning out somewhat more severe than they had intended. Finally, when Batman walked in on the process and flew into a rage, they froze Batman and removed his memory of the event.

Identity Crisis thereby introduced the term "mindwipe" into the vocabulary of early 2000's DC readers, and established it as a controversial weapon in their arsenal. The controversy is articulated by the characters within the story, with Green Arrow, Black Canary, and Green Lantern voting against altering Doctor Light's personality, and Batman, obviously, completely rejecting the idea. Both Wally West and Kyle Rayner also articulate shock regarding the practice, and the heroes who supported the idea nonetheless knew that it needed to be kept a secret, even from other heroes, seemingly from Superman, among others. However, it is the controversy that was new to Identity Crisis, not the mind wipe idea as such. The idea of memory wipes goes back to a Green Lantern story in All American #23 in February 1941. Later stories show heroes deliberately altering their enemy's minds, such as a 1948 story in which Batman uses an interrogation room to break a prisoner's will, and a 1952 farce in which Batman goes to great lengths to make the Joker doubt his own sanity. Even killing villains was not off-limits for Golden Age heroes, with Hawkman and the Spectre downright bloodthirsty while Batman, the Flash, and arguably Superman finished off some of their enemies deliberately.

However, in the older stories, there was no hint that the reader should doubt that the hero had acted appropriately and justly. What's new in Identity Crisis is the controversy. It's not the deed, but the reaction. Superhero comics operate under the universal truth that heroes try to act justly. When one faction of superheroes decides that another faction of superheroes has acted inappropriately, the worldview that superheroes are just is irreparably shattered, because at the very least, one of those factions is wrong. Mindwiping and even killing villains was not new. Superheroes judging other superheroes as immoral was.

What makes the knife twist deeper is that the mindwipes were not an event involving only some newer, morally suspect superheroes such as Guy Gardner or Booster Gold. The flashbacks in Identity Crisis involved Barry Allen and Hal Jordan, who were not even alive anymore when Identity Crisis hit store shelves. By placing them in the conspiracy, Meltzer made this story about the pre-Crisis Justice League, and tore down the black-and-white morality of DC's pre-Crisis superheroes.

In performing his rewrite of DC history, Meltzer included some thorough scholarship in the details. When, in pre-Crisis history, did the Doctor Light-Sue Dibny incident take place? A panel in IC refers to events from a 1979 story in JLA #166-168, and the deaths of Barry Allen's wife Iris Allen and Zatanna's mother, Sindella, also took place in 1979. According to Meltzer's revisionist timeline, these all took place before the mindwipe and the secret pact to cover it up. Meanwhile, a story in New Teen Titans #3-7 that shows a "dimwitted" Doctor Light is cover-dated January-May 1981. That story itself explains that Doctor Light had been psychically manipulated by Psimon, but IC attributes his state to manipulation by Zatanna. According to the cover dates of the original issues, the rape of Sue Dibny and its shocking aftermath must correspond to an unprinted story that would have taken place sometime between late 1979 and late 1980.

Meltzer’s handling of the DCU did more, though, than simply lower the bar of morality for its villians and heroes. A gritty, noir feel pervades his use of supervillains as criminals who just happen to have superpowers rather than as superbeings who just happen to be bad. Meltzer’s villains are involved in all sorts of criminal activity, and are first and foremost out to make a buck, often without the traditional flamboyance of standing up in costume to make a public show of some grand robbery. In contrast, Meltzer’s heroes are more of a family, if an often dysfunctional one, than the traditional DC lineup, with first names being used at almost every opportunity. These people, heroes and villains alike, feel more real than the characters of earlier years.

The destruction of traditionally "good" characters is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the handling of Jean Loring. This character had been through the ringer before: In pre-Crisis stories, she was driven insane, then cured of insanity, by the villains in two science fiction stories, and abducted by the villain in another. In Identity Crisis, she is conspicuously on-panel early and often, and was, before the conclusion, correctly identified by readers as the killer. Other possible culprits might have been motivated by a desire to strike heroes through their vulnerable loved ones (as Doctor Light articulates in the rape flashback); the story illustrates that this is not a sound motive for super criminals because it drives the heroes to harass all super criminals even harder than usual. Yet, Jean Loring's motive is less than rational: Seeking to win her ex-husband back, Jean plans to attack Sue Dibny with the use of the Atom's shrinking suit, give her a stroke "or something" and thereby draw Ray Palmer back to her side as her defender. Her microscopic invasion of Sue's brain accidentally killed her, but insofar as that goal is concerned, her plan works, until her culpability is discovered. She accidentally gives away her complicity to her ex-husband, Ray Palmer, at virtually the same time that Batman separately solves the case. Her efforts to conceal the crime include a staged attack on herself, a threat to Lois Lane, and a hit-for-hire that killed Jack Drake, the father of Robin, and his attacker, Captain Boomerang. In perhaps the story's weakest moment, she smilingly tries to get Ray to accept her despite the killing. Predictably, he doesn't go for it: The story ends with Jean in Arkham Asylum and Ray shrinking himself to go into some microscopic exile. Identity Crisis a fair mystery in the Agatha Christie sense, Jean Loring was already marked as a damaged individual all the way back in 1970, decades before Meltzer planned this story. Surely, earlier writers didn't foresee her future use as the villain at the center of a rape-and-murder story, but Meltzer didn't choose the story's killer arbitrarily.

JLA #81: Jean Loring's first bout of insanity

While many readers objected to the formulaic and seemingly unrealistic "good person goes insane" story arc, it is worth remembering the character's history of externally-triggered madness, and one might consider that, whether or not it made

Jean Loring's role in Identity Crisis may have had some slender precedent in the past, but superhero comics had never seen anything like the rape of Sue Dibny. The shocking reveals and realism (not the same thing) in Identity Crisis create an unmistakable air of revolution. The use of Silver Age characters, including a pointed statement that Hal Jordan might soon return from the dead, turned the Crisis on Infinite Earths revolution into a counter-revolution, and Identity Crisis became the first of several monumental works that rolled back the entire post-COIE continuity. Within four years, it would all be undone: Hal Jordan would return to life as soon as Identity Crisis ended, then Infinite Crisis would bring back the Multiverse, and Final Crisis would bring back Barry Allen. The entire era from Infinite Crisis to Flashpoint was presaged by Identity Crisis. The darkness implied by Identity Crisis joined the deaths of Superman and Jason Todd and Bane breaking Batman’s back to become a rationale for Infinite Crisis and seemed to justify a quest to repurify the DC Universe.