Guardians of the Galaxy Origins: Marvel Super-Heroes #18

 Oh Guardians of the Galaxy. How you have haunted my comics-reading life. I’d be lying if I claimed I was ever a fan, but like Captain Marvel, the Guardians are figures that have kept popping up on the fringe every now and then. I own Marvel Super Heroes #18, the first appearance of the Guardians, I own Marvel Presents #3 (their first major solo appearance after MSH) and I own the first issue of their 90’s series.

 The strange part though, is that I didn’t end up with any of those comics because I cared about the Guardians themselves. I bought Marvel Super Heroes #18 because of the Golden Age reprints in the back of the book, and the Marvel Presents #3 and Guardians #1 both came in a “mystery box” of comics I bought at a garage sale. I actually tried to sell the Marvel Super Heroes #18 several times because hey, first appearances always sell, right? Not if no one knows who the characters are! Now all these years later, a movie comes out featuring this team I own the key ‘first” issues of (which usually =$$$), and except for Yondu (who sources indicate will play an antagonistic role) not a single member of the original team will be used in the movie.

 Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?

 Still, despite my financial disappointments (over used comics I bought 20 years ago) and the film featuring characters I’m mostly unfamiliar with except for Groot and Rocket Raccoon, I have to say I’m still eager to see the movie.

 Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s no denying that the Marvel Studios films are here to stay, and while the same thing was once said about Raimi’s Spider-Man series or Nolan’s Batman series (before he announced that he was only going to do three films), the consistently strong box office and favorable reviews have made it clear that, even if they hit a snag, we aren’t going to be seeing the last of these movies for a long time.

 The Guardians film, more than any other, marks a turning point. Think of the incentive and confidence it will give Marvel to tap into other obscure properties if it is a success. We could see movies based on Moon Knight (maybe they could introduce him first as the villain in a Werewolf by Night film), Agents of Atlas, or hell, since it’s been confirmed he’ll make a cameo in Guardians, maybe even a good Howard the Duck movie. (You could argue that the success of Blade should have started this all the way back in the late 90’s, but honestly, did anyone who went to see that movie know it was based on a comic? Do any of the fans of those movies know that now?)

 On the other hand, if it fails, don’t expect to see anything other than the major Avengers-related characters onscreen for the next few years.

 So with all that said, let’s take a look back at the first appearance of the Guardians in 1969. Ah, 1969, when men were men, women were women, Black Sabbath was no longer Earth, hippies were mass-murderers and Gene Colan was John Buscema:

 The story starts off in the year 3007, where all Earth nations have joined together as the U.L.E (United Lands of Earth) and set up colonies on different planets where the inhabitants are modified at birth to survive. We are introduced to just one such of these humans; Charlie-27, who was raised on Jupiter and has a bulky, square-shaped physique to withstand its pressures. Returning from a trip, he arrives home only to find that his planet has been conquered by a race of reptilian creatures called the Badoon:

 The Badoon have forced most of the Jovian colonists into concentration camps (including Charlie's father), while the others are forced to mine uranium without protective suits:

 Charlie manages to escape by using a teleportation device to warp himself over to a random planet, where he is saved from the Badoon’s “Saturnian Hound-Hawks” by Martinex, a colonist altered to live on Pluto who has crystals for skin. Although the Plutonian and Jovian colonies have centuries of bad blood between them, they agree to work together:

 The story then shifts over to Earth, where we meet the Badoon commander Drang and his erstwhile prisoners (and the true protagonists of the piece); Major Vance Astro and his servant Yondu.

 Astro is forced to wear a purple copper suit (which sometimes appears to have a mouth and other times does not) to sustain his life, and the story of how he ended up wearing it is not only a supreme example of tragi-comedy, but one of the darkest origins in all of Silver Age comics. I’m not even going to summarize it, read for yourself:

 Damn.

