We dropped a couple of bombs on Japan and they quit, pretty much overnight.
Your IMO, is just that. However I strongly disagree on Green Lantern. Green lantern’s vulerabilty to wood wasn’t well known and he has the power to level just about anything.
http://www.comictreadmill.com/CTMBlogarchives/2003/2003_Individual/2003_12/000143.php
They surrendered after two atomic bombs that followed on years of conventional bombing and (including their activities in China) over a decade of war. What do you picture GL doing that wasn’t done to the Japanese in real life with conventional weapons? It goes without saying that in any work of fiction, the Japanese will surrender because the script calls for them to do so, of course.
You’re asking what people would do if they had freaking super-powers, yet balk at the ‘fiction’ of a similar character, because it doesn’t jive with real life?
If you can’t have fun with a comic book thread; then why bothering creating it? If you want to talk about super-powers seriously, I predict lots of dead threads in your future.
peace.
Unbunch your panties. All I’m asking you to do is to play scriptwriter for a moment and come up with a “believable” scenario where Golden Age Green Lantern causes Imperial Japan to surrender. Try to make it a scenario that remains true to the character as he was written at the time.
Nitpick, I thought the SoD would cause any hero either mystically based (e.g. Wonder Woman, Doctor Fate, The Spectre) or vulnerable to mysticism (e.g. Superman) to become evil and fall into service to the Nazi cause if such a hero entered into territory held by Germany and/or the Axis.
As for the ability of one or more of the various heroes to stop or alter WW2, imagine what the effect on Japan of seeing the Emperor cryng like a little bitch after being smacked around by Wonder Woman would have been? Or the chaos that would have ensued had Batman slipped into Germany and assassinated Hitler and other high-ranking party members and military leaders?
Look I don’t have to play scriptwriter. We already have a work created by Roy Thomas, one of the best comic book writers ever. I gave you a link to a brief breakdown of the story. Here’s another, it even has a analysis.
http://www.quarterbin.net/politics/pol20.html You don’t think it’s believable fine. Read it and tell me why, then we can have a discussion…that’s my base. You have a better scenario, let’s hear it.
Assumpting it wasn’t an illusion by Brain Wave, I fail to see Japan continuing to fight after the damage Green Lantern unleashed.
GL from out of range of naval artillery sinks every Japanese ship sailing the Pacific three days after Pearl Harbor, thus destroying Japan’s ability to wage a naval war or an air war.
GL flies into Japan and decimates its munitions factories, railroads, surface roads, etc, crippling its ability to wage a land war.
GL snatches up the Imperial Family and delivers them to the Allied forces.
Bereft of its ability to wage war on land, sea or air and with its spiritual leader a prisoner, Japan surrenders.
:: Devil’s Advocate Hat On ::
Alan Scott might, after great difficulty, after a period of several days in between fitful sleeping and eating locate and destroy Japan’s wartime navy. You mentioned nothing of submarines, which I therefore assume they all escaped unharmed to immediately target civillain and military installations along America’s west coast.
While THAT was going on, no doubt steps would have been taken to relocate munitions stockpiles immediately to conquered regions of mainland China and step up production there.
And no doubt Japanese military officials would sequester the Imperial Family immediately.
While Green Lantern’s weakness wasn’t well known, it was a matter of public record – therefore I surmise a sensible reaction would be for Japanese spies to relay information quickly back to Japan command about the GL’s weakness to wood. Countermeasures are swiftly put in place: Kamakaize pilots are given wooden payloads to aerially bombard Alan Scott with sharped chopsticks and tiny wooden acupuncture needles. Tragically GL dies pincushioned by the deadly accuracy of the wily Japanese; his remains are ingested by a slumbering Godzilla, now imbued with the Green Flame, and in a fit of unprecedented patriotism, marches forth from Japanese fishing waters to lay the smackdown on Los Angeles.
What, you thought I could only do this stuff with Batman?
at least he tries, before he can fly off a young, comic-relief kitchen servant beats the tar out of him with a nearby bokan.
