Greatest Stories Never Told: “Green Lantern, The Lost (or Discarded) Fill-Ins!" Three Stories From Three Decades That Never Got Told
(Originally published in Back Issue #86, February 2016).
There are stories that have never been told...and then there are stories that have been told but just never been published.
Over the course of my years in the comic book business, I’ve had a (relative) handful of stories that fall into the latter category. Including five different issues of three separate magazines starring Green Lantern.
Needless to say, as a 1960s comic book fan growing up in the shining light that was the Julius Schwartz edited world of DC superheroes, I was an early and devoted fan of Hal Jordan. Green Lantern, along with the rest of Schwartz’s heroic stable, was about the best DC had to offer in those days. Unlike most of the rest of the DC line at the time, his stories always felt rooted in at least a sort of real world scientific logic that played off long-established and comfortable science fiction tropes. Julie kept a shelf full of science text books in his cabinet that he used for reference and inspiration. The filler pages in his books weren’t “Cap’s Hobby Hints” or “Casey the Cop” but “Flash Facts” and “Spotlight on Science.”
Strange Schwartz Tales
My association with Green Lantern—or should I say with the Green Lanterns—began not under the auspices of the great Schwartz, but for later editor, Dave Manak in Green Lantern #148 (January 1982) with an untitled “Tales of the Green Lantern Corps” story that introduced my one and only enduring contribution to the pre-Crisis GL mythos, the Green Lantern from H’lven, Ch’p, the bushy-tailed chipmunk member of the Corps. Thirteen more GL Corps stories followed, along with a GL Corps Annual and a (published!) fill-in, GL #187 (April 1985), before the Post-Crisis Englehart/Staton run began.
But circa-1985, I was finally to write an issue of Green Lantern about Hal Jordan and for Julie Schwartz.
In anticipation of the major changes coming to the DC Universe in the aftermath of Crisis On Infinite Earths (April 1985 - March 1986), Julie was wrapping up his run as editor of the Superman titles with the two-part “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” crossover in Superman #423 and Action Comics #583, and DC Comics Presents #97, all cover dated September 1986); the Superboy and Supergirl titles (written by yours truly) had already come to end with #54 (June 1984) and #23 (September 1984) respectively, and he was also about through with the line of 14 graphic novels he had produced in the DC Graphic Novel and DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel series (published between 1983 and 1987, including my own 1986 adaptation of Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away, with artist Jan Duursema).
“As I recall it, after the SF Graphic Novels were discontinued, they wanted to let Julie stay busy, justifying the office space and consulting salary,” said Robert Greenberger, then on staff as DC’s Editorial Coordinator. “So, Dick Giordano assigned him the task of creating a bunch of fill-ins for various DC titles, hoping whatever interest he still had could be instilled in newcomers and those in need of work.”
While continuity played a fairly big role in the DCU of the mid-1980s (there wouldn’t have been the need for Crisis if it hadn’t), so did the problem of late shipping books. Whether the causes, late books were epidemic at the time. Finally, the powers that be put their foot down and ordered the fill-ins to be created and kept in the drawer, threatening Swords of Damocles hanging over the heads of editors and creators who were unable to get their acts together.
Now, in late 2013, almost thirty years since their creation, it’s difficult to determine how many fill-in stories Schwartz actually ended up commissioning. “I don’t recall if any of them actually made it into print beyond one or two,” Greenberger said, although one that did see print was Bob Rozakis’ eighteen-page Blue Devil fill-in that was incorporated into the thirty-eight page final issue of the title, #31 (December 1986).
And, of course, my own scripted, penciled, lettered, and inked Green Lantern tale, “The Eyes of the Beholders!” with art by Rick Stasi and D. Bruce Patterson. DC’s comics at the time ran to 23 pages of story and art, but like the Blue Devil tale, it was written as a shorter story to allow for the addition of a four or five-page framing sequence that could be created relatively quickly and serve, however loosely, to tie the non-continuity fill-in story in with whatever was happening at the time of its use.