 Despite being time-displaced by millennia, Drang nevertheless is willing to give Astro employment and power if he betrays the rest of the human race, who have set up a small resistance group. Astro appears to comply at first since all the people he knew are centuries dead, even selling out Yondu:

 However, it’s all just a ruse and Astro and Yondu escape. Astro is not as unfamiliar with current technology as the Badoon would think:

 They then meet Martinex and Charlie and, typically for Marvel, mistake them for bad guys and a fight ensues.

 Also typically for Marvel, they then realize the error of their ways and join forces quickly. Escaping the Badoon guards, they set out to find the rebel colony and sing a modified version of “We Shall Overcome”:

 And that’s that.

 As we all know, the Guardians of the Galaxy didn’t exactly grip the comics reading public, with their longest-lived series not coming about for two more decades and the incarnation of the team that caught Hollywood’s notice consisting of entirely different characters. As a stand-alone work of fiction, it’s a pretty typical pulp sci-fi tale, not much different from the kind of series that would have run in Planet Comics back in the 40s (In fact, Planet Comics’ old Lost World series seems to have been something of an influence, with the Badoon substituting for the Voltamen) and the usual Marvel formula of heroes fighting over a misunderstanding and then becoming fast friends is repeated here.

  Nevertheless, the debut story of the original Guardians is fascinating for several reasons. The idea that humans would have to drastically alter their bodies in order to successfully colonize and live in the atmosphere of other planets, although not an idea original to Drake, is a hard sci-fi concept that one rarely sees addressed in books and films, and even rarer in comics, particularly Silver Age comics. The tragic circumstances of why Vance Astro must wear his costume are also amazingly dark for the time. His whole origin story is essentially a Weird Science twist-ending (or a twisted parody of Buck Rogers, depending on your point of view), and the fact that he can never remove his suit makes Tony Stark’s problems seem trite in comparison. If he had betrayed the rebels to Drang, he would be a compellingly tragic villain.

 Another interesting aspect not often mentioned about the original Guardians is that they are probably comicdom’s first true team of “freak” heroes.

 

 It is true that the X-Men and the Doom Patrol pre-dated the Guardians (and considering that Arnold Drake wrote this, the Doom Patrol couldn’t have been too far from his mind), but the whole “X-Men are treated as freaks/X-Men are a metaphor for minorities” thing didn’t really come about in the original series much except for a few out-of-place scenes that could just as easily be found in Fantastic Four and Avengers. Even the whole Sentinels storyline was really just a prolonged variation on the standard “Public turns against the heroes until an even worse menace is created” plot. Instead of being discriminated against, you were more likely 99% of the time to find scenes of the public asking the X-Men for autographs, drooling over Marvel Girl, teenyboppers swooning over The Angel’s blond good looks or hippies trying to draw on The Beast’s big feet. The rare times that humans were shown hating mutants often felt tacked on, like the mob sequence in X-Men #8. I’m not saying that a subtext wasn’t there, but it was focused on in the 60’s about as much as Bruce Wayne’s angst over his losing his parents was in pre-Bronze Age Batman comics. I could write a whole essay about this, and probably will.

 The Doom Patrol definitely had tragic origins that made them outcasts, and certainly would be frightening to look at in real life, but most of their stories were showcases for Drake’s absurdist sense of humor and surreal imagination. Quite a contrast to Byrne and Morrison’s grim takes on the characters.

 Either way, my point is that the X-Men and Doom Patrol were all either fairly normal-looking, or the few who were abnormal-looking were non-threatening. The Beast and Iceman, the most inhuman appearing of the X-Men, were generally played for comic relief and were handsome in civilian guise. The other members of the team were all traditionally good-looking. Robotman was also made a cuddly presence in Doom Patrol. Even Negative Man was drawn to look cute underneath the bandages, showing a whole array of facial expressions. Elasti-Girl was a glamorous movie star in her civilian identity. You wouldn’t mind being around them, or being them despite their painful origins.

