A Thing that looks like a Police Box, standing in a Junkyard….
It can move anywhere in Time and Space….
“…..it shifts shape again and comes up in the form of Christ The Carpenter,
and Says,
“Do You Know Me?”
and Kirk said,
“Oh, now I know Who You Are.”
And He Says,
‘How Strange You Didn't Know
These Other Forms of Me.’
Really, what Gene had written was that this 'thing' was sent forth to lay down The Law; to communicate The Law of The Universe, and that as time goes on The Law needs to be reinterpreted.
And at that time 2,000 years ago, The Law was interpreted by this Carpenter image. As time went on, The Law was meant to be reinterpreted, and The Christ figure was meant to reappear in different forms.
But This Machine malfunctioned, and it was like a phonograph record that got caught in a groove and kept grooving back, grooving back, grooving back. It's important to understand the essence of all this and reinterpret it as time goes on.
This was a little heavy for Paramount. It was meant to be strong and moving, and I'm sorry it never got made."
"I handed them a script and they turned it down," Roddenberry stated.
“As we wrap up here and I sweep my head clear at last of all things Green Lantern, one reader (hi, Colin McKenzie!) talked about feeling understandably uncomfortable with the ‘cop’ aspect, the stated ‘police procedural’ nature of the book, particularly at a time when in both the USA and the UK way too many policemen were being caught overstepping their bounds in horrific ways.
I grew up with a deep distrust of the police; the police dragged my dad from sit-ins and demonstrations, the police threw him in jail, the police turned up at the door to threaten him. I was raised with a working-class distrust of authority that is generations thick. It took a while to cure myself of instinctively flinching at the sight of a squad car and feeling immediately guilty in the presence of the Boys in Blue.
As I grew older, as I made more effort to take people as they come and give them the benefit of the doubt without prejudice, I met a few police who seemed okay sorts, decent types. Fuck only knows what it took to retain their Humanity in a culture that has been exposed again and again of late as a cesspit of Wrong but I was able to relate to them, have a laugh, and get on as with normal people. They do exist among the ranks.
Nevertheless, it’s hardly controversial to point out that police on Earth are often corrupt, often on the take, often as happy to enforce unjust laws as they are to ignore the law altogether. In short, my last inclination would be to valorize the police in my work.
Were I to write a story about policing in our real world, I would of necessity be compelled to examine some fairly grimy corners of the human experience, it’s true.
The Green Lantern Corps, being fictional, can comprise a finer caliber of polisman! The Rules of the DC Universe allow for the existence of a genuinely trustworthy, honorable, courageous and selfless form of cosmic law enforcement and those were the rules Liam and I chose to play by.
When I decided to approach The Green Lantern as a police procedural in the style of a weekly TV show then, I was borrowing the format and translating it into a science fiction context, rather than attempting to make any meaningful comment about the real life nature of policing on planet Earth which, as is the case with so much human activity tends to exemplify what happens when stupidity, brutality and prejudice are given free license and dangerous weaponry.
Nor was I using the opportunity to comment on the way cop shows romanticize or fetishize law enforcement. I was trying to use cop show tropes to demonstrate what might be the same and what was very, very different about regular policemen compared to Green Lanterns.
Our ‘re-imagining’ of police procedural began with the Guardians of the Universe, the council of blue-skinned immortals overseeing the activities of the Green Lantern Corps. In the past, the Guardians had often been portrayed as geriatric, out of touch, bureaucratic or authoritarian but Liam and I chose to take a different track and to portray them as wise sci-fi monks with an ancient profound understanding of how the universe really works.
Our Guardians are supremely attuned masters born of an unimaginably ancient race of sages. The ‘laws’ they administer correspond to the Hindu concept of Dharma or the Chinese ‘Tao’, ‘the Way’ or ‘Road’ of Zen.
It takes Olympian suspension of disbelief to imagine an authority that is entirely benign, selfless and still effective - such a chimera does not exist on our planet except in our stories – but the attempt to put aside the constraints of the human condition and actually think about how a cosmic law and order enforcement agency might function without falling prey to the problems of earthly policing can be, if nothing else, instructive and gave us our context for the Green Lantern Corps.
Jordan’s twisty character bio saw him begin life as a glamorous test pilot before deciding to chuck it all in and sell insurance. The insurance gig lasted only until Jordan decided that the wandering life of a toy salesman was the natural next step.
Jordan’s writer, my hero John Broome, gave Hal the soul of the Beat Generation, imprinting a rootless, searching-for-America restlessness that became the foundation for various takes, including our examination of the character. Considering Hal Jordan in the round, it was easy for Liam and I to emphasize his Beat nature and amplify his cosmic Kerouac, Dharma Bum dimensions!
To call the Green Lanterns ‘cops’ is simply to translate into comprehensible terms what they really are which is some combination of knight errant/sheriff/Beat cop/area manager and more…
There is always another story to be told using these characters, of course, one that more closely comments on or reflects events in the real world but that wasn’t our story in this case and the general OTT extravagance of our approach would, I suspect, have been more inclined to trivialize serious contemporary issues.
Thankfully, my job no longer depends on pondering these and other such imponderables on a daily basis!
As peers and admirers alike stood in line to congratulate Hal Jordan on his achievements, he quietly slipped away in a blaze of emerald into the shadows of space without any great fanfare and so too I made my exit into the aether, the either and the other.
Liam switched to illustrating Batman: Reptilian from Garth Ennis scripts, while writing and drawing his own spectacular graphic novel series Starhenge, (the first remarkable volume The Dragon and the Boar will be available from Image Comics on July 6 - if you liked where Liam was going in the latter issues of The Green Lantern, this is the fabulous flowering of those experiments – Arthurian Celtic Futurism barely covers its scope).
As for Hal Jordan, he flashed that wry grin, thumbed another ride and took to the Road once more, passing out of our stewardship as he’d passed in turn through the hands of John Broome, Denny O’Neill and Geoff Johns among many others. Forever young, self-assured and iron-willed, he lives on, reinterpreted through the personal filters of future creative teams for as long as his IP delivers on the balance sheet!
Reading through it all again for this retrospective, I’m proud of our work on The Green Lantern and look back on it fondly. I think the whole thing – including Season 1, the Annual, Blackstars and Season 2 – hangs together as a tight and complete portrait of a complex, contradictory veteran character who’s seen and done it all.
Despite the intrusion of doubt and loss, the entire enterprise was driven by a spirit of relaxed imaginative play and a desire on the parts of Liam and I to goad one another to new heights of invention.
My own work on The Green Lantern Season 2 – especially the somewhat scrappy experiments on my part in the final two issues - encouraged me to go deeper into those seeming flaws and mistakes in search of inspiration and new energy, which then gave rise to the Xanaduum project with its focus on fragmentation, collage, compressed information, charged symbolic imagery and textual overload.
Season 2’s nimble response to bad times and painful feelings, its willingness to adapt and try different things, its privileging of art over commerce showed me where to go next with my comics.
Liam and I had creative freedom and a joyful working relationship on a book where anything could happen and very often did, and the result, we hope, is a thematically tight collection of interlocking short stories that add up to a timeless portrayal of Hal Jordan as we saw him after his decades of character development.
Although my last extended run on a monthly superhero comic sometimes felt like one of Jordan’s test flights – a full throttle take-off and climb to altitude, wing flex, pulling Gs, busting through harsh turbulence up there on the edge of the sky, followed by a steep white-knuckle landing that called for a bit of improvisation and imagination to bring the bird home – in the end, The Green Lantern worked thanks to the absolute trust Liam and I had in one another’s divine madness!
Sexcelsior!
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