I’m disappointed. Issue 3 came out today and it turns out that Parallax is [spoiler]A yellow entity made of living fear that was born at the beginning of sentience. The guardians imprisoned him in the main battery, thus giving all the power rings before his release their impurity.
This leaves Hal Jordan (nearly?) blameless. On the downside, it looks like Parallax has taken over Hal and The Spectre.[/spoiler]
So the story has been retconned…but at least the art is beautiful.
Also, Sinestro is back. And if the preview for issue 4 is accurate, Ollie may use his Green Lantern ring to kick his ass. Thoughts?
[spoiler] Well, yeah, they’ve taken most of teh blame for Parallax away from Hal. I mean that was kind of the point of the series. Anyone could have brought him back from the dead (especially since he was only “undead” at the moment) and declared him GL again. What Johns set out for was to undo what he (and I, FTR) saw as one of DC’s biggest mistakes: warping a classic and beloved character into a mass murderer. Your acceptance of the story bends on whether or not you buy the explanation. And you know what, I buy it. Yellow Parallax is cool. And finally! An explanation for the yellow weakness besides “we don’t want the power to go to your heads”.
FWIW, I think Hal is still to blame for some of it. Parallax influenced him, but it wasn’t in the driver’s seat until after Hal entered the central battery. So Zero Hour (where Hal destroyed the universe) isn’t his fault, but Emerald Twilight (where Hal destroyed the GLC) should remain on his conscience. Now we just know why Hal was driven to do something so jaw-droppingly out of character. [/spoiler]
As for next cover, I don’t put much stock in covers. It’s obvious enough that Ollie’s gonna fight. But using the ring would be a mistake, given what Kyle just told him.
[spoiler]Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that they’re going to remove Hal’s responsibility further by indicating that Sinestro is responsible for awakening Parallax and directing Parallax to Hal. It makes sense, too, because it was Sinestro’s death that destroyed the original master power battery.
I like the linkage of yellow with fear…since cowardly people are called “yellow”, it adds another layer of meaning.[/spoiler]
I had my comics with my at work today - so I had to go ahead and quickly go through this issue.
Very nice. I think they’re addressing each and every little detail about the changes in the Corps over the year. If they cover the backstory with Alan Scott’s ring (and somehow, I think they might) then this is going to be a solid miniseries.
Remember Emerald Dawn, the series about Hal’s introduction to the corp. and their battle with the entity called Legion? In that story Hal entered the central battery and absorbed enough power to defeat Legion by himself. I wonder if Parallax sensed him then and established some sort of link which it was only able to use to manipulate Hal after (a) the central battery was destroyed and (b) Hal was so emotionally affected by the destruction of Coast City.
I haven’t read #3 yet, but at the end of #2 I had figured Parallax was something inside the central battery that had taken control (at least partially) of Hal.
Rebirth doesn’t have to “fix” the original Parallax story by taking away all the consequences of it. You may not have liked what happened to Hal, but it still made him a much more in depth character and was one the most interesting events in DC history. Hal may have already redeemed himself by being the Spectre, but having to work at gaining the trust of other heroes would’ve made for some great stories.
Green Lanterns can basically do whatever they will to happen, and having the greatest of them fall like Hal did was a perfect reminder of why they shouldn’t play god with their powers. Instead, we’re just left with a really good excuse caused by a fuck up. A great retcon is still a retcon, and Johns missed a great opportunity.
A “Hal goes nuts” story could, conceivably have been done well, but the mess that was EMERALD TWILIGHT wasn’t. The only way it made sense was if you ignore everything we knew about the character of Hal Jordan AND everything that had happened in the previous couple of years in the book AND ignore the basic “rules” of the book. I’m not talking continuity-geek type stuff dealing with one panel of one issue 23 years prior, I’m talking about ignoring basic, basic stuff (on the level of “Superman comes from Krypton, not Rann.” level basic stuff) as well as directly contraditing (without explanation) stuff that occured in the previous few issues and basic character traits.
Gerard Jones, just prior to Emerald Twilight had spent like 8 issues having Hal come to grips with Coast City’s destruction. Having Hal do a 180 and suddenly go nuts over it without explaination was just stooopid. Unless he’s posessed. Then it all makes sense.