 The original Guardians though, truly are grotesque and freakish. Charlie-27 looks like a human compressed into a square shape, Martinex’s vaguely defined features and segmented, crystalline structure make him look like a grotesque cross between Iceman and Batman villain The Outsider and far eerier than either of them, Vance Astro is a man trapped in an inexpressive suit that makes him look more like a robot (or Superman villain the Parasite), than a hero. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be him. In fact, it is Yondu, oddly enough, who is the most normal-looking, despite being characterized as the most primitive and uneducated. All of them are the last of their kind in a sense (even the human Astro is the last living man from the twentieth century), with all the other members of their “races” dead or imprisoned. All of them would be misfits wherever they were to go.

 Perhaps it was this very aspect that was the reason the original Guardians were never a major hit, just like DC’s even more freakish-looking (and even less successful) Outsiders from First Issue Special #10.

 Another fascinating aspect of the Guardian’s debut is Drake’s vision of the future. All of Earth’s nations have united and we are specifically told by the narration that there haven’t been any wars. Normally this would imply some kind of peaceful, idealistic Utopia, but Drake never forgets or tries to overlook human nature. There are mentions of “New Paris”, “New Moscow”, “New New York etc. Clearly, there was a lot of blood spilt to create this ‘U.L.E’.

 Nor are racial or class conflicts depicted as a thing of the past, despite “We Shall Overcome” having changed to “Earth shall overcome” over the years. This is demonstrated briefly by mentioning the conflict between the “Jovians” and the “Pluvians”; they have even created their own slurs for each other. You can bet that if humanity ever does split into subspecies like this that it will just leads to new forms of racism, despite all the talk about “transhumanism” these days and claims that it will end racial conflict. Casual racism too can be observed in the hurtful things Astro says about Yondu, even if they were a bluff (Although then again, Yondu is written as a Tonto-like “Noble Savage”). We also see “robot servants”, but since normal labor jobs are shown to still exist and not made obsolete, apparently they are something only the very wealthy can afford.

 

  I wish more writers of futuristic space epics spent as much time on world-building as Drake does here, rather than simply making everything black and white, with the future being either a Utopian paradise or a Dystopian hellhole which has to be rebelled against, and Drake manages to achieve this in a story about rebels fighting a dystopian hellhole.

 All in all, while the original Guardians story isn’t great, and has even less potential as a film series than, well, a film starring a tree and a raccoon, it still offers up a truly fascinating vision of the future that’s neither too hopeful or too cynical, as well as a team of “freak” heroes that really are freakish for once. For fans of bizarre and unusual Silver Age comics, it’s one of Marvel’s most fascinating failed experiments.

 

 And let’s hope “failed experiment” isn’t a term that will be applied to the movie after it opens tonight.

 

UPDATE: Saw it opening night, and just went to see it a second time tonight. Loved it both times, and there’s really nothing for me to say that hasn’t already been said. In fact, I’m tempted to call it my favorite of all the Marvel Studios productions along with Winter Soldier, but it’s a bit too early to make that call.

 The doors are open. The Marvel Cinematic “Universe” has truly begun. Let Fox keep Fantastic Four and it’s supposed “grounded/found footage” approach, comic book movies that aren’t afraid to be comic book movies are going to be the norm from now on! Bring on Adam Warlock, Mar-Vell and Thanos!

 

 

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Captain Marvel Masterworks Vol.1 review

There are some characters that just seem to haunt the fringes of your interest in comics until you finally decide to explore them in depth. While I’m not too keen on DC/Fawcett’s big red cheese, and I don’t find MF Enterprise’s “SPLIT!” version to be the campy masterpiece some praise it as, I’ve always seen Marvel’s ‘Space-Born Super-Hero” as the Captain Marvel, even though, as everyone points out, Marvel created him to secure copyright to the name. Granted, my fondness could stem from my first continuous exposure to the character being Jim Starlin’s acclaimed run and the good captain playing big roles in ‘important’ stories like the RoyThomasBrainFart Kree-Skrull War, or maybe it’s because, courtesy of a flea market, I ended up owning his first two appearances in Marvel Superheroes #12-13, as well as issue #4 of his own title where he fights Namor. Now, I fully admit I picked those books up because of the Golden Age reprints and because I go crazy for Gene Colan art and even crazier for Namor, but I always liked them because of the series’ gimmick, even though there were things in those stories that even as a teen I couldn’t suspend my disbelief about.

