In the last year, DC Comics has finally wised up. For years Marvel has been putting out their "Essential" series...huge volumes of black-and-white reprints of essential comics--The Essential Fantastic Four, The Essential Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men, etc. DC has finally caught on to this idea with their "Showcase Presents" series, and has started with 500+ page volumes of inexpensive reprints of some classic runs of their best-known characters, including Superman, Teen Titans, the Justice League, and Green Lantern.

I was skeptical at first of this Green Lantern volume, because even though I love the character and the idea behind the character--an galactic space corps, each a superhero in their own right, each with a "power ring" that gives them the ability to fly and create energy constructs fueled by their willpower--I was worried that the book would come across as too cheesy forty years after being published. I was also worried that the black and white format wouldn't work as well for stories that depended on color. Green Lantern's only weakness was that his power ring was powerless against anything yellow--and that comes up quite a bit in these stories. Thankfully, the sometimes redundant text made those instances clear, and if anything I was impressed at how "modern" many of these 1959-1962 stories were.

"Green Lantern" was a recycled title for a superhero--the first one was named Alan Scott, who was created in 1940, and was active until the 1950's. Writer John Broome and artist Gil Kane took the bare bones of the character--the name and the idea of a magic ring, and changed it from being a mystical concept to a scientific--or science-fiction, at least--superhero.

I was surprised at how many of Green Lantern's classic characters and premises came about in the first few years of the series. Things that I thought would have developed over decades were here whole-cloth, and show just how rich the creativity of Broome and Kane were. Some examples of what you'll find in these stories:

Hal's Character
Everything about him seems to be well thought-out, and more fleshed out than most other superheroes of the period. Everything from his day job as a test pilot to his family--he has two brothers, who show up fairly often in the book--is more well-rounded than you'd think. I know people often cite Green Lantern as being a tipping point for comic books, creating more realistic, three-dimensional characters...but I didn't realize that this process started so early in the character's run.

Carol Ferris
Carol is Hal Jordan and Green Lantern's love interest, and she's also Hal's boss. Complicated? Yes. Carol is more than a one-note character mooning over Green Lantern--she's one of the strongest female characters in comics of this time period, and can come across as too much of a ball-buster. She also has her first appearance as Star Sapphire towards the end of this volume--one of Green Lantern's primary villains.

Tom Kalmaku
Hal Jordan's mechanic--and although he's an Inuit ("Eskimo") and usually referred to as "Pieface," he's a well-rounded character. You could think of him as Jimmy Olsen, but I'd say he's even more well-rounded than Jimmy is. He's also the only person who knows Green Lantern's secret, and is able to back Hal up on several cases. He's an enjoyable character, and not the one-note awkwardly racist depiction that some other minorities of the same time period are.

The Green Lantern Corps
By 1961, we see that Hal Jordan is only one of hundreds of Green Lanterns--a sort of space police force that each has their own part of the galaxy to watch over. Kane gives these aliens beautiful designs, and some of them are still around as aliens in the DC Universe today. My favorites are still Tomar Re, a birdlike alien with a crested head and beaked face, and a crystalline ball with tentacled arms and a mohawk, here called simply "the Green Lantern of Barrio III."

Guardians of the Universe
Within the first year of publication, we meet the "police chiefs" of the Green Lanterns--the Guardians of the Universe. Three-feet tall and blue faced, wearing red robes, they control unimaginable power, and are capable of almost anything. They're also a little too mysterious, only telling the Green Lanterns what they need to know to do their jobs, not the overall reasoning behind them.

Sinestro
This is Green Lantern's archenemy, and although we meet Sonar, Hector Hammond, and other villains in this volume, Sinestro is the one who turns up most often. This is another case where I was impressed with his fully-formed characterization even from his first appearance. He used to be a Green Lantern, but the power went to his head and he enslaved the planet he was supposed to be protecting. Since then he forged an alliance with the "Weaponers of Qward," an antimatter parallel universe. They eventually build a new power ring for Sinestro, who's able to use it to fight Green Lantern with yellow energy, just as GL uses green. Sinestro's ongoing vendetta against Hal Jordan and the other Green Lanterns are entertaining, and are some of the best stories in the book.

Overall, this is a better book than I thought it would be. I bought it out of some kind of misplaced archival obligation, but I really enjoyed the stories. The Green Lantern stories were some of the first in comic books to make use of arcs instead of being standalone stories, and events in one story will have an impact further down the road. This makes the characters more believeable, and the cumulative history of Hal Jordan's adventures makes him more impressive as a superhero.

The artwork is also a notch above most comic books of the period--even in black and white, Gil Kane's work is impressive. He breaks the artwork out of the static 6 panel-pages that were the standard at the time, and often uses long panoramic panels to show Green Lantern in flight. The alien creatures and planetscapes Kane draws are beautiful (and would be more so in color), and it's telling that his design for the Green Lantern uniform is still the one being used by DC Comics today.

If you're a Green Lantern fan from cartoons, but you've never seen him in action in the comic books, this is the place to start. There are dozens of other Green Lantern books out there, but this is the original stories, and some of the best. To understand why Green Lantern is one of the world's greatest superheroes, start at the beginning.

MORE DC COMICS "SHOWCASE PRESENTS" VOLUMES

Superman Volume 1

Justice League of America Volume 1


Recommended: Yes