Is Volume 3 tainted (retroactively) by Gerard Jones?

[Michael Heide]

Not if it has to lower down the character to scum in order to make way for improvement.

[Trey Strain]

In television show or a comic, you normally can't put a protagonist through a character arc, which is what you do in a movie. The only place you can do it in a television show or a comic is in the origin story. There it's a perfectly valid thing to do.

[Michael Heide]

It's the same "we have to make the hero become a better person at the end of his origin story" problem that the Man of Steel and Shazam movies had. Conventional wisdom tells us that a character cannot be perfect from the start, even when 80 years of comic books tell a different story. So the characters like Hal, Clark and Billy Batson artficially get flaws (drunk driving, doesn't know that you shouldn't prove your enemies right by killing them, not being worthy of the power of Shazam) that they can then conveniently overcome over the course of the story (or stories, in the case of Superman).

It's lazy shorthand. Instead of trying to make the character better at the end of the story, they make them worse at the start, so the status quo they've always had is the new end point of their arc.

[Big Blue Lantern]

So it kind of comes back to, "it makes Hal less perfect." No?

"Less than perfect" doesn't do justice to the severity of the issue. This isn't something like Barry Allen's bad time management. The defining characteristic of a GL is his/her will. That means the mind of the wielder must be clear and focused. During the HTH era, we saw what happens when drug use is mixed with a thought-based weapon. If Hal couldn't even properly handle the responsibility of a vehicle, how in the world did the CPB arrive at the conclusion that he was at a place in his life to handle thought-based power?

Quite right. Drunk drivers and the alcoholism associated with are a special sort of disgusting, none of which have any place in a Hal Jordan origin story. Next they will probably tell us Hal was a bully in school.

Indeed, it made for a unnecessarily rocky start to a story that ultimately had some solid parts. I don't have a problem with GLs making mistakes due to an abundance of self-assurance, but Emerald Dawn's storyline was a futile attempt to be edgy.

And speaking of mistakes, I've completely derailed this thread. Sorry about that, Andrew.

[Trey Strain]

Quite right. Drunk drivers and the alcoholism associated with are a special sort of disgusting, none of which have any place in a Hal Jordan origin story. Next they will probably tell us Hal was a bully in school.

https://www.alcoholproblemsandsoluti...drunk-driving/

[HalFingJordan]

Yes, he served his sentence and he eventually seemed contrite, but that was the absolute wrong way to go about a story like this. GLs aren't given powers by accident, they're chosen for their mental and moral make-ups. Granted, that's somewhat vague and there has been different interpretations of what it means, but the GL concept doesn't mesh with a character who severely overindulges, then acts like a child when he does harm to others. Hal was a mess when the ring found him, not someone who had gone through a period of self-reflection, fixed his mistakes, and brought out the best version of himself. It was just so cringeworthy.

And I certainly applaud your effort to open your friend's eyes to the gravity of that kind of behavior.

Quite right. Drunk drivers and the alcoholism associated with are a special sort of disgusting, none of which have any place in a Hal Jordan origin story. Next they will probably tell us Hal was a bully in school.

[Andrew NDB]

Yes, he served his sentence and he eventually seemed contrite, but that was the absolute wrong way to go about a story like this. GLs aren't given powers by accident, they're chosen for their mental and moral make-ups.

So it kind of comes back to, "it makes Hal less perfect." No?

[Trey Strain]

This brings up something I'd change if I were in charge of the property. The CPB should pick the Green Lanterns, and its choices should sometimes seem incongruous. That way, nobody would have a cow if a Lantern wasn't perfect all the time.

Perfect people aren't good subjects for stories. They're not even interesting.

[Big Blue Lantern]

^I’m no fan of drunk driving* and it’s been decades since I read ED, but doesn’t it end with him volunteering for his sentence even though he has the power to just leave?

*A friend of mine was once trying to tell me how worried she was she was losing her girlfriend one time that she rushed over to her place under the influence. I think she got mad at me as I explained I didn’t find that stuff funny,

Yes, he served his sentence and he eventually seemed contrite, but that was the absolute wrong way to go about a story like this. GLs aren't given powers by accident, they're chosen for their mental and moral make-ups. Granted, that's somewhat vague and there has been different interpretations of what it means, but the GL concept doesn't mesh with a character who severely overindulges, then acts like a child when he does harm to others. Hal was a mess when the ring found him, not someone who had gone through a period of self-reflection, fixed his mistakes, and brought out the best version of himself. It was just so cringeworthy.

And I certainly applaud your effort to open your friend's eyes to the gravity of that kind of behavior.

[Space Cop]

^I’m no fan of drunk driving* and it’s been decades since I read ED, but doesn’t it end with him volunteering for his sentence even though he has the power to just leave? And I’d have to agree with the others that ED I and II felt apart from vol. 3 itself. It was probably canon, but it’s not like it got referenced a lot. And the main issues didn’t seem to suggest alcoholism, IIRC (though, again, it’s been quite a while).

*A friend of mine was once trying to tell me how worried she was she was losing her girlfriend one time that she rushed over to her place under the influence. I think she got mad at me as I explained I didn’t find that stuff funny,

[Big Blue Lantern]

That wasn't even in the core book. Personally I never understood the problem with it. Were people just upset because it made Hal less perfect/cardboard?

Getting a DUI isn't a simple mistake or an emotional reaction. It's the product of things like poor forethought, lack of awareness, entitlement, and addiction. On top of that, instead of owning a mistake that hurt several people and could have *killed someone*, Hal threw a tantrum about how it was the sign's fault. So, of all of the humans on the planet, the ring selects someone who obviously has some immature aspects to his personality as the avatar of indomitable will? That hardly adds up, and yes, it made Hal look like a royal douchenozzle.

[Trey Strain]

That wasn't even in the core book. Personally I never understood the problem with it. Were people just upset because it made Hal less perfect/cardboard?

I agree. George W. Bush had a DUI conviction and it wasn't even brought up in the 2000 election.

People's wailing about Hal's grey temples was in the same category.

[Mister Ed]

That wasn't even in the core book. Personally I never understood the problem with it. Were people just upset because it made Hal less perfect/cardboard?

I had no problem with it, myself. I had a bigger problem with people who took that one scene and extrapolated it to "they made Hal an alcoholic". I don't think that was supported by what we saw.

[Andrew NDB]

I don't think DC is in any hurry to revisit Hal being a drunk driver

That wasn't even in the core book. Personally I never understood the problem with it. Were people just upset because it made Hal less perfect/cardboard?

[Big Blue Lantern]

I've never considered the 80s and early 90s the best time for Hal Jordan, even before the Jones debacle. I don't think DC is in any hurry to revisit Hal being a drunk driver or falling in love with an alien who looked and acted like a teenage girl.

That being said, there are still some events from that time period that I really like and Jones' sickness coming to light doesn't change that. Make no mistake, I wouldn't want the guy's autograph in my GL collection, and I'm usually willing to ignore a writer/artist's personal life (ala Ethan Van Sciver) if I like his/her work. Obviously, there are a few exceptions, and what Jones did certainly crosses that line.

I really doubt that Jones' actions become a black mark that is often associated with the Green Lantern mythos. As Rotten2thecorps pointed out, there are very few comic creator names that break out of the shadows of the characters that they bring to life. For example, I work in mental health and most of my colleagues knew the name William Marston from their college classes or post-grad trainings. Yet I've regularly shocked numerous coworkers over the years when I pointed out that he also created Wonder Woman. The inner workings of the comic book industry are still unknown outside of hardcore reader circles.