  Captain Marvel was about Mar-Vell; a member of an alien race called the Kree who came to Earth, took on a secret identity as a scientist and wound up becoming a superhero. On paper, it’s not too different a concept from lots of other alien heroes, going all the way back to Superman himself, and Cap’s costume wasn’t too markedly different from that of other spacemen like Adam Strange except for being in secondary colors.

 

  No, what made Mar-Vell unique was why he acted as a superhero. It wasn’t that he was raised by humans, or was an intergalactic policeman who decided to study our methods, or who fought crime since he was stuck here and believed evil should be eradicated no matter where it was, or because he was struck by the beauty of human life. Nothing like that. Mar-Vell was a soldier on a reconnaissance mission whose entire goal was to spy on us, and if need be, blow us all to kingdom come if we ever came anywhere close to developing weapons that could challenge the Kree empire.

 He only came off as a hero because his asshole superior officer, Colonel Yon Rogg, wanted to bang his girlfriend Una, so Yon-Rogg kept trying to force Mar-Vell into situations where he would be killed or forced to abort his mission (an offense punishable by death in Kree law), such as activating big homicidal robots to kill people who Mar-Vell was merely supposed to study, or tricking enemy alien races into attacking him. Mar-Vell would then fight these various menaces (mainly out of self-preservation and because he believed in sticking to the original plans to simply spy on Earth’s people, not kill them) and, to the unknowing populace of Earth, Mar-Vell would appear to be a benevolent superhero defending them.

 This could have been turned into a comedy series where the evil alien always ends up doing good by accident, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style horror; where the people of Earth have no idea that their champion is an alien spy. But the thing was, Mar-Vell was torn up inside because of this. He knew that, other than to Una, he was just another grunt to the Kree, while to the people of Earth who he was supposed to view as the enemy, he was appreciated and acclaimed as a hero, and noble soldier that he was, he couldn’t live with betraying trust, since he was a firm believer in showing honor even to his worst enemies. Even worse, he knew that eventually, he was either going to have to destroy us, or Yon-Rogg would find some way to make him look bad in the eyes of the Kree higher-ups and he’d have nowhere to go (if the Kree council didn’t kill him first).

 The final panel of #4, where Mar-Vell speeds off after battling Namor, the true hero of the story, and considers the tragic irony of his situation, always stuck with me for some reason.

 Many years later, I got a hold of the first Marvel Masterworks volume of CM, read up to the fourth issue (which I was already familiar with), and then, due to a bunch of factors, didn’t get a chance to finish reading and sort of forgot about it.

 

 That, however, has been rectified.

 

 And you know what? For a character created just to secure copyright, these stories are pretty damn good!

 

 Oh sure, there are plenty of ludicrous coincidences that even as a kid I found hard to swallow, namely, Mar-Vell conveniently happening across a dead rocket scientist named Walter Lawson who looks exactly like him and who he then impersonates to get access to Cape Canaveral.

 At the same time though, there are also some nicely realistic touches like a hotel clerk who becomes suspicious of Cap being a spy after noticing that ‘Lawson’ has no idea how to properly register, often uses false names and doesn’t handle money well (an interesting subplot that sadly gets hand waved a bit too easily), or people at the cape falling for the ruse, but admitting they detect something subtly “off” about ‘Lawson’, from the way he doesn’t understand various social norms or seems too forced in his slang, while others just write off his weirdness as harmless eccentricity, like a cab driver named Chester whom he befriends. There are also some nice moments of humor, such as Mar-Vell coming to appreciate mankind’s greatest achievement: The Coffee Break.

