Hal Jordan
Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern of Earth, took his look from a movie star. In 1959, artist Gil Kane drew the hero with Hollywood actor Paul Newman as his visual inspiration.
On paper, Hal is about as clean-cut as a comic book hero gets. He is a former fighter pilot turned test pilot, handed a ring that turns willpower into solid light. Yet this same man would later be written as a killer of his own comrades, and then as a ghostly agent of divine wrath.
How does a polished science-fiction revival end up carrying the political arguments of 1970? What happens to a hero when his own origin is rewritten again and again? And why does a character who has been a villain, a spirit and a fugitive keep ranking among the most popular of all time?
Julius Schwartz had a hit on his hands in 1956. The DC editor had revived the Golden Age hero The Flash with great success, and he looked next to another old name, the Green Lantern of the Golden Age of Comic Books. That earlier lantern was Alan Scott, a 1940s character designed after figures from folklore and mythology. Schwartz wanted something different. Drawing on his love of science fiction, he aimed to show a new Green Lantern in a more modern light.
He enlisted writer John Broome and artist Gil Kane. The idea was older than the revival itself. Broome had imagined the character years earlier, in a Captain Comet story called "Guardians of the Clockwork Universe," published in Strange Adventures #22 in July 1952.
Showcase #22, dated October 1959, introduced Hal Jordan to readers. The character was a success, and DC quickly followed his three-issue run in Showcase with a series of his own. Green Lantern #1 appeared in July-August 1960 and ran until issue #89 in April-May 1972. Gardner Fox joined Broome on the writing from issue #17. Schwartz, Broome, Fox and Kane remained the core creative team until 1970.
The man they built works for Ferris Aircraft as a test pilot. His ring makes him protector of Sector 2814, which includes Earth, on behalf of the Guardians of the Universe. It lets him fly through space and shape shields, weapons and even his own uniform. Its only limits are his imagination and his willpower.
Carol Ferris became his on-again, off-again love interest, and at times his enemy Star Sapphire. His rogues include the psychic mutant Hector Hammond and Nekron, the avatar of death. Hal also helped found the Justice League alongside Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.
The villain who would shadow him longest was Sinestro, a corrupt former Green Lantern who had once been Hal's mentor.
Issue #76, dated April 1970, put Dennis O'Neil in the writer's chair and Neal Adams at the drawing board. Adams had already drawn the cover of issue #63. He and O'Neil had also been preparing for this run by reworking another DC hero, the archer Green Arrow.
O'Neil explained his thinking in an introduction to a 1983 reprinting of the run. He had wondered whether comics could carry his own political beliefs and take on the social issues of the late sixties and early seventies. His answer was to cast Hal, effectively an intergalactic law enforcement officer, as an establishment gradualist liberal. Opposite him stood Oliver Queen, whom O'Neil characterized as a lusty, outspoken anarchist standing in for the counter-culture.
The first of these stories was written with Gil Kane slated to draw it. Kane dropped out, and Adams took his place. The stories tackled power, racism, sexism and exploitation. Comics fans still regard them as the first socially conscious superhero stories.
The sales told a harsher story. Green Lantern had been in major decline when Green Arrow joined as co-star, and the new approach failed to revive it. The series was canceled with issue #89, and its climactic arc ran as a back-up feature in The Flash #217 through #219.
That finale dropped the social commentary for emotion. Green Arrow struggled with the guilt of having killed a man. Hal kept appearing in Flash back-up stories from 1972, until his own title returned in 1976, and in 1982 the Guardians themselves would turn on him.
Green Lantern #151, dated April 1982, opens a year of banishment. The Guardians exile Jordan into space to prove his loyalty to the Corps. Their complaint is that he pays too much attention to Earth when he has an entire sector of the cosmos to patrol. The storyline runs through issue #172, dated January 1984.
When Hal returns to Earth, he lands in a dispute with Carol Ferris. Forced to choose between love and the power ring, he resigns from the Corps. The Guardians call up his backup, John Stewart, to take over as regular Lantern.
The 1985 storyline Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted much of DC's continuity, and it put Jordan back in the role of Green Lantern. The new Corps had seven members living on Earth, among them John Stewart, Guy Gardner and several aliens.
