But, then again this IS NitCentral, where we never met a topic we couldn't drift from.
Can anyone tell me what the big appeal of this comic is? Cause my Mom is a HUGE fan. I once received a letter in the mail. It wasn't my birthday or a holiday I celebrate (like MLK day or something), so I wodnered what it was. It was a two page (both sides of paper used) rant on how pyssed she was when they killed Hal Jordan.
Personally I'd always placed Green Lantern and Superman in the same category. Characters too danged powerful to be interesting. I alwasy preferred non to little powered heroes, like Batman, Green Arrow, Daredevil, etc.
Too danged powerful? Okay, go buy a bottle of yellow tempera paint at the 99 cent store, be a little quiet and fairly sneaky, and you just might bag yourself one certified superhero.
Now go try buying a piece 'o Kryptonite. Not really a fair comparison.
The whole color yellow weakness is fairly silly if you think about it. First of all, exactly what property of yellow prevents GL from affecting it? All it is is the result of light being reflected off a surface while that surface absorbs the other colors.
http://www.minoltaindia.com/p_02.html
Given the fact that metal, paint, bananas, lemons, flowers, clothing, etc. can be yellow, there's nothing intrinsic about that color - or any other color for that matter -that would keep Green Lantern from affecting it.
Second of all, it'd be very easy to overcome that weakness. Kill the light. Then nothing would be yellow beause the light would not be reflected. Through a coat of red paint over the yellow object.
Incidentally, the color yellow weakness only applies to the Silver Age Green Lantern and his current incarnations. The Golden Age Green Lantern, Alan Scott, could not affect wood. (Bet his girlfriend could.) (Sorry. That was slightly off-color, wasn't it?) (And the audience jeers.)
Originally, it wasn't just wood, but any vegetable matter. (It was a side effect of the lantern being made of a magical metal, if that makes any sense.) Eventually, the only vestige left of that wider weakness was Solomon Grundy's immunity to the emerald beam.
Vegetable matter? Really? Huh. I had never heard that before. Interesting. One of these days, I have got to get the Green Lantern Archives Vol. 1 for both the Golden and Silver Age GL. I'm now more curious than ever to read those early stories.
Currently though, Alan Scott is weakness to any form of cellulose.
So its expanded again, but not quite as far as originally? Interesting....
Hmm. While interesting (and funny) none of this really answers my question.
But, then again this IS NitCentral, where we never met a topic we couldn't drift from.
Brian - Can anyone tell me what the big appeal of this comic is?
What's the appeal of any comic?
In the case of Green Lantern (and to a degree, Superman) is wish fufillment. IIRC one of the original ideas behind the original GL was Aladdin's Lamp. As a matter of fact they toyed with naming his secret ID Alan Ladd, but decided that that was too silly and called him Alan Scott instead. (Although an actor named Alan Ladd did become a star afterwards.) When the magical green metal crashed on Earth it was made into a lamp that looked like Aladdin's Lamp, later it was remade into a train lantern.
What I've read of the original GL stories tended toward a pulp style of crime fic, no doubt because Bill finger, who also wrote Batman, wrote the stories. Later, science fiction writers Henry Kuttner & Alfred Bester wrote GL stories.
The Silver Age GL (Hal Jordan) tended toward more SF style plots, but there was still a wish fufillment factor to the character (anything he willed he could make the ring do).
As for the yellow weakness, Benn. It was an impurity in the power and can make some sense. What colors make Green? Blue and YELLOW. True it was an arbitrary decision, but otherwise the character would be unstoppable and that would be boring. Unfortunately later writers felt the need to have yellowproof rings invented which made for some boring stories IMO. If I'm not mistaken the current GL has a yellowproof ring.
Also, Benn, there was a story where GL was accused of destroying something that was kept in a satchel (stolen money?) but it was revealed that he couldn't have because the interior of the satchel was yellow, so turning out the lights would make no difference.
Of course, how the ring reacted to yellow really seemed to depend on the writer.
Sometimes yellow objects would pass through the green whatever-he-created, another time Sinestro used his yellow ring to create a yellow hand and GL created a green hand for power ring arm wrestling and the yellow hand didn't pass through the green.