 

 The characterization of the supporting players is also quite good, and the situations created for them are handled uniquely. Carol Danvers, later to become a super heroine called Ms. Marvel (among several identities) is introduced here, and she’s as different from your typical female supporting character of the time as it’s possible to get. She’s a full-time working woman employed as the cape’s head of security, and although she needs to be rescued now and then, so does pretty much everyone else. Mar-Vell is the only one who knows how to stop the various alien threats that pop up, so having any human character defeat them on their own would come off as a stretch. And best of all, there is no romantic subplot….at first, but again, how it’s handled is quite unique. She doesn’t come to fall for ‘Lawson’, as she suspects him immediately and thinks he’s a spy (which he is, just not for the Russians), and there’s no attempt to portray her as secretly having feelings for him. In fact, next to Yon-Rogg, she becomes the biggest thorn in his side, with each time she appears building up tension. Using a female character in such an antagonistic light without making her a villain or a Lois Lane-type isn’t something you saw much in this era.

 However, Carol does end up falling for Captain Marvel. Again, this is handled in a far from typical manner. She’s just as suspicious of him initially as she is of ‘Lawson’, but because he saves her life several times, demonstrates his noble qualities and displays the grudging respect he has for her that he couldn’t show as Lawson, she gradually ends up falling for him over the course of many issues, without it ever coming off as forced.

 

 But here’s the thing; Mar-Vell does not at any time reciprocate her feelings or show any sign of falling for her (As Walter Lawson, he does occasionally make flirtatious remarks, but he’s clearly trying to keep her away from him by making her think he’s a sexist pig). He remains loyal to Una, and his attempts to protect Carol in particular are simply a combination of respect and because he’s afraid she might stumble onto something if he’s not around. However, Una sees them together and starts to worry that she might seduce him. Una could easily have been portrayed as jealous or unreasonable, possibly even ending up trying to kill Carol or betray Mar-Vell (remember all those times Lady Dorma would betray Namor or try to kill Sue Storm?), but instead, she’s portrayed with nothing other than sympathy. Her fears of losing Mar-Vell seem completely reasonable based on what she has to go on, and when she sees Cap kissing Carol (she forced herself on him and he immediately tries to pull away), it’s a legitimately heartbreaking moment.

 Una is also far from the typical weepy love interest (aside from a few lines about her feeling a ‘woman’s weakness”). She’s portrayed as a brilliant scientist and Mar-Vell’s go-to-gal for technology, and uses her expertise to get him out of several jams. She also gets one awesome moment where she knocks Yon-Rogg and his entire crew out with gas to buy Mar-Vell more time. It’s also made clear that she’s fully aware of Yon-Rogg’s lecherous designs on her, and even at her most paranoid about losing Mar-Vell, she’s smart enough to never trust Yon-Rogg or confide in him. In other Marvel series, she would probably end up falling for him in a fit of grief, or at least pretending to in order to make Cap jealous. Not here. There’s a lame subplot about how she and Mar-Vell are the only members of the Kree race that can feel emotion, but thankfully that isn’t dwelled upon much.

Yon-Rogg himself is easily the most despicable villain in late 60’s Marvel. He has no depth other than being a jealous, glory-hungry bastard, but you end up truly hating him on a level you don’t for say, Doctor Doom, because his evil is a real world, every day evil, and all of the drama in the stories come about from the emotional tension he creates, not because of his powers or latest super weapon. The way he mockingly tries to convince Una that Mar-Vell is cheating on her, or orders Cap to wipe out a city with a virus to prove his loyalty, or tries to get Cap in trouble with the Kree council really, really makes you despise him. A common reaction I’ve seen from people reading Silver Age Marvel is that the fights with supervillains often seem like distractions from the real drama that takes place out of costume, and that you often want to see supporting characters or ‘employers” like J. Jonah Jameson, Senator Byrd or General Ross pummeled more than the actual villains. Since Yon-Rogg is both villain and supporting character/employer, he comes off as far more compelling.