“The Eyes of the Beholders!” is a Rashomon take on Hal Jordan’s origin and earliest experiences as Green Lantern. It opens with Superman carrying the Batplane, damaged by skyjackers’ artillery, and Batman on a detour across the desert to investigate the crash of an unidentified aircraft he had spotted on the way home. The World’s Finest team arrives just in time to see a glowing green flare shoot from the ship “It’s...like a beacon,” Superman tells Batman, “or tracking signal...criss-crossing the planet at the speed of light.” The Man of Steel tracks the beacon with his super-vision while the Caped Crusader muses over its purpose and sees it pick up “that flightless trainer...along with the man operating it! Batman! We know that man!”
They do indeed. It’s test pilot Hal Jordan, who they had met, according to the footnote, when he had helped the Justice League of America on a case (in JLA #144, in a flashback story entitled “The Origin of the Justice League—Minus One!” from July 1977). With Superman eavesdropping via his super-senses and narrating the story for Batman, they watch as the spaceship’s dying pilot, Abin Sur passes the Power Battery and ring of the Green Lantern on to his human successor, a sequence I lifted directly from the Showcase #22 (October 1959) origin tale, “S.O.S. Green Lantern,” by John Broome, Gil Kane, and Joe Giella. “Well, well! Looks like we’re about to witness history, old chum!” says the Man of Steel, who’s been around the universe enough to know of the Lanterns.
The story cuts to Washington, D.C. and a high-speed police chase in progress which is being joined from the air by Wonder Woman and her invisible robot-plane. Wonder Woman disables the escaping vehicle, driven, we learn from the grateful cops, by crooks who had just hijacked a shipment of experimental military weapons. One of which is activated, unleashing a storm of flying black spheres that project absolute blackness to cover their attack. She’s overwhelmed by the spheres, which break off their attack before they can do her any damage. One of the cops on the scene—a cameo appearance by editor Schwartz, courtesy of fellow Schwartz fan, artist Rick Stasi—explains that they and she were saved by a costumed flying masked man with a power ring which created a giant green hand to swat aside the spheres and dissipate the darkness, followed by a giant boxing kangaroo to take out the bad guys. He called himself Green Lantern.
Wonder Woman is impressed by what she’s heard and is happy there’s a new super-powered protector around...not a bad thing, considering that “three hours later, outside Central City,” the Flash is tracking an alien battleship that’s streaking by overhead, shielded from detection but visible to him “because it’s surrounded by a vibratory screen at a frequency my speeded up vision can detect.” The big surprise comes when the great warship passes unharmed through a hillside. When the Scarlet Speedster tries to follow, he goes ricocheting off the hillside.
Flash narrowly averts personal disaster but is no closer to figuring a way into that hillside to see what’s going on when something even more astonishing than an alien warship is added to the mix: a giant green glowing drill-bit angling down from the sky into the hilltop. Flash allows that “since whoever’s behind it appears to be doing a better job at getting to them than I am,” he’ll just hang back and see what “their” next move is. Except “they” turn out to be a “he” ...a green clad masked man with a magical ring that disables the warship and tows it back into space in a matter of seconds, leaving Flash to wonder if he’ll ever know the identity of that masked man. “A guy can’t help wondering...” he muses.
It was, in telling and tone, a pretty typical late Schwartz-era Silver Age-twinged superhero story, heavy on schtick, with a script dark with Julie’s No. 2 pencil edits. It was the mood in the comics themselves that had turned darker by the time I snagged my next Green Lantern assignment from editor Bob Schreck, a three-issue arc for Legends of the DC Universe, a forty-one issue series (February 1998-June 2001) that spotlighted a rotating cast of heroes in legendary and/or untold stories from the DCU.
From Brightest Days to Darkest Knights
My pitch to Schreck stemmed from a long unrelieved itch caused by the 1994 Green Lantern “Emerald Twilight” story arc that installed Ryle Rayner as the new GL after Hal Jordan turned rogue and became Parallax. The decision to flip Hal came at the last minute and new writer Ron Marz was given only three issues to effect the change without much, if any set-up.