In a Flash story GL tried to bring a yellow sculpture through time but couldn't protect it because it was yellow. Huh? He couldn't create a bubble to protect everything inside from the ravages of the timestream?
In Larry Niven's Ganthet's Tale GL flew far away from a rogue guardian and used doppler shift to change the color of his ring to yellow. Uhhhhhh, okayyyyy...
Other interesting things about the Silver Age GL, he was one of 3600 other Green Lanterns each assigned to a different space sector. Unlike most other heroes this meant that GL could have adventures on other planets. Unlike all other heroes, it meant GL had bosses, the Guardians of the Universe, who could question his actions or order him around.
Personally I don't think Hal Jordan really became interesting as a character until the early to mid-80s when he quit being Green Lantern and had to find other ways to deal with problems.
The real problems started coming about when the writers started coming up with dumb things like revealing that Hal Jordan was an alcoholic. Say what???
Then they hired a guy who just had trouble writing the character and he didn't like the idea of all these other Green Lanterns out there & didn't like the idea of the Guardians, basically everything that most fans liked, so he had GL go insane, steal the rings of the other GLs and entered the central power battery to become an ultra-powerful villain named Parallax. Then the last surviving Guardian took the last surviving ring and gave it to some shmuck named Kyle Raynor, zzzzzzzzzz..., and he became Green Lantern and still is for some unknown reason.
Anyway they later had Parallax sacrifice himself to restart the sun or some such rot and then, as if they hadn't ruined the character enough, they turned his ghost into the new Spectre.
Unimportant Trivia Note: Hal Jordon's appearance was originally based on actor Paul Newman.
As for Superman being too powerful, well, that came later. In the original stories he wasn't as powerful as he would become by the '60s & '70s. With his reboot in the '80s they did try to keep him from reaching the planet-juggling, star-blower-outer proportions he had been at.
"As for the yellow weakness, Benn. It was an impurity in the power and can make some sense. What colors make Green? Blue and YELLOW. True it was an arbitrary decision, but otherwise the character would be unstoppable and that would be boring. Unfortunately later writers felt the need to have yellowproof rings invented which made for some boring stories IMO. If I'm not mistaken the current GL has a yellowproof ring." - Keith
I don't mind the idea of the rings having a limit to what they can do or affect. But yellow isn't just arbitrary, it's senseless to me. It isn't a real property of the item in question, as most anything can be yellow. Heck, if I get hepatitis, I could beat the snot out of GL because I'd be yellow. I could throw bananas at him and beat him, theorectically.
And, yeah green is the result of mixing yellow and blue. So, why yellow and not blue or yellow and blue? Heck, given that yellow is part of the color green, shouldn't GL be absolutely powerless? Wood, having specific properties to it, at least makes more sense.
"Also, Benn, there was a story where GL was accused of destroying something that was kept in a satchel (stolen money?) but it was revealed that he couldn't have because the interior of the satchel was yellow, so turning out the lights would make no difference." - Keith again
Yellow is the result of light being reflected off the surface of an object. If there's no light, there can be no yellow. Thus the interior of the satchel wasn't any color at all, except perhaps, black (which is a neutral and not a color, actually).
What if Green Lantern were colorblind? He'd be screwed. He'd be trying to zap a yellow object and not affecting it, but would not be able to figure out for the life of him, why nothing happens.
I really think they should retcon a new weakness for the ring. By all means, limit the Lanterns' powers, but let it be a weakness that can be better quanitified.
"As for Superman being too powerful, well, that came later." - Keith, who else?
And it came incrementally. Each new power was added as the writers and editor realized that it made little sense to have Superman, say, keep jumping from one place to another, the way the Hulk now does. Instead of just busting down walls, it'd be better if Clark could look into the building first, using his x-ray vision. And so it goes. And so it goes.
Benn: ..yellow is part of the color green..
Luigi Novi: Only in subtractive color. Not in additive color. In additive color, green is actually a primary color, and it combines with red to make yellow.