Hal became romantically involved with an alien Lantern named Arisia Rrab. He came under fire for it because Arisia was only a teenager. Human governments also disliked the way the alien Lanterns involved themselves in human affairs.
The Earth-based Corps eventually broke up, with several members going home to their own sectors. The Guardians returned to this dimension, and Jordan worked with them to rebuild the fractured Corps. That rebuilding was gentle work compared with what 1993 had in store.
Two limited series, Emerald Dawn and Emerald Dawn II, retold Hal's origin in the early 1990s. Keith Giffen, Gerard Jones and James Owsley wrote them. The first expanded the Corps' role in his beginnings and filled in his childhood and his relationship with his father and brothers. The sequel detailed his part in the downfall of Sinestro. In the 1992 graphic novel Green Lantern: Ganthet's Tale, Hal first met the Guardian Ganthet, who asked for help against a renegade Guardian trying to change history with a time machine.
In the 1993 storyline Reign of the Supermen!, the alien tyrant Mongul destroyed Coast City, Hal's former home, and murdered all seven million of its people. Hal was off world at the time. Furious, he flew to Engine City and knocked Mongul out with Steel's hammer.
The Emerald Twilight arc followed. Hal used his ring to rebuild Coast City and spoke with ring-made versions of his old girlfriend and his parents. When the ring ran dry, a projection of a Guardian rebuked him for using it for personal gain and summoned him to Oa, the Guardians' homeworld.
Hal saw only callousness. He absorbed the projection's energy, went insane, and attacked Oa to seize the Central Power Battery. He injured several Corps members, took their rings and left them to die in space. He killed Kilowog and Sinestro. The Guardians took their own lives to pool their life force in Ganthet. Hal then renounced his life as a Green Lantern and took the name Parallax.
Ganthet chose Kyle Rayner as Earth's new Green Lantern, giving him the last power ring, made from the shattered remains of Hal's. Guy Gardner then led a team to Oa that included Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman and Alan Scott. Jordan beat them easily and left Guy in a coma.
In Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, Parallax teamed with Extant to remake the universe into a peaceful place, destroying the Time Trapper along the way. Hal exhausted most of his power fighting and manipulating the time stream. Green Arrow took advantage and shot an arrow into his chest. In the 1996 miniseries Final Night, Parallax made a brief, redemptive appearance, apparently sacrificing his life against a threat to the Solar System.
As Parallax, he could reconfigure time-space and manipulate reality on a large scale. He once knocked out Superman with a single punch. Yet physical force never beat him. Every defeat came from his own conscience, after which he gave up the fight and hid.
He was not done with unusual roles. A miniseries called Day of Judgment in 1999 would hand him a very different kind of power.
Day of Judgment, in 1999, made Jordan the newest Spectre. A fallen angel had tried to seize that power, and Hal was released from Purgatory to take it. He soon chose to bend the Spectre's mission from vengeance toward redemption.
That choice shaped his appearances elsewhere. During the Emperor Joker storyline, in which the Joker steals the reality-warping power of Mister Mxyzptlk, he advised Superman. He also erased public knowledge of Wally West's identity as the Flash after West's terrible first battle with Zoom, which led to the miscarriage of his wife's twins.
A fourth Spectre series ran for 27 issues from 2001 to 2003. In it, Hal loses his brother, Jack Jordan, to a supernatural assassin. When the series ended, a confrontation between the new Justice Society of America and the Spirit King weakened his hold on the damned, and Mister Terrific managed to resurrect the ghosts the Spectre had sent to Hell. Hal returned, temporarily, to a mission of vengeance until he accepted it as his own.
The Identity Crisis storyline shows how far the Spectre's rules reached. Green Arrow visits Hal's grave and asks for revenge on the killer of Sue Dibny. Hal admits he knows who did it, later revealed to be Jean Loring, but refuses. He hints to Oliver that the killer will be caught.
The 2004 miniseries Green Lantern: Rebirth brought Hal back to life as a Green Lantern, in a redesigned uniform. A new Green Lantern series began with a fresh issue #1 and reframed his murders as Parallax: the work of an intergalactic, fear-driven parasite. The Corps had been successfully rebuilt, but many officers did not trust him.
