BHOC: GREEN LANTERN #119

The cover to this issue of GREEN LANTERN bugs my eye in a way that it didn’t when I first bought it back in 1979. Having spent time working with John Romita Sr., who was attuned to every discontinuity in spatial relationships on a cover and made me similarly sensitive to them, it bugs me tremendously that the bowstring to Green Arrow’s bow is positioned in front of his hat, when it must be further back into space than that, even if it was newly-fired. That overlap is about all that I can focus on here. It’s not a terrific cover even without that, with both characters soliloquizing in the time it’s taking for the falling high-rise worker to plummet earthward. So I can’t say that I think it’s very effective. It certainly doesn’t especially make me want to crack it open and see what happens. And yet, that’s just what we’re going to do.

I feel like we’ve covered my feelings toward the GREEN LANTERN series at length by this point, but just to quickly reiterate; I loved the character, had ever since he was running as a back-up feature in THE FLASH. And so I bought his book every month without fail. However, the creators working on it, in particular writer Denny O’Neil, were more interested in earthbound conflicts than star-spanning ones, and so focused heavily on co-star Green Arrow to the detriment of the theoretical lead, Hal Jordan. This would only become more pronounced whenever Black Canary was also in a story, which was often. I continued my regular patronage, but I was less than satisfied with what I was getting.

It didn’t really help that O’Neil was making Hal a bit of a cad. He’d taken up a romance with Kari Limbo, who had been recently-killed substitute Green lantern Guy Gardner’s fiancée. I mean, Guy wasn’t even cold in the ground and these two were hooking up. Even at the age of twelve, I knew that there was something fundamentally wrong with this behavior, even as I accepted it because the comic I was reading told me that was what happened. The story this issue opens with Hal and Kari canoodling in her home. Hal’s attention is drawn to a piece of pottery that Kari tells him has been in her family’s possession for almost a thousand years. But as Hal goes to pick it up, he’s zap[ped back–the pottery has resonated with his power ring, causing a jolt of energy that shatters the piece, revealing a strange object concealed within.

Because Kari Limbo is a comic book psychic, she’s able to pick up strange mental impressions from the revealed item. They show her a group of starships falling into the gravity well of Saturn to their destruction. Believing in Kari’s abilities, Hal swiftly charges his ring and sets off into space in the hopes of finding this space convoy and preventing disaster. Meanwhile, in a subplot that takes up a lot of space, Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance are on the hunt for a particular ingredient for Ollie’s famous chili. However, the entire neighborhood supply has been bought up by a Mrs. Vorpal, despite the fact that even a teaspoon is enough to provide a dangerous level of heat. As the pair follows the woman’s trail hoping to be able to get a supply of the stuff for themselves as well, they learn that she’s also purchased a pound of rat poison. So something weird is going on.

Hal finds the solar sailing ships headed towards Saturn, but even his great will power can’t pull them out to safety. After a bit of manufactured conflict to get some action into this story, it turns out that the convoy’s engineers have been attempting to use their engines rather than their sails to get out of the gravity well. But a key component is missing, which was taken by one of their kind on a sojourn to Earth centuries ago. This raises a lot more questions than it means to about why thousand-year-old starships are still in service, why they’ve never needed their engines until now in all that time, why nobody wen to track down or replace the missing component–but the story isn’t interested in any of that. GL recognizes that the missing piece is the device that Kari is in possession of, and so he zips back Earthward in order to retrieve it in time to save the floundering ships.

Back on Earth, Green Arrow has worked out that Mrs Vorpal is trying to kill her husband and make it look like an accident. She laced his lunchtime chili with a drug cocktail in the hopes that he’d fall to his death–which he almost does. Green Arrow is there to intercept him, though, and the fact that the engine fragment that he’s carrying defies gravity is what saves them both. At that moment, Green Lantern races in, grabs the engine fragment and shoots back up to the stars, leaving Ollie and Dinah baffled.

From there, the resolution of the conflict is plug-and-play. Green Lantern reaches the stricken convoy and replaces the missing engine component, which brings the engines back to life and allows it to escape from Saturn’s gravity. And that’s it! Hal returns to Kari’s place to debrief her and for some more uncomfortable nookie, and the issue ends. It’s a decent attempt to do something different, running interrelated stories of each character simultaneously. But the two stories are each pretty thin, so the whole issue feels pretty perfunctory. And the Kari Limbo situation isn’t making anybody feel good either, apart from Hal.

This issue also carried the weekly Daily Planet promotional page, but a different edition than the one that ran in yesterday’s BRAVE AND THE BOLD issue. It featured a much better gag from Fred Hembeck in his regular comic strip as well as another Answer Man column and the regular previews and spotlight on upcoming titles. This checklist may have been where I first heard about Iris Allen having been killed, but it didn’t make any impact on me as well–buried in that line item, I imagine that I took it to simply be typical hyperbole. Having missed the two most recent issues of THE FLASH, I was oblivious to what had been going on in its pages.