BHOC: GREEN LANTERN #110

I believe that I picked up this issue of GREEN LANTERN while on a shopping trip one Satuday. That’s a pretty good, eye-catching and dramatic cover by artist Mike Grell. Grell had been a semio-regular fixture on GREEN LANTERN ever since the title came back from limbo in 1976, and his Neal Adams-influenced artwork was strongly associated with the Emerald Crusader, at least in my mind. And this piece was pure Grell, which to my eye was superior to the interior work, which was inked by Vince Colletta, an embellisher I never warmed to.

This was the second and final story to use a concept created by writer Denny O’Neil some issues earlier: the Silver Twist. This strange, unknowable artifact of deep space was very much in keeping with the Guardian of Forever in STAR TREK: it was a massive silver quasi-moebius strip that wound up propelling Green Lantern and Green Arrow into different genre-based adventures. The first time, it had sent the duo to a world that was a pastiche of medieval England, where Green Arrow became a Robin Hood figure. This time, it would be Hal Jordan who’d be the principle character, and he’d get a genre adventure of his own.

BHOC: GREEN LANTERN #92

So after an introductory preamble, Hal and Ollie once more run into the Silver Twist when they go to retrieve Hal’s trucking rig, which he conveniently left in orbit. Approaching the thing, the pair finds themselves spit out in what appears to be a town in the old west. What’s more, Green Lantern’s power ring will only release a narrow beam, and Green Arrow’s many trick arrows have been replaced by ordinary ones. Before they can catch their bearings, the pair are under attack from a group of outlaws led by a four-armed alien called Borch. It seems that, in this world, the Lantern symbol is analogous to a Sheriff’s badge, and so they take Hal for the new lawbringer in town. Which, given his job, he pretty much is.

From this point forward, we’re into a full-blown western pastiche. GL and GA find some aid and information from the Saloon owner, Miss Lulu. The town is Coyote Gunch, and Burch and his outlaws have been attempting to take it over, and have almost entirely succeeded. Borch sends an envoy to challenge the newcomers to a showdown shootout, one-on-one between Borch and one of the strangers. This’ll be Hal, of course, who naturally falls into the Sheriff’s role, being a big fan of western films. The heroes know that the bad guys are going to try to ambush Hal and not fight fair, but that’s where green Arrow comes into play: taking out the assorted ambushers quietly before they can interfere in Hal and Borch’s duel.

With his back-up taken out of the fight, Borch counts on his own skill as a gunslinger. And he is quick with his four draws. But not as quick as thought, and so Hal zaps each weapon out of his hands with a well-targeted power beam. At this point, the threat to the town is dealt with, and Green Arrow has located a rift back to their own dimension, so he and Hal say their farewells and get out of Dodge. And that’s it! The whole adventure is a bit of fun, but not really anything more than that. And I’d guess that the cover was probably drawn first here, and then this tale was written to account for it, which explains why Hal is zapped by Borch’s gunfire at the start of the story and his lantern insignia is somehow burned onto his chest. It’s not a plot development that goes anywhere, so it feels to me like it’s there to justify the cool cover image.

This was the last issue of GREEN LANTERN to be released before the DC Implosion caused the line to shrink both in terms of page count and number of titles, and so it was the last one to feature a back-up series starring Alan Scott, the Green Lantern of the Golden Age of Comics. Which I thought was a shame, as I loved all of the original Earth-2 DC heroes. This final chapter concluded Alan’s battle with Chang, the lord of the Green Dragon Tong and possessor of another fragment of the enchanted meteor from which his power ring and lantern had been crafted. By this point, Chang had stolen the Lantern’s ring and thrown him into a fiery pit.

Green Lantern survives, of course–his power ring had been secreted onto his person by Lo-Lanke, Chang’s wife who nonetheless hates the course he’s on. What’s more, Alan communes with the spirit of the ring, discovering that his recent losses of power have been failings of will on his part, not a malfunction with the ring or its power. His confidence somehow restored, Green Lantern locates and engages Chang, who has transformed himself into an actual Green Dragon. During their battle, a huge tree falls upon Chang, killing him–he had no idea that the green power that he was using was ineffective against wood. And the story winds up with a cliffhanger that would be wrapped up elsewhere, with Alan Scott opening a life-changing letter in the wake of his company, Gotham Broadcasting, having gone belly up. This was clearly intended to lead into the next story–but there would be no next story, as I mentioned earlier.