Hal Boredom

Hal Jordan is played by Ryan Reynolds in the Green Lantern movie, and there is a new set of Green Lantern animated shorts coming out featuring him prominently. I, for one, find Hal Jordan to be an insufferably boring character. I read all of Geoff Johns' run on Green Lantern up through the end of Blackest Night before finally realizing that nothing interesting about the title had anything to do with Jordan.

Having never read the original John Broome stories, I couldn't say whether they are sublimely awesome or not. Maybe they are are work of art comporable to the 7 Seven Wonders of the World.

What I have read leaves me yawning enthusiastically. Jordan is a courageous hero who plays by his own rules and always gets the girl. He never seems to suffer any personal or emotional trauma. In other words, he is the same as every character in every action movie and pretty much every superhero that was never re-tooled for the Modern Age.

DC seems to struggle with what to do with Jordan, who has a paradoxical combination of ultimate power and a total lack of personality. Dennis O'Neil teamed him up with Green Arrow quite extensively, Jordan playing the straight man to Green Arrow's radicalism. O'Neil also created John Stewart, intended to be Jordan's back up in the Corps.

Deciding that a Green Lantern with recognizable character traits would appeal to a younger audience, DC had Hal try and blow up the universe, murdering the entirety of the Green Lantern Corps in the process. Kyle Rayner stepped in to the black and green spandex.

In another failed attempt to make Jordan interesting, he became the new Spectre, on a mission of redemption after trying to kill everyone and become God. This petered out a little after two years.

Geoff Johns decided that the world need Hal again, because straight white men with type A personalities were becoming a rare commodity in the comics industry. It turns out murdering all of his comrades and trying to erase existence only happened because he was possessed by an evil space entity. Apparently, someone forget to tell God, who let him become the Spectre to redeem himself. Or maybe God thought that was funny, Hal redeeming himself for things that weren't his fault.

As all characters and situations in continuity must revert to some arbitrarily chosen point in the status quo, so too did Green Lantern. Hal came back to life, was forgiven by everyone, become a fighter pilot again and started dating attractive women without missing a beat.

So it goes in the comics industry.