I read that when it came out. Like most modern-era tales of Golden Age characters, it isn’t true to the characters as they were originally written. They are written to play to the modern audience.
I’ve already stated my piece, but I’ll go over it again for you.
If you don’t want to share what ideas of your own you might have, that’s fine with me; but frankly I don’t give a wet, runny shit what Roy Thomas said.
How are those prescription pants fitting?
The interesting thing is that Superman’s 1938-level powers are actually within the realm of possibility. Give someone carbon nanotuble based bones and connective tissue. Shield critical areas with harder-than-diamond beta carbon nitride. Make the fundamental biochemistry more efficient so that the energy demands on heart and lungs are tolerable. Tune up the nervous system to the point where, like a cheetah, you can move your legs fast enough to run at 70 mph. Add internal reenforcement to organs like the brain to make them more shock resistant. You could end up with a person twenty times stronger and fifty times tougher than an unengineered human.
Unstoppable war machine sounds like a pretty good job.
Green Lantern picks up tons of incendiary bombs—possibly from a base within the continental U.S.—with the ring, flies them to Japan, and drops them on any city he pleases. Then repeats. Or, if he can, he just sets them on fire with the ring.
That’s just the first thing I thought of, and it brings up a point—maybe it wouldn’t be more destructive than conventional weaponry, but he could do it instead of and in addition to conventional means. Think if the U.S. didn’t have to divert resources to building as many bombers and munitions, taking as many forward air bases, or manning aircraft?
Or the more specialized missions…“GL? Be a dear and hurl this bomb into the Möhne Dam at mach one, if you would. Or airlift the 101st airborne directly into position in Normandy.”
Maybe he wouldn’t make them surrender within days, but he could probably hasten the end a whole hell of a lot.
The biggest problem with Golden Era characters isn’t their power level, but the imagination of their creators. GL has the most powerful weapon at his disposal. One that can create anything and has one weakness. He uses it to create giant fists with boxing gloves on. He makes baseball bats and spheres. WTF?
He doesn’t have to land on Japan to level it. Japan is on a major fault line, push the tectonic plates and Japan is rocked by earthquakes, keep pushing and Japan sinks into the sea. They surrender.
Superman is pointed at Berlin and destroys everything in his path. He doesn’t have to sleep or eat. Unlike bombers he doesn’t have to return to refuel or to replace downed planes. All he has to do is destroy everything in his path. Destroy supply lines, Dams and bridges, tunnels and railroads and kill every member of the German High Command he can find. How can you fight a war, with an Ubermensch smashing his way across your country?
He can leap 1/8 of mile. He can run 120 mph for the long haul, and 1100 mph for the extremely short sprint (faster than a speeding bullet). He can deadlift 54 tons, roughly the weight of a heavy armored tank. He could jerk 32 tons, and squat 48 and a half tons.
You don’t see Berlin in ruins? Now imagine him with Allied Troops behind him…
Everything you say is perfectly true using modern ideas about the Golden Age characters. Whether you want to chalk it up to unimaginative writers or just to it being pre-power creep times, in those days GL didn’t have the “most powerful weapon” at his disposal. Superman, likewise, was still at a point, power-wise, where a hit from a weapon like a Flak 88 wasn’t something he’d casually shrug off. All the heroes fought criminals and mad scientists for the most part; and those villains were enough to provide “believable” challenges issue after issue. So, suddenly, guys for whom bank robbers require some effort are going to bring an entire industrialized nation to its knees? I’m not buying it.
Plate tectonics were not discovered until the 1960’s, so I doubt the GL could push on something he doesn’t know exist. 
Still, I agree with your basic point - a small number of super beings of the golden era characters power levels, could have dramatically shifted the course of the war. Superman could have pretty easily infliltraded Germany, and simply grapped Hitler, and haul him back to England to hold in prison, and then repeated the process for other Nazi high officials - hell, when the war is just about over, grab Stalin too, makes the post war situation easier to deal with.