Green Lantern rings channel willpower. There is (and has never been) an upper limit on a ring beyond the limits of the user’s will. Why, then, would Hal snuff all those GLs to get their rings? “More Rings” + “Same Willpower” does not equal “more power” any more than poking holes in a firehose makes more water pressure.
Hal killing GLs, however nuts he may have been, is simply out of character. It would be like Superman going nuts and becoming a child-molester. If Hal was to go nuts, it would be a “Duty, honor, corps” kind of nuts (turning into a Patton type for example)–not a “MAD!? YOU DARE CALL ME BWAHAHAHA! MAD?!” type nuts. It didn’t add “depth” to his character, it completely rewrote it into something that hadn’t existed at all in the previous 30(ish) years.
Personally, I’m loving this series: it’s undoing much of the Kevin Dooley inspired stupidity (he’s the editor who said that having more than one GL would “confuse” readers. He’s also the editor who kicked Peter David off Aquaman because David’s Aquaman wasn’t edgy enough–David has some…< cough > unkind things to say about Dooley), it’s undoing some of the really bad mid-1980’s retcons (Usedta be that the ring was simply allergic to yellow because of a…a mechanical/chemical/engineering flaw in the ring-making process–but if you fixed the flaw the rings stopped working. Somewhere in the mid-'80s, the benevolent Guardians became eeee-vil facists who’d intentionally added the yellow impurity to keep the GLs in line. :rolleyes: This is akin to a city intentionally sending cops out with defective bullets–cause they might throw their weight around otherwise and this’ll keep 'em in line. ) and it all kinda fits–the “Parallax in the Battery” thing has great '60s feel to it too!
And the (I assume) return of the yellow weakness will make the writers stop having to have the characters lose the ring since it’s pretty much limitless otherwise.
One thing I’m hoping is that they leave Kyle around. There’s room for multiple Green Lanterns and under Grant Morrison and other writers he’s evolved from his wussy “Oh golly Captain Marvel/Batman/Superman/Little Boy Blue/'Mazing Man/Arms-Fall-Off Lad, can you tell me really and for true that I’m an honest-to-gosh hero?” beginnings into a really good, strong, interesting, likable character. Plus I really like the Wally/Kyle (and the Kyle/Um…wasshisname-Green Arrow Junior) interactions. Hell, if necessary, rename him Ion and keep him around. I really like the Nightwing (all growed up sidekick with his own identity), Flash (all growed up sidekick taking on his mentor’s ID), Green Arrow (never a sidekick, but taking the father he never knew’s ID) and Green Lantern (never a sidekick and thrust into the role randomly) dynamic. That whole third generation of heroes thing was neat and if they snuff Kyle, they’ll undermine it.
I’m really liking this so far. I can’t wait to see where they take this (aside from the obvious with Hal), especially in Kyle’s storyline. He’s kicking more Parallax ass than any other GL just by being able to resist it.
For me, the backstory with Alan Scott’s ring will always be ‘It was a mystical stone that fell to earth in ancient China. It is unrelated to the Guardians or the GL Corps in any way.’
I don’t remember where I got this from, but it was explained that he only thought the other rings gave him more power. It could have been speculation from some other forum though.
Johns said Kyle fans won’t be disappointed, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
I missed where it had been said that the yellow weakness was deliberate. It makes vastly more sense to suppose that it’s the 24-hour time limit that was deliberately imposed, for the following reasons:
-It’s sensible that the Guardians would limit the damage that could be done by a stolen or ursurped power ring (which happened amazingly often). The 24-hour limit is inconvenient but not extraordinarily so to careful, responsible Lanterns. Giving the rings an otherwise pointless weakness harms the Lanterns and does nothing to prevent misuse.
-in one old story, Hal for some reason was trying to deliberately exhaust his ring before the time limit, but couldn’t. He said something to the effect of “the ring limits the maximum output so it can’t run dry in less than 24 hours”. This suggests that the rings have some very large (but not infinite) power reserve.
-Kyle’s ring (and Guy Gardner’s yellow ring) were both capacity limited rather than time limited.
