BHOC: GREEN LANTERN #120

This was another comic book that my younger brother Ken also picked up a copy of after I had bought one. To this day, i really don’t quite understand why he would do that, but it was a pattern that repeated again and again. Sadly, what he got was a bit of a dud–Green Lantern was a favorite character of mine based on my earliest encounters with him, but his ongoing series had become downright tedious to follow. It just wasn’t good. Some of that was down to the fact that regular writer Denny O’Neil was more comfortable with earthbound scenarios, and so he tended to favor the activities of co-star Green Arrow and his lady love Black Canary more than the interplanetary scale of GL’s exploits. Some of it, too, was that Denny himself wasn’t at his best at this moment in his life, and his overall apathy for this assignment shines through.

This time out, regular but raw artist Alex Saviuk had been relieved of his duties, and the artistic reins passed over to Don Heck, a reliable warhorse of an artist. Heck developed a bad reputation in fandom past a certain point, in part due to some unkind comments that surfaced in a provocative interview between the Comic Journal’s Gary Groth and outspoken author Harlan Ellison. But even without that, Heck’s star had been falling for a while by this point. He legitimately had some strong chops as an artist, but super heroes weren’t his natural idiom, and he continued to struggle to deliver the sort of slick, kinetic artwork that his peers were generating–whether those peers were named Kirby, Buscema, Perez, Byrne or whatever. Heck was also saddled with a number of inkers who didn’t capture the best of his pencils–John Celardo here is a good example of that. The work seems sketchy and impressionistic and a bit unfinished or unrefined. It certainly wasn’t slick.

The story opens in Florida, where an approaching hurricane winds up toppling a tree and dislodging a wooden coffin that had been buried underneath at some point. To the shock of a passerby, the lid to the box suddenly opens and a figure in full conquistador armor steps out of it, fully alive. The passerby bolts from the scene, inadvertently naming the cause of his distress El Espectro, and as he runs for his life, he darts out in front of Hal Jordan’s eighteen wheeler, which is on a run. Hal becomes Green Lantern in order to save the man from being crushed by his truck, but he’s perplexed by the victim’s insistence that he’s being pursued by a ghost.

In the sort of coincidence that would be pretty unforgivable today, Oliver Queen, Dinah Lance and Hal’s girlfriend Kari Limbo are all vacationing in Florida (right in the middle of this hurricane, mind you) and have stopped into a cafe to sample the local chili. But El Espectro has made his way to this location, and he literally grabs the bowl of chili from out of Ollie’s hands. This of course leads to a scuffle, but the silent stranger is able to get away unmolested, though he topples a palm tree towards Ollie that the just-arriving Green Lantern has to stop. The figure left his helmet behind, though, lost in the melee, and Kari Limbo uses her ESP powers to hone in on it, getting some backstory: the figure is Jamie Sanchez, who was Ponce De Leon’s right-hand man on his quest to locate the Fountain of Youth. Sanchez splits off from De Leon and actually finds the mystical waters, drinking from them–just before his men clock him and proceed to bury him alive for no reason that is ever articulated. Rendered immortal by the Fountain’s waters, Sanchez has lain in his makeshift grave for centuries, going increasingly mad.

At this point, with a greater understanding of what they’re dealing with, Green Lantern and Green Arrow decide to split up in their efforts to locate El Espectro. This is done, of course, so that O’Neil can focus on Ollie and Dinah carrying the action rather than being burdened with his much more powerful headliner, Hal. This kind of thing happened again and again in these stories and drove me nuts. I was buying the book for Green Lantern, and while I didn’t have anything against Green Arrow or Black Canary, it was the Emerald Crusader that I was paying my money to see. Anyway, Ollie and Dinah waste no time in tracking down El Espectro and beginning to battle him, but their efforts are ultimately futile, as the immortal figure continues to manifest new powers whenever he needs them, a convenient trait to possess.

Green Lantern, meanwhile, has headed out to sea, where the hurricane is growing in intensity, and a huge tidal wave is forming that GL isn’t certain even his ring can stop. I don’t know what he expected to find there, given that he was searching for a land-bound Spaniard, but there you go. This does give Denny the opportunity to set up the issue’s deus ex machina climax. Anyway, as El Espectro mops up on Green Arrow and Black Canary, Green Lantern finally decides to show up in his own series and enters the fight himself. But wouldn’t you know it, El Espectro whips out another attribute: his sword, having absorbed the properties of the Fountain of Youth, which was described as having a golden hue, can now effortlessly cut through Hal’s ring-constructs.

So Hal’s on the ropes as well, until the aforementioned tidal wave hits. In the aftermath, Hal is able to scoop up Green Arrow and Black Canary before they drown. But El Espectro has vanished, leaving his clothing behind (though not his magic sword.) And that’s the note on which this story is To Be Continued! It’s an embarrassingly poor climax to a haphazard story, a reflection of just how in his cups Denny was during this time. The real question in all of this is where was editor Jack C. Harris? My guess is that Denny was respected enough and his situation dire enough that Harris figured that the easiest thing was to just help him out as much as was possible. But nobody covered themselves in glory with this issue, and it’s no wonder that my attention was beginning to wander from the book.

The one bright spot in the issue was the week’s new edition of the promotional Daily Planet page. It had a particular groaner of a gag strip from cartoonist Fred Hembeck that I nonetheless still chuckle over, plus more answers from Bob Rozakis to queries posed by the audience.