In either case, yellow and green are of different EM wavelengths, so if it can't affect or is vulnerable to one wavelength, there's no reason to think it should be vulnerable to another.
I was only half serious about the "yellow is part of the color green" comment. Unlike other posters here, my posts don't always have emoticons. A grave disadvantage at times. Then again, in the real world, I can be taken at face value with almost everything I say, no matter how absurd.
Benn - Yellow is the result of light being reflected off the surface of an object. If there's no light, there can be no yellow.
It isn't a real property of the item in question*
Okay, I'm going to have to disagree with parts of this.
Yes, what we see as yellow is reflected light, however the light is being reflected because the material is not absorbing that wavelength of light. This property of a material will not change if it is suddenly dark, it will always have the ability to not absorb yellow light.
* Lines rearranged from Benn's original post
What if Green Lantern were colorblind?
There was a Tales of The Green Lantern Corps that featured Green Lantern Katma Tui trying to give a power ring to an alien species that did not have eyes. The story focused more on the problems dealing with the aliens lack of understanding of the words green or lantern since they were unnecesary to that species. So instead of becoming a Green Lantern the alien became an F Sharp Bell.
Remembering that story, however, reminded me of an old GL story from the '60s. It was part of the original Zatanna storyline, but I'm not sure if it was in an issue of Green Lantern or the Justice League of America. In it GL was having problems with his ring, but there didn't seem to be any yellow around. It turned out that the problem was caused by a sound that was at the same frequency as yellow light.
And now a nitpick that has nothing to do with Benn's posts. ;-)
Since we later learn that Green Lantern's can fly through space without need of a spaceship, why was Abin Sur in a spaceship in the Silver Age GL's origin?
There was a later Tales of The Green Lantern Corps that tried to explain this, but I don't buy it since it would involve Abin Sur being afraid for his safety and one reason why people are chosen to be GLs is because they don't have fear. (I guess this means that Daredevil could be a Green Lantern. ;-)
The Tales tale is easy to ignore, however, as it is told by Sinestro as part of a ploy to gain the aid of a powerful entity.
I've been reading the above without ever reading a GL story, but it occurs to me that yellow is an electromagnetic frequency, and on shows such as Star Trek, there's a long tradition of systems being vulnerable to a specific frequency.
Example: the shield frequency in TNG: Generations.
Okay, granting all that, it's a weakness that's easily defeated. KAM mentioned a satchel that had a yellow interior. That shouldn't render the satchel safe from harm. The exterior isn't yellow. It can safely be damaged/destroyed. The color of the object can be changed. Painting the object for one thing. How about bathing it in a red light? The yellow of the object in question is not something that is immutable. It can be altered. That's why I consider it an insignifican quality.
Some later stories did indicate that the yellow weakness was created by the Guardians.
I think Roy Thomas did a story that had an early Green Lantern with a no weakness ring abusing its power so when he was being attacked from some natives he was trying to conquer the Guardians gave his ring a weakness to wood (since that's what kind of weapons they had) & later this became the original Green Lantern's ring.
The Blue Benn - ..yellow is part of the color green..
The Red Novi - Only in subtractive color. Not in additive color.
According to Justice League of America #127 Green Lantern's power beam is subtractive color since The Anarchist is able to drain off the yellow energy of his ring.
TomM - Originally, it wasn't just wood, but any vegetable matter.
Oddly enough in All Star Comics #3 Green Lantern says, "A non-metal is the only thing against which the ring does not protect me".
It's worth noting, they've retconned in a new explaination for the yellow weakness of the rings in the GL-Rebirth series. I won't spoil it, but it has nothing to do with wavelengths or even light really.
You talking about Green Lantern: Rebirth, Anon? That's actually a pretty damned good explanation if you ask me. But then, GL:R has been a fairly decent series, I must say.
Excelsior!
Yep, that's what I was talkin bout, Willis!
Perhaps some of you GL geniuses out there can answer a question I have. If the rings are connected to the central power battery, by some sort of AI if I believe, why do they need personal batteries to recharge them? Even though Alan's and Kyle's are quite cool looking why not just have them constantly charge?