This is a Whole Can of Worms

I am probably committing blogger suicide here, but I have a theory. And that theory, is that perhaps, in the long run, Emerald Twilight...wasn't so bad.

What is that sound that you hear? Herds of GL fanboys screaming in the night? I guess my perspective may be different, but when they did the whole thing with Hal going nuts, the destruction of Coast City, and Hal as Parallax, I wasn't even reading Green Lantern. I knew vaguely what was going on, but didn't pay much attention. It wasn't until quite a bit later, that I started picking up Green Lantern again, and then, since I didn't have the slightest clue as to what was going on...who WAS this Kyle person anyway?...I began to go and pick up back issues so that I could fill in the holes.

And you know what? Although I do agree that the initial plotline was a bit rushed, and there were probably a lot of things that could have been done a little better, I still think that Emerald Twilight does hold up as an important story. Maybe THE important story, because when you think about it, a lot of what has happened to Hal in the meantime, certainly goes back to that whole story arc.

I love Hal, I really do. But...(and I ALWAYS have to insert that but)...there is no doubt that in the Silver Age at least, Hal was a monumental fuck-up. He was arrogant, selfish, domineering and quite requently, stupid on a galactic level. For all of that, he was still handsome, charming, brave and stubborn. Generous and understanding however, he was not. He treated Guy pretty shabbily for one thing, picking him to be his replacement without ANY training, and then running off with Guy's fiancee after the poor fellow was supposedly tortured and killed. Guy turned out to not be dead, but he was pretty much broken, so Hal put him on the shelf for a while, and decided to play with John Stewart instead.

He didn't treat John a whole lot better than Guy. Hal certainly had an elitist attitude around John for quite a while. John himself brings it up in "Mosaic" that Hal saw him as his creation,and how he got mad when that creation went and got uppity. Then Guy came back a changed and bitter man, and Hal didn't behave much better. I'm not even going to go into his whole treatment of Carol Ferris.

So Hal starts to get white temples, and begins to act even more arrogantly than before. He takes Guy's ring back for no good reason, he's hitting on Power Girl, pushing people around, and then of course Coast City is destroyed, and he completely loses it. I don't say that the Guardians handled things any better of course. In their own inimitable fashion, they screwed things up even worse than Hal did.

Geoff Johns' retcon of Parallax into the mind-possessing space bug, is genius to my mind. I can now go back and reread those issues, and NOT want to kick Hal in the gonads. Then we had Final Night, and Hal's redemption, and then we had Hal as the Spectre, and then finally, finally we had Hal in Rebirth. Then we had Recharge, and the reestablishment of the Green Lantern Corps, the Guardians back, and so on and so forth.

Hal was redeemed in his own book, but still all of the stuff that he did in Emerald Twilight is still there, and he has to deal with it every day. He's not quite so guilt-ridden as he was, but it is such a more interesting take on his character. The concept of the Lost Lanterns is a wonderful one, the distrust of the Guardians, and the way that Hal has actually had to fight to earn his right to be among the other heroes and the Corps is much more interesting to me, than simply seeing Hal the way that he used to be.

Like Guy, like John, like Kyle, Hal has actually had to grow and change as a character. He's still on the arrogant side, and I think that he always will be, it is such an intrinsic part of his nature, he's still brave, he's still handsome and he's still charming. He's NOT quite as stupid as he used to be however, and he even has shown a tendancy to stop and think once in a while, and possibly even learn from his mistakes, which is a HUGE step for Hal Jordan.

I think that we can all agree that this is a wonderful time to be a Green Lantern fan, with two books, and a lot of attention on Hal, John, Guy and Kyle. Or, as Geoff Johns calls them, the Four Musketeers. And we wouldn't have been able to have Rebirth, Recharge OR the Sinestro Corps War without Emerald Twilight.

Oh, and can still make fun of him. He makes it so easy sometimes.