 Roy Thomas writes the first four issues and the second appearance, and he does a fine job. His purple prose is perfect for the space opera/soap opera going on, and he gets in several great lines which really capture Mar-Vell’s loneliness and inner conflict. He does however, have a tendency to reuse familiar characters as antagonists too much (something he admits to in the introduction). First we have the Sentry, The Super Skrull and Namor (all Fantastic Four-related characters). Things pick up when legendary DC oddball, Arnold Drake, takes the reins. He comes up with some interesting foes like a Soviet monster called the Metazoid, a living solar flare called Solam, alien pirates and a robot created by the real Walter Lawson (who it appears was far from saintly, or sane). Drake does reuse familiar Marvel villain Quasimodo the living computer, but gives him the bizarre gimmick of seeing himself as the ‘liberator’ of machines. Seeing him talk about the oppression of his “brethren” (drills, heaters and power tools) is just the kind of looniness you’d expect from Drake’s Metal Men and Doom Patrol, and makes him a lot more interesting than the rather vaguely defined villain from the Fantastic Four annuals.

  The Metazoid story is the one that most impresses. The Metazoid is portrayed as a tragic figure, an ordinary man arrested by the KGB and put on trial for speaking out against the USSR, then mutated into a monster and sent to abduct Lawson to prove his loyalty; if he fails, he will never be made human again. The Metazoid’s plight provides a fascinating counterpoint to Mar-Vell’s conflict with Yon-Rogg and his turmoil over whether to prove his loyalty to the Kree or to do the right thing. The fact that neither Cap or the Metazoid ever realizes the similar situation they are both in is a nicely mature little touch. It doesn’t end happily, and succeeds in creating a genuine feeling of ambivalence in the reader. It’s so good, you can easily forgive the Metazoid’s vaguely defined powers and appearance (is he made of rock, fur or tar?).

 The artwork is excellent throughout. Who knew Gene Colan “comic's prince of darkness” (as Wizbang called him) could be so good at space opera? Much maligned inkers Paul Reinman and Vince Colletta also do a fine job. This Masterworks edition features photocopies of Colan’s pencils before they were inked, and although they do look more impressive prior to inking, that was pretty much the case with every Colan inker. Reinman’s scratchy style gives things a rough-hewn, gritty mood, and although I’ve heard that Colan hated Colletta so much he sometimes went back and re-inked his own work, all I can say is that either he found time to do it for every issue here, or Colletta’s reputation for erasing is exaggerated. This stuff is fantastic.

 Don Heck takes over with the fifth issue (also the same issue where Drake arrives) and seems much more comfortable on this strip than with The Avengers, which is where most of Heck’s poor reception comes from. Heck was a fine artist, just admittedly not a superhero artist, more suited to science fiction and romance (You could always tell he enjoyed drawing Tony Stark more than Iron Man), so he’s at home here. Like I said before, some of his character designs are kind of odd, but then again, what is a ‘Metazoid” supposed to look like anyway? This is some of his best work.

 I really, really enjoyed this volume. Some people really hate this series, calling it a cynical copyright grab, or “a foray into sustained tedium”, often by pointing out the radical changes the premise would undergo (Mar-Vell eventually ended up becoming a space wanderer, an approximation of the old Billy Batson/Shazam concept, then a cosmic philosopher) as proof that he was a “nothing” character without a unifying concept. It may indeed be true that those abrupt changes destroyed the series (I haven’t read many of them and can’t comment), but I have to say, there’s nothing wrong with the original premise presented in these stories at all. It’s one of the most compelling (and grim) ideas for a ‘space hero’ series I’ve seen, and as long as it lasts, I think I’ll enjoy reading more of these collections before getting to the Starlin stuff. There’s nothing to be ashamed of here at all. 4/5.

 

R.I.P. Dick Ayers

 Sad to report the passing of another legend, but Dick Ayers is no longer with us. The famed inker passed away earlier today at the age of 90. His thick, gritty inks on Kirby’s pencils helped to define the look of Marvel in the early Silver Age, so much so that when he took over the Sgt. Fury and Human Torch strips, you’d almost think Kirby had never left at first since Ayers’ inks had been such an integral part, but of course his own style shown through.

