I’m glad I missed that era. It doesn’t even make sense in the Green Lantern world to pick a non-caring, self-absorbed asshole like that for the Corps.
The Lantern Corps are literally space cops. They get written as jerks kind of a lot.
Got it. My experience was from the Hal Jordan comics, and then the Green Lantern movie, where they were portrayed as very noble.
Fundamentally, the GL rings (which are kind of sentient) choose people who have tremendous willpower, as that’s the emotion/quality which a Green Lantern uses to wield a ring. My understanding is that the rings won’t choose someone who is flat-out evil or a criminal. Some Green Lanterns are heroic and noble (John Stewart, another GL from Earth, is arguably even more so than Hal is), while others are…less so.
They made Guy (who had been around, as a “backup” GL, since the late '60s) into a jerk in the 1980s “Justice League International” series, and that generally stuck. He’s loyal, he does generally do heroic things, and he does have great willpower…but he is also an ass.
Wasn’t it a running gag that all the ladies love Jimmy? I dunno if that’s a canonical thing, but they made an effort to show it, so at least they laid some groundwork to explain why Ms. Teschmacher would have hot pants for Jimmy.
Not enough willpower to not be an asshole, I guess.
Guy’s major plus is that he’s totally fearless. Sometimes you need someone like that. Is he an ass? Of course. Did he get one-punched by Batman? Yes he did. But he’s a lot more interesting because of it.
Since, at least, the Silver Age. While in pursuit of Lucy Lane, his efforts were often stymied by the beautiful women pursuing him.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this movie is the way it embraces the Silver Age zaniness of Superman - Krypto, the Superman robots, the Hall of Justice, pocket universes, kaiju Stitch, an evil clone of Superman, etc.
Perhaps in the sequel Jimmy Olson can get turned into a gorilla or we can get Kandor or Comet the Super-Horse or different colored kryptonites that give Superman weird rainbow powers.
I watched it on a plane trip on Sunday. It was enjoyable, and I really like some of the choices they made, but it’s not really a top notch movie in my eyes. A lot of things were introduced that a non-comic fan would miss, and that comic fans probably have mixed emotions about.
All that being said, I’m expecting to watch the next one.
But he’s supposed to just be “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man”…
That’s one reason I usually like the original version of superheroes. They start out with real personalities, and real problems (one reason Spidey stood out, especially to kids raised on Superman).
And even Supes started out fighting corrupt businessmen and mob bosses. None of whom were building satellites with giant slingshots to destroy the moon…
What? You didn’t like Super-Knitting?
Even as a kid, I hated the comics where he’d perform brain surgery after skimming a dozen books (“Your Scalpel: Use The Pointy End”?)
And how the hell did Super-Ventriliquism work? People would hear the bad guy’s voice shouting orders from the opposite direction…
The list got more and more absurd in the Silver Age…
One reason why I like the 1978 Superman, is that he does just that to start.
I mean, Lex Luthor is fundamentally just a corrupt businessman writ large.
I’ve seen pointed out a few times that Superman and Batman should swap archnemeses. Superman could fly the Joker to a prison on the Moon with no guards for him to corrupt, and Batman could use his detective skills and knowledge of high finance to find the evidence that nails Luthor to the wall.
Executing Mali seemed out of character for Luthor as portrayed in this movie, but he’s obviously willing to kill many people to get his way.
I love this spin on it.
That was very enjoyable.
You’ll be happy to know that they’re developing a Jimmy Olsen spin-off series, and the main antagonist will be General Grodd.
Isn’t Grodd more of a Flash baddie?
Yeah, the constant deus ex machina of Superman revealing some heretofore-unknown-power in every story to get out of a bind really made a lot of those stories worse than they needed to be. It didn’t help that even with his super-brain he constantly found himself in ridiculously stupid situations he should have seen from a mile away.
As I think I mentioned previously, I liked that in Byrne’s Man of Steel era he at least tried to inject some semblance of plausibility. No more super-intelligence, no indestructible costume (instead I think Clark projected some sort of near-field forcefield that protected his clothing? A good way to explain away why he ran around in his undies.)
Also I think Byrne was the first to propose a “levitation field” that lets Clark fly with monstrously heavy objects without the object just snapping/breaking at the point of contact.