“The initial ‘Emerald Twilight’ storyline was given to me in an editorial outline of just a couple pages,” Ron recalled in late-2013 email interview. “The outline contained the major beats of Green Lantern #48, #49 and #50, including Hal mourning Coast City, destroying the Corps and the Guardians, killing Sinestro, and emerging from the battery. Then at the end, it essentially said, ‘Go create a new Green Lantern.’
“The switch from Hal to a new GL had to happen by the end of issue #50 (March 1994), since DC understandably wanted to take advantage of the anniversary issue. So, we had three issues to tell the story, no ifs, ands or buts. The decision to implement the ‘Emerald Twilight’ storyline had been made late enough that we were starting behind the eight-ball in terms of the schedule. All three issues had to be written and drawn concurrently.”
It was the speed of the switch that left me unsatisfied. Ron, of course, was working according to editorial specs and isn’t to blame for the plot twist’s abrupt implementation, saying, “Ideally, I would've preferred about six issues to tell the story. Hal's descent into...well, if not madness, at least psychosis...is abrupt, especially after he was portrayed as relatively normal in issue #47...The irony, I think, is that if the same sort of story was done now, it would be a 36-part crossover spread across an entire line of books.”
In Green Lantern #48 (January 1994), Hal tried to resurrect his hometown of Coast City which was destroyed by Mongul during the “Reign of the Supermen” portion of the “Death of Superman” storyline. When he found he was unable to maintain his power ring produced doppelganger, he confronted a Guardian to demand more power to achieve his task. The Guardian refused. So, Hal took the power, recharging his ring with the Guardian’s image and, with a sinister sneer, vowing to return to Oa, “but you’re not going to like me when I get there.”
Unable to change what was writ in the hard stone of (then current) continuity, I conceived of a patch which incorporated events from earlier GL storylines, including “Emerald Dawn” that would give a little more weight to Hal’s fall from grace...and which took place in the space/instant between Green Lantern #48, page 18, panel 3 and page 19, panel 1.
Convoluted, overlapping reality time travel-style!
Part One of “Emerald Interlude: Fathers and Sons,” with art by Peter Doherty and Joe Rubinstein, begins in the locker room of Ferris Aircraft’s Coast City test facility, where an adolescently awkward Hal Jordan tries connecting with his hard ass test pilot dad, Martin as he suits up for a flight. Hal asks if Martin ever gets scared. “What kind of fool question’s that? ... Brave’s just a word, kid. Everybody’s afraid of something. Being a man’s all about not letting the fear run your life....’Brave!’ The problem with you, Hal, is you always got your head in the clouds...but I always keep my feet on the ground.” Way to parent, Martin, because as plot devices have it, the next time Hal sees his father it’s as the aircraft he’s testing slams into the ground and disintegrates.
In another time, grown-up Green Lantern is at the edge of the crater that was once Coast City, at the moment the energy to maintain his power ring generated recreation lapses, then jumps to a reprise of the moment in the locker room that Martin walks out on Hal, except this time, we see a shadowy hand reaching from out of nowhere for the boy. Then, back to the edge of the crater and Hal’s encounter with the Guardian who refused him the power to bring everything back, a retelling of the aforementioned GL #48, page 18, panel 3.
At which point, time freezes and Hunter, leader of the Linear Men steps into the moment and without much in he way of explanation, transports GL and himself to the past and the street Hal had grown up on in Coast City. Without waiting for Hunter’s explanation, Hal zips inside his old house in time to catch his old man chewing his younger self out for some minor infraction of the house rules. Unable to watch (rewatch?) this painful moment from his past, Hal looks away, failing to see the arrival in the moment of a hooded figure, a being who, like Hunter and himself, is invisible to those who live in the time they’re visiting. The figure reaches for young Hal, but mature Hal knocks him away and, after some mild taunting and a reminder that thanks to time travel not only isn’t this over just because he’s been stopped here, but he has all the time in the world and then some to accomplish his task, the mysterious figure vanishes.