 Ayers was also more than just an inker, he was quite an accomplished artist in his own right. Besides making a name for himself on hundreds of war and western comic, he co-created the original Ghost Rider over at Magazine Enterprises in the 1940s and was so identified with the character that when Marvel launched their carbon copy version in 1967 (later renamed Night Rider and Phantom Rider to avoid confusion with Johnny Blaze) they got Ayers to draw it! Say what you will over how Marvel treated its artists, but that’s a nice gesture.

 Here’s “Hate Town” from Ghost Rider #9 (1952), a story drawn completely by Ayers on his own, where the ‘Scooby Doo” conclusion doesn’t detract at all from the atmosphere Ayers creates.

 

Green Lantern: Secret Origin review

 So here’s Secret Origin. I’ve been wanting to cover this one for a while, as far back as 2011 in fact, but the words just didn’t seem to come to me until now. It’s a story which got a lot of acclaim from some and was clearly the main influence on the film in regards to story structure, Hals’ initial arrival on Oa and his training, the bar fight, tying in Hector Hammond’s origin to Abin Sur and a few other things. Some printings have introductions by Ryan Reynolds, and a few even have photos of him on the cover. But while some loved it, others really hate it and see it simply as Geoff Johns’ attempt to make the GL property his own and to make certain big events look like part of some grand design.

 I have mixed feelings about Geoff Johns. On one hand, I like the way he manages to throw so many completely superfluous elements into his stories (Does a retelling of Hal Jordan’s origin really need Atrocitus, Black Hand, Hector Hammond, The Empire of Tears and Sinestro in it?) without them ever seeming intrusive or overly fanboy-ish (like some of Roy Thomas’s lesser work); just a writer showing off his love for the vast universe he’s playing with. He also writes dialogue you can imagine real people speaking rather than always trying to get in clever one-liners (and he’s no slouch in that department).

 On the other hand, he might just be the worst violator of the “show don’t tell” rule in comics. Granted, most stories he writes attempt to have an epic quality with lots of subplots and foreshadowing going on, so that is to be expected now and then. That said, the disconnect from what we’re being told by Hal’s narration and what we’ve seen for ourselves can be pretty jarring at times.

 For example, a key plot point in this version is that Hal needs to overcome his anger and resentfulness. However, except for a few scenes scattered about here and there such as a bar fight (which comes about from him attempting to save a woman from being raped), Hal comes off more like he has a longing to be free than anything else. I’m not saying that recklessness and anger are mutually exclusive, but it gets sort of funny when Sinestro, of all people, brings up Hal being rude and resentful, when at that point, all of the rudeness Hal has shown toward him has stemmed from Sinestro nearly killing him in mid-flight!

 What’s even funnier is how all of this gets chalked up to Hal losing his father in a test flight accident, even though we see Hal acting just as reckless and impulsive when his father was alive by skipping school and sneaking onto landing strips. (And I don’t even want to get into how glossed over the death (and life) of Hal’s father is, one minute we have a big tragic scene of papa’s plane going up in flames, next thing you know, it’s Hal’s teenage hi-jinks). Even though fandom tends to dislike the whole drunk driving bit from the Emerald Dawn books, the whole theme of an irresponsible Hal growing up was handled much better there.

 

No, I didn't cut out some crucial context. These pages really did appear in sequence like this. Dead dad one page, next page wacky hi-jinks!

 

  Another pretty funny bit involves Hal describing Sinestro as the first person to truly connect with and understand him, when at that point in the story, Sinestro has done nothing but berate, misinterpret and look down upon him, more so than anyone else! Not until the very end of the story does Sinestro seem to warm to him any, and we all know how long that’s going to last. Frankly, I much prefer the way Sinestro was portrayed in Emerald Dawn II, where he was no more likeable, but where his downfall carried a lot more weight to it and actually came off as sort of tragic. Here, even though he still remains a good guy by story’s end, you can’t wait to see him become evil just so he can be smacked around.

