"Handwave" Hal Jordan getting turned into a killer? 'Scuse me? The noblest Green Lantern of them all? Star of all those great John Broome stories and some of those less-than-great Denny O'Neil stories? (Be fair, folks. The stuff that came up in the post-Adams revival was decent, but usually not great.) A lot of the appeal of Silver Age heroes was their NOBILITY. Even Spider-Man, as trouble-beset as he usually was, knew he had to do the right thing and did it. Hal Jordan was simply not a killer. If he was, Sinestro would have been gone a LONG time ago.
I agree on all counts, but I don't mean (and I apologize for not making that sufficiently clear) handwaving in the inane sense that DC actually did. They just swept the problem away and blamed it on a monster. I mean that:
- It's a plausible interpretation of the art (which, frankly, is pretty, but not particularly clear) to say that all the defending Green Lanterns survived, if battered, meaning that Hal did not go on a "killing spree," which absolves him of most of the deaths;
- Sinestro's spirit was narrating, meaning that Hal's actual actions may have been exaggerated in the retelling; and
- Sinestro was technically a construct of the Guardians, so his death doesn't "really" count any more than a robot would, except in its psychological effect on Hal.
That leaves Kilowog, who was alive and Hal killed him on-panel. And I can't handwave that very far, but I should admit that didn't bemoan the passing of the worst Englehart creation ever.
However, in the previous years of stories, Hal was confronted with increasingly erratic dictates from the Guardians, who were also exerting more authority over the Green Lanterns. So I'm left wondering if there was a mind control aspect to the story, especially when Tomar-Re or even Hal talks about how he can't do anything else. It could have even been Sinestro, considering that Mosaic established those sorts of abilities against Stewart.
Anyway, my point is that the story was far more complicated than even the editors (and possibly Marz) realized, and the way to bring Hal back was to explore that and have him take responsibility and repent for his actions (even if under someone else's control), not just jump back with everything magically better.
Characters are just narrative tools to him, I think.
My inner child desperately needs to say that "Moore is a narrative tool!" in a petulant voice, just so you all know.
I think that's one of my big problems with him. He's not a creator. He wants to jump into everybody else's sandbox, kick around what everybody else has done, dictate a bunch of rules for everybody to follow, and then be left alone for not being given enough freedom.
In my line of work, people like that get fired, not held up as geniuses. Because they're not, any more than the dadaists were the geniuses of their generations.
I'm being harsh (and it's not directed at you), but he's just like Meltzer in that way, in that he doesn't actually contribute so much as tell the reader that everything else is trash.
Identity Crisis
I personally feel thier are potentially portions of the story that might be offensive to my daughter as a woman (kinda like Kyle Rayner's girlfriend stuffed in the fridge scene - gruesome). It isn't the the number of times the dialogue is asinine or the puny redherring crap we had to ferret our way through. It isn't the subplots...
IT IS the gruesome death of Sue (including the rape scene on the JLA Sattilight), her being pregnate, on Ralph's brithday and of course Ralph ultimate reaction.
It was horrid. You don't have to be a fan of either chara to see this as something that was simply pushed too far. It was disgusting and though I know horrible things happen in real life... this wasn't truely necessary in this medium.
I do get that. But I would have found it acceptable if it had been done well (whatever that may mean), it had been a good story (whatever that may mean, too), and it actually had some bearing on the story.
As it was, it was a combination of cartoonish and disgusting, bouncing around a cesspool of story idiocy, and turned out to be entirely irrelevant to the story Meltzer was telling.
And I'm serious, here. It could have been an intense story about how Sue and her friends had to deal with the effects of the rape over the years. It could have been a mystery story where the nature of her death and the graphic nature held clues that we were supposed to follow. It could have even been a straightforward hunt for a brutal killer and probable rapist and how the heroes try to live up to the term when they'd much rather torture him.
Any of those would have made it acceptable and, to use the earlier word, mature. In their place, we got an accidental case of poorly-motivated murder drenched in gore and sex for no real reason at all. To me, that's what makes it offensive: It didn't have any meaning other than to show it was permissible.
I apologize for jumping up and down on my soapbox.
But I don't apologize for feeling offended by the imagery, context of the story and the portions I mentioned.
I don't have a problem with it, and I agree. I'm just not as focused on the details because I can see the case for a graphic death scene or the inclusion of rape in a story, even about superheroes. But I most emphatically think that "Identity Crisis" wasn't it, because it only added shock, and not even for the sake of the story, but for the sake of the scene itself.
But I'm hard-pressed to think of a single ... Moore... creation, for example, that would make for viable dinner conversation.
Oh, I could ramble on at length in response to the many threads and topics you hit upon, John, but I'm limiting myself to just this one - since someone pointed it out to me while I was in Paris...
Can you actually name ONE Alan Moore "creation" that wasn't based on someone else's character/story? Try, and let me know what you come up with.
It really does depend, because you can argue how much is original and how much is "retroactively original." I mean, I know that he relies heavily on books like "Superfolks" for his plotlines, so I don't even find his stories particularly innovative when others might rave. Likewise, is "he looks like Sting" grounds for declaring unoriginality?
(And if that's the case, then are ANY comic book characters original? Superman borrows from Wylie and Burroughs. The Flash borrows from Wells. Submariner from maritime myth and maybe some Lovecraft. Captain Marvel draws from many myths. I admit that I've yet to find a literary or mythical super-soldier, so the Shield may be entirely original, though.)
So I'd say that Constantine fits the bill. Likewise Tom Strong and Promethea, even though they obviously derive from other sources, are characters he created that aren't direct copies of something else or empty receptacles waiting for someone else's story, like the Watchmen characters were.
Beyond that, and to the extent those aren't "legitimate answers," I can't think of anything.