Hunter and Hal also go, while the reader stops back at the Ferris Aircraft locker room where and when the story opened, but for a tweaked version of Hal’s past, as Martin never makes it out of the room because young Hal is touched by the shadowy hand from nowhere and dies. The next stop has Hunter and Hal emerging from the timestream at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, where the Linear Man shows the now flabbergasted Green Lantern irrefutable evidence that someone is messing with Hal’s past: there he sees a middle-aged Martin Jordan, retired from Ferris and flying as a commercial aviation pilot. “You keeled over dead just before his flight. He didn’t fly that day. He didn’t go down. He lived,” Hunter explains.
Hal allows Hunter to take him back to the locker room, just seconds before young Hal’s anomalous death. Knowing what’s coming, Green Lantern jumps in to save the day, knocking the mysterious time-killer away from young Hal and fighting him to a standstill. In the course of the melee, the killer smashes the time travel mechanism in Hunter’s gauntlet, triggering a failsafe device that causes the Linear Man to vanish. Just as the test aircraft starts to go out of control overhead, Hal realizes the identity of his hooded foe, snarling out the name, “Sinestro!” as his father dies (again!) in the seemingly inevitable fiery plane crash and the villain pulls back his hood to reveal his true face.
Part two, “Masters and Students,” begins with the flight simulator snatched up by the dying Abin Sur with Hal in it streaking over the desert before landing by the crashed alien ship, where this time, Sinestro murders the Green Lantern before Hal can arrive. Elsewhen, while Hal and Sinestro snarl at one another at the crash of Martin Jordan’s plane, Hunter has materialized at Vanishing Point, the Linear Men’s headquarters at the end of time. As he quickly repairs his damaged gauntlet, he confers with fellow time cop Liri Lee. Sinestro has somehow “gained mastery over time, and he’s been able to screw things up enough that everything from the moment they’re in forward is in flux.”
Sinestro has also gained mastery over Hal, taunting the now imprisoned GL with his crimes that lay “within minutes of your return to your rightful time,” referring to his impending massacre of the GL Corps. As corrupt as Sinestro ever was, Hal’s got him beat by a mile, yet it was Hal, we see via flashback, who had been admonished by his then teacher Sinestro that his foes will use his “honor (as) a weakness to be turned against you. Learn to think like your enemy.” Hal never could wrap his mind around the concept. Besides, what good did it do Sinestro, who wound up being imprisoned by the Corps in the main Power Battery.
Back at the moment of Abin Sur’s crash landing on Earth, as Hunter comes hurtling into the moment to stop Sinestro’s assassination of the wounded GL. Sinestro escapes, but not before the Linear Man gets a lock on his chronal energy signature. And, in the “now,” at what was once Coastal City, Sinestro explains to Hal how his will power survived intact and he learned to manipulate the power of the main Battery from within, becoming a “living conduit of those energies.” And then, he shows Hal what awaits him once he returns to his own time stream and resumes his life: his violent disobedience of the Guardians and subsequent murderous rampage against the Corps, his cold blooded murder of Sinestro, released from the Battery by the Guardians to stop Hal...and his ultimate destruction of the universe so that he could “begin it anew, reshape it to (his) own vision” as Parallax.
Sinestro reveals he had used the power ring energy to bring Martin Jordan’s plane down, hoping to drop it on Hal and kill him! Martin fought too hard, however, and steered the plane away from the bystanders on the ground. Enraged, Hal’s ring absorbs the image’s energy, and he uses it to take down Sinestro. But not really. Sinestro was just funning with him and strikes back, with a power ring created dagger to Hal’s gut.
Part three, “Endings and Beginnings,” begins with Hunter’s baffled search through time for Hal, who seems to have disappeared as though erased from his own time stream. That’s because Hal is in “a moment outside of time,” dead and being dragged across the desert by a satisfied (“Well. That was fun.”) Sinestro, knowing he had to kill Hal before Hal could kill him, and as proud of killing Hal as he is of arranging it “so that you never existed!”