Hal himself believed Parallax took hold because he had surrendered to it, and so he admitted he had a dark side. The experience left him with moments of self-doubt, and he was no longer the daredevil he once was. He became friends with Kyle Rayner after their first battle with Parallax.
He moved to the nearly deserted Coast City, then slowly being rebuilt. Reinstated as a United States Air Force pilot, he worked in the test pilot program at Edwards Air Force Base. Air Force General Jonathan "Herc" Stone learned his secret identity during a fight with the Manhunters and became his ally. Hal also began to develop feelings for fellow pilot Captain Jillian "Cowgirl" Pearlman.
This series also offered a new account of how it all began. Hal is an assistant mechanic under Tom Kalmaku, barred from flying after insubordination in the Air Force and because of his employer's lingering guilt over his father's death in the line of duty. Green Lantern Abin Sur, fighting the villain Atrocitus, crashes near Coast City. His ring, as all rings do when their wearer dies, goes looking for a replacement, and it fetches Jordan. Sur tells him he is to take over Sector 2814.
In 2006, a company-wide event called Infinite Crisis would pull him straight back into the crowd of heroes.
During Infinite Crisis in 2006, Hal helped briefly against the attack of the OMACs and Brother Eye. He also fought with a group of heroes against the Secret Society of Super Villains, defending Metropolis. After the event, stories jumped ahead a year in One Year Later. It was revealed that Jordan had spent that time as a prisoner of war in an unnamed conflict, haunted by guilt over being unable to free himself and his fellow captives.
The Sinestro Corps War pitted the Green Lanterns against Sinestro and his army. In the Agent Orange arc, Hal briefly commanded Larfleeze's power battery after stealing it in a fight. The orange light of avarice spoke to him and changed his costume, but Larfleeze soon took the battery back.
He was a charter member of the revamped Justice League of America. In Justice League: Cry for Justice, he led his own League to avenge the deaths of Martian Manhunter and Batman. He recruited former Titans, including Dick Grayson, Donna Troy and Starfire.
The Blackest Night event sent Hal into the War of Light, allied with six other Lantern Corps. Nekron raised his dead allies, enemies and failures as undead Black Lanterns. He worked with Barry Allen, himself resurrected, and with his old enemies Sinestro, Atrocitus and Larfleeze. His former lover Carol Ferris stood with them too.
In 2011, after the event Flashpoint, DC relaunched all its books as The New 52. Hal was discharged from the Air Force and back in civilian life, with Geoff Johns and Robert Venditti writing him. The relaunched Justice League showed him five years earlier, believing that the ring let him overcome anything by sheer will.
That belief made him reckless, and it nearly got him killed. Only when Batman revealed his own identity as Bruce Wayne did Hal reconsider. Five years after the team formed, he resigned from the Justice League to keep it functioning after his behavior put it in peril in the fight with David Graves.
He later went rogue from the Corps on purpose, becoming a scapegoat so the universe's blame and distrust would fall on him rather than on the Lanterns. The Corps believed he had betrayed them when he attacked Kilowog. He stole a prototype gauntlet and power pack from the armoury, which let him operate as a hero without a ring.
In 2012, DC editors revealed that Hal Jordan is Jewish, making him one of the most high-profile Jewish characters in comic books.
The 2016 relaunch DC Rebirth restored continuity to a form much like before The New 52. Hal built his own power ring and went hunting the Sinestro Corps. Soranik Natu, Sinestro's daughter and a Yellow Lantern, healed him after a fight with her father. When the planet Xudar was shrunk by Brainiac, Hal was believed dead and went to the Emerald Space, an afterlife for deceased Lanterns. White Lantern Kyle Rayner pulled him out. At the end of the run, Hal reconciled with Carol Ferris.
Writer Grant Morrison took over with The Green Lantern, in which Hal infiltrates Controller Mu's Blackstars. He later reassumes the Parallax mantle and seemingly sacrifices himself to stop Mu's U-Bomb, but his ring rescues him and he meets its artificial intelligence, Pengowirr.