 There’s also a subplot about Hal going to confront Carl Ferris, his father’s former friend and who Hal apparently blames for his dad’s death, and the build-up to that scene implies that Hal hates him a lot, possibly enough to kill him, even with his daughter Carol in the house. It’s supposed to be an intense, character-driven scene with us worried about what Hal might do. However, except for one bit earlier where he snaps at Carol, this is first mention of Hal having anything against Ferris; completely ruining what Johns obviously intended to be a powerful and emotionally resonant climax.

 

  To be fair though, there’s a narrative twist at the end which does sort of justify some of the more disjointed aspects of the story, but since it’s one of the parts of the book I absolutely loved, I really don’t want to spoil it.
 

 One criticism I often see of John’s GL work is that he makes Hal too perfect and makes anyone who dislikes him look like a bad guy to prop him up. That’s not really the case here, thankfully. Most of the people who get pissed off at Hal in this story (like his older brother Jack) are shown to have legitimate reasons to be and aren’t really depicted in a negative or unfair light. Pretty much the only time Hal is shown in an overly ‘saintly’ mode is when he defends buddy Tom Kalmaku from being called the racist nickname “Pieface”, which of course, was what Hal (and everyone) used to call him all the time back in the Silver and Bronze Age. Doing away with offensive or dated elements is fine, but why be so smug about it?

 

  Writing aside, the real star of SO is Ivan Reis’s art. It does a good job combining realism with a 1980’s sci-fi paperbacks aesthetic. Some of the moodier scenes, like the subplots involving Atrocitus and Black Hand, or Hal first finding Abin Sur, have an almost Gene Colan vibe to them, and the depiction of Hal’s arrival on Oa just might be my all-time favorite. He’s just as good with earthbound scenes too, like Hal first applying for the Air Force, which looking at it, you’d never think came from a superhero comic, but one of those ‘biographical’ comics written to win awards.

 

The only real problem I have with Reis’s art is how he seems to fall back on clichés for how some characters should look as if we wouldn’t recognize them or their function in the story otherwise. He gives Carol freckles as a child that she has no trace of as an adult, just so we know, hey, she’s a little girl. He gives Sinestro perhaps the most stereotypically old fashioned villain mustache imaginable, even though at this point he’s not supposed to be evil. Sinestro’s mustache and how it makes him look like a Snidely Whiplash/Simon Legree character is probably the most joked about aspect of the villain, but even in the Silver Age it was more subdued.

Which one looks more "Nyaaa! Foiled again!" to you?

 

 

 Also (and boy is this scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to complain about) why does Hammond drool in this? It’s become common since the 90s to depict the villain drooling, and I always assumed it was a side-effect of him being paralyzed and no longer being in control of his nerves and muscles. Some writers have had him paralyzed because of the meteor’s radiation, others because his huge head snapped his spine. Either way, it made sense as something that would happen to him as a long term side effect. Here, he starts slobbering almost the instant he gains his powers, still with a normal-sized head and full mobility.

To be fair, most people I know who claim to be mind-readers seem like the types to drool on themselves.

 

 Speaking of oozing bodily fluids (I just love beginning a sentence with words like that), man do some parts of the book get gory. When the movie came out with a full-on marketing blitz, I remember seeing a Scholastic edition of this at a Borders, and although I didn’t look through it, it looked roughly as thick as the regular editions. Did they censor any of this out of that edition? Even without the gore, the bits with Black Hand trying to make sexy time with corpses and Hammond being told his mustache makes him look like a pedo must have made for awkward reading time for parents who got this for their kids.

Each panel could pass for an Image cover

 

 Green Lantern: Secret Origin isn’t quite the definitive take it wants to be, it often feels rushed and probably won’t make many new Green Lantern fans, but as a superhero adventure with lots of action, monsters and sci-fi, it’s a great way to kill 50 minutes. 3/5.