Or the GL could use his power to dig a couple secret tunnels under the English channel, and let Allied forces come pouring out in undefended portions of France, behind the Atlantic defenses. If the US and other western Allies can beat the war sooner, then you have Russia overrunning less of Eastern Europe, or Northern China/Korea, which means a radically altered Cold War.
Just thought I’d add that WRT Golden Age GL, something as simple as issuing wooden bullets to the defense forces puts him out of the picture.
[translated from Japanese] When you see the guy in the garish costume who flies and makes big green boxing gloves, switch to this ammo and open up on him with everything you have. [/translated from Japanese]
It also occurs to me that since, in the world of the Golden Age comics, mad scientists were such a pervasive and “real” threat/challenge for the heros, there is no reason to suspect that such malevolent geniuses would not work for the Axis powers.
All of which is just to say that there was no real need to write some asinine ret-con about why the JSA didn’t win WWII.
What does that mean? GL’s ring had clearly defined abilities. It could create anything Alan Scott could imagine and had the will power to maintain. That makes it, the most powerful weapon at the time…regardless of whether or not he used it to it’s full potential…regardless of whether the writers understood what they had created.
Your argument seems to be, that because the writers weren’t able to have Superman smash the Axis, (due to the reality of the real war) and had to have the Super-heroes, fight the “mob”, renders the actualization of the characters ultilizing their full potential unbelievable or modern.
The writers crippled their characters and you only see them as crippled. I don’t, because I understand why they did it.
The truth is really simple: They realized that dropping the JSA into WW2 would end the war. Hell Dr. Fate or The Spectre could do it single handed and they did fight more than just thugs.
So why come up with the Spear of Destiny? They realized:
a.They would be insulting the lifes of real soldiers who didn’t have super-powers and were dying…by having “Super-men” end the war in weeks or even days. Especially as the war was still going with no end in sight. How’s that going to play?
b. The medium’s purpose was to entertain. It’s more fun to have Superman fighting robots in one comic, than to have him “realistically” fighting with the ground troops for 3, 4, 5 years…where’s the escapism in that?
The only way it makes sense is for the characters to be prevented from fighting. Anything else, defeats the purpose of having Super-heroes.
What I find amazing is that you find those stories of the Golden Age, “believable” and you give the writers a pass for having bank robbers able to hold off Superman. Without the forced limitations on his abilities due to the nature of the medium, he wouldn’t have trouble with bank robbers and would be able to bring an industrialized nation to it’s knees. In time. With support.
The Golden Age writers didn’t “cripple” their characters. They imagined them with certain attributes. To the writers in that pre-supersonic jet, pre-spaceflight, pre-atomic bomb age the powers they imagined seemed pretty darn super. Modern writers pen their scripts with modern sensibilities and knowledge of technology.
How super is it to let bullets bounce off your chest when the fat local cop with a kevlar vest can do the same thing?
How super is it to run 70 mph when any car or motorcycle can do the same thing?
How super is it to have a ring that will let you scoop up hundreds of gallons of water to dump on a forest fire when a helicopter will do the same thing?
How super is it to punch through the side of an armored vehicle when the raggedy guerilla soldier with an RPG can do the same thing?
How super is it to see in the dark when a cheap, surplus set of Russian NV goggles will let anyone do the same thing?
Modern era writers continually “upgun” the power level of characters because what would have impressed a 1930’s audience won’t do the same for a modern audience. Fine so far. The Golden Age writers, for the most part, didn’t have their characters run off and single-handedly win WWII. I see no pressing need to ret-con that.
Finally, please try to remember that Superman, GL, et. al. are just fictional characters. You almost seem to think they’re real when you make statements like
“Forced limitations?” His powers, then, were what the writers said they were. His powers, now, are what they writers say they are.
After all that, I think I’ll take my original point several steps farther and just state that ret-conning in general is asinine.