In the 2020s, the Dark Crisis event found Hal back on an Earth in chaos after the apparent death of the Justice League. Jeremy Adams' run on Green Lantern then has Hal quit the Corps after the Guardians disappear and the United Planets take over the group. Losing his ring, he gets a new one from a Central Oan Battery and reconciles with Carol Ferris once more.
Green Lantern: Evil's Might has a different Hal Jordan, a New York City police constable in the late 19th century who is engaged to Carol Ferris. In the Amalgam Comics universe, Hal Stark, also called Iron Lantern, merges Jordan with Marvel's Iron Man. In JLA: The Nail, he leads the Justice League. In Green Lantern: Earth One, he is an asteroid miner and former astronaut who finds a ring during an excavation.
The Absolute Universe version is a toy salesman living in Evergreen, Nevada. He briefly becomes a Black Hand after killing Abin Sur, until Jo Mullein cures him, and he later manifests the violet light of chaotic action.
Injustice offers a darker alternative. In the Injustice: Gods Among Us prequel comic, Sinestro manipulates a Hal who supports Superman's Regime into killing Guy Gardner before converting him into a Yellow Lantern. In the Injustice 2 prequel, a guilt-ridden Hal stands trial on Oa, confesses everything and agrees to be imprisoned and rehabilitated. He is haunted by Gardner's spirit and becomes a Red Lantern for a time.
On screen, Gerald Mohr voiced Hal in The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure. Michael Rye voiced him for most of the Super Friends era, starting with Challenge of the Superfriends. His first live-action appearance was in the 1978 television special Legends of the Superheroes, played by Howard Murphy.
Josh Keaton voiced the lead in Green Lantern: The Animated Series, where Hal is a member of the Corps' Honor Guard and starts out as a rival to Guy Gardner. Nathan Fillion voiced him in Green Lantern: Emerald Knights and Justice League: Doom. In Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Fillion's Hal is chosen to fly Abin Sur's spacecraft against the Atlantean fleet and is eaten by a sea monster first.
Jonah Hill voiced a Master Builder Hal in The Lego Movie. In DC Super Hero Girls in 2019, Jason Spisak voiced a stereotypical jock who is a student at Metropolis High School and the ex-boyfriend of Star Sapphire.
Video games gave him more roles. He is a playable character in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, and Ryan Reynolds voiced him in Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters. In Injustice 2, Steve Blum voices a Hal rehabilitated by the Guardians, hunted by Atrocitus, who wants to make him a Red Lantern.
Hal made his cinematic debut in the 2011 film Green Lantern, portrayed by Ryan Reynolds. Next, Kyle Chandler will play him in the DC Universe, beginning with the series Lanterns.
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Common questions
Who created Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern?
Writer John Broome and artist Gil Kane created Hal Jordan in 1959. He first appeared in Showcase #22, dated October 1959, under the direction of DC editor Julius Schwartz.
Who inspired the look of Hal Jordan?
Artist Gil Kane took visual inspiration for Hal Jordan from Hollywood actor Paul Newman. This set Hal apart from the earlier Green Lantern, Alan Scott, who was designed after characters from folklore and mythology.
What are Hal Jordan's powers as Green Lantern?
Hal Jordan's power ring channels willpower into hard-light constructs. It gives him flight, space travel, shields, weapons and even his uniform, limited only by his imagination and willpower.
Why did Hal Jordan become the villain Parallax?
In the 1993 storylines Reign of the Supermen! and Emerald Twilight, Mongul destroyed Coast City and killed seven million people. Grief and anger drove Hal to attack the Green Lantern Corps and take the name Parallax. Later stories revealed Parallax to be a fear-driven parasite.
When did Hal Jordan return after becoming Parallax and the Spectre?
The 2004 miniseries Green Lantern: Rebirth brought Hal Jordan back to life as a Green Lantern in a redesigned uniform. Before that, he had served briefly as the Spectre, beginning in the 1999 miniseries Day of Judgment.
Who has played or voiced Hal Jordan on screen?
Howard Murphy played Hal Jordan in the 1978 television special Legends of the Superheroes, and Ryan Reynolds starred in the 2011 film Green Lantern. Kyle Chandler will play him in the series Lanterns, while voice actors include Michael Rye, Josh Keaton, Nathan Fillion and Jonah Hill.
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