But Hunter has tricks of his own and is able to track what remains of Hal’s existence in a pocket universe where “his life’s been put on an endless loop, existing forever separate and apart from reality.” Hunter follows Hal through that timeline, finally intersecting with him in the instant before he steals the energy from the Guardian’s projection, and brings them to Vanishing Point where an enraged Hal is made to listen to what awaits him in his true reality: madness, murder, the end of time...a horrible future, but one Hal knows, without either of them saying, that he has to face if the universe is to survive. Hal and Hunter travel to Oa with Sinestro, to the history-changing moment when the villain escaped the Power Battery. “Reverse that and everything returns to normal,” Hunter advises.
So, they do, the Hals and Sinestros from several timelines existing simultaneously while they battle it out, until the paradox of all these people misplaced in time existing in one moment is too much for the timestream to take and everything snaps back to normal in one big cosmic auto correct.
But Martin’s plane still crashes and kills him!
Hunter realizes Sinestro “must have reached out from the Power Battery and caused the crash...before the moment he started changing time. It...it happened, Hal. Nothing can change that.... if it’s any consolation, when you get back to your present, you won’t remember any of this...”
“Remember?” Hal snarls. “Somehow, somewhere inside of me, Hunter, I’ll remember! I’ll remember.”
And so, as history resumes with Hal taking the energy from the Guardians’ projection, Hunter’s narration, speaking for me, continues, “I always wondered what could make a man like Hal Jordan turn the way he did...And now I know. He remembered...”
The Brave and the Bold
And on a slightly lighter note...
In August of 2009, I wrote “Duel,” a twenty-page tale for Batman: The Brave and the Bold (March 2009 - December 2010), the comic based on the Cartoon Network animated series by the same name (November 2008 - November 2011), featuring Batman and guest-star Guy Gardner. This was one of two B&B scripts I wrote for editor Michael Siglain, the other being a Plastic Man story, both of which were supposed to be drawn by Joe Staton. Between the time I turned in the scripts and when they were to be given to the artist, B&B underwent a format change, going from a single book length story to a pair of ten-pagers. My stories had become functionally obsolete.
“Duel” opens in Gotham Park, where the military, police, and Guy Gardner have gathered under the shadow of a massive and heavily armed alien spaceship. The ship hasn’t made any threatening moves, but Guy wants to go on the attack anyway, which he’s prevented from doing by Batman. At which point, the ship’s occupant reveals himself: the alien warrior, Mongul the Conqueror, who has “crossed the universe to claim your planet by rite of combat...your champion against me!” Guy steps forward to accept that challenge, but Mongul projects an image of Green Lantern Hal Jordan and says, “Not you...him--the universe’s greatest Green Lantern!”
Learning that Hal is off planet on a mission, Batman is much surprised and suspicious that Mongul is so “quick to accept my conditions, including a substitute for the champion he claims to have crossed the universe to fight.” The Dark Knight’s concerns deepen when Mongul announces that before Guy can fight him, he must first prove his worth by besting Mongul’s herald, Battlestar. Batman goes after Mongul, but the oversized alien smashes him to unconsciousness pile on the floor in the shadows.
Or does he? While Guy and Battlestar duke it out, we find Batman, without his cape, prowling the ship. The “pile” on the floor is actually an inflatable flotation device in his cape “which makes it look like I was still laying there in the arena.” His WayneTech Energy-Sensor directs him to what he’s looking for and, up in the arena, Guy finishes off Battlestar, then turns on Mongul. At which point Mongul reveals that they were never going to fight; the whole point of for a GL to engage Battlestar, who’s actually an energy-draining android, to absorb the great power of a Green Lantern ring to fuel Mongul’s weapons of war.
But Batman’s already put an end to that idea, having disabled Mongul’s power battery set-up. Guy decks Mongul with one punch, proving a power ring’s not necessary to take down this clown. But in order to win, sometime’s a buddy is.
And now, as we’re more than a third of the way through yet another decade, I start to wonder where and when my next unpublished Green Lantern story will come...!
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