From Showcase #22 to HBO: Hal Jordan's 67 Years of Comics

A crashed spaceship and a costume with a clock in it

Showcase #22 went on sale on July 28, 1959, written by John Broome, penciled by Kane, inked by Joe Giella and edited by Julius Schwartz. The setup has barely changed since. An alien Green Lantern, Abin Sur, crash-lands on Earth, and his ring picks Hal, a test pilot at Ferris Aircraft, to take his place. Carol Ferris of Ferris Aircraft became his love interest and, later, his boss.

Two details from that era still make me smile. Kane's costume carries an hourglass shape on the chest, meant, per 13th Dimension, to hint at the ring's 24-hour charge. And when Hal got his own series in 1960, the first issue carried no issue number on the cover, because DC believed buyers preferred higher-numbered titles. A superhero born with a timer on his shirt and a comic too shy to admit it was new.

DC's current character page adds the family history that matters most for the TV show. Hal's life was changed twice by crashing aircraft: the first time when he saw his father, pilot Martin Jordan, die, and the second at Abin Sur's wreck. The ring runs on willpower, and DC sums up his gift as being able to operate without fear.

The rookie who pushed him off the cover

John Stewart arrived in Green Lantern #87, cover-dated January 1972, created by Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams as Hal's backup. He was written as an architect, a deliberate choice to show a Black hero with a profession, according to his publication history). When Hal gave up the ring in the 1980s, John took over as the main Green Lantern for issues #182 to #200, from 1984 to 1986.

Issue #183 has the cover everyone remembers. John pushes Hal out of the way and calls him a has-been. IndieWire's Mike Ryan told Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre that it was his first Green Lantern comic, and Chandler, who plays Hal on HBO, had the perfect reaction.

The fall, and the long climb back

The 1990s nearly finished Hal. According to Wikipedia's summary of his publication history, his hometown, Coast City, was destroyed, and in the 1994 story "Emerald Twilight" a grieving Hal became the villain Parallax. He died a hero's death in Final Night in 1996, then returned in 1999 as the Spectre, described in that history as an agent of God. That is a lot of career for one test pilot.

Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver brought him back in Green Lantern: Rebirth, a six-issue series published from October 2004 to May 2005. Its big move was to recast Parallax as a parasite born from fear, imprisoned inside the Corps' central battery, per the series' record. That also explained why the rings had always struggled against the color yellow. Suddenly Hal's worst decade had an outside culprit.

What Lanterns kept, and where it swerved

The show keeps the test-pilot roots, the rivalry with John, Carol Ferris, Sinestro and Guy Gardner, all of which The Ringer has tracked episode by episode. It moves the action to Rushville, Nebraska, rather than Coast City, and it makes Hal an older veteran. The writers modeled him on Chuck Yeager, per The Hollywood Reporter, which is a very test-pilot way to honor a test-pilot hero.

The swerve I find most interesting runs opposite to Rebirth. Johns gave Hal's darkness an outside source, a yellow bug in the battery. Lanterns keeps the darkness inside the family, which is why the show's Hal feels more human than cosmic. I don't think either version is wrong. They are answers to different questions.

And somewhere in both of them is still Kane's young man with Paul Newman's face, climbing out of a cockpit toward a glowing green light. He has been knocked off covers, killed, turned into a ghost with a divine job and dragged back. He keeps coming home.