Green Lantern #134: Hal Jordan on Ice

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

So, one of Dr. Polaris' less inspired death traps involved stealing Hal Jordan's power ring and dumping him at the North Magnetic Pole. I guess shooting him in the head would have been totally out of the question. Before he leaves Dr. Polaris helpfully informs Hal that there is National Geographic sub-station 100 miles away from the spot he's dumping the powerless superhero, but given the intense cold it's really no use trying to make it there. What is Hal to do?

He recalls how he ended up in the situation (Dr. Polaris tricking him, stealing his ring, etc...) and finds the resolve he needs to attempt the impossible.


That's the spirit.



What are the chances? Also, I'm amused by the fact he apparently gets stubbly after a few hours.

We soon learn that a blow that could break a seal’s back is no more than a love tap to Hal Jordan. I bet he wishes he could just toss the bear like Aquaman would.



Apparently both the animal and Hal forgot that polar bears can swim or something. Hal manages to crawl into a cave and gets a few hours sleep. When he wakes up he realizes his mask is gone (it's made out of ring energy, and he hasn't recharged in over 24 hours). He continues on.



I’m sure most of us know that wolves don’t actually attack humans all that often, but apparently this one, much like the polar bear, has a mad on for Hal Jordan...which just goes to show you that everything and everyone in the universe wants to kill Hal. Or sleep with him. Sometimes both.



Oh dear.



He gets damn near philosophical the closer he gets to death. Poor Hal, he's babbling, blind, and steadily losing clothes.





Yay! Of course he still needs to get his ring back from Dr. Polaris, and he needs to do it while nearly completely blind, but Hal Jordan is not the sort of person to let little things like that bother him...because he's Hal Freaking Jordan, fighter of polar bears and master of the North!

Comments

[volksjager.insanejournal.com]

I never knew his costume (or is it a uniform) came separated like that.

Thats one of the time-traveling Dharma polar bears isn't it ????

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, it's rare to see the uniform being used as a muffler.

Thats one of the time-traveling Dharma polar bears isn't it ????

OH SHI-

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Crap. My money was on "polar bear."

Say, isn't his costume created by his ring?

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

They are now, but in the older comics only the mask was generated by the ring, which works out because otherwise he'd be wandering around in civilian clothes (Or possibly naked? Nah) and would have froze.

[thormonger.insanejournal.com]

That issue was one of the first issues of GL I ever read, back when I was a kid. Ah, the memories...

[rab62.insanejournal.com]

"My Suit! The Guardians created it for space travel!" Which makes those unravelling sleeves a bit hard to understand...

There were some early stories where Gil Kane drew GL pulling the green section of the costume on over the black tights, so that part works for me. I'm a bit less clear on the notion of the mask being ring-created: it seems like there were times Hal ran out of power and the mask didn't vanish...so that he could, for example, bluff a villain into thinking he still had a charged ring even though it was really out of juice. I suppose he could have kept a spare non ring energy mask tucked away in his tunic for precisely that purpose...but doesn't that obviate the whole point of a ring-created mask?

I'm clearly in my "thinking too much about this" place just now. ;-)

[maslego.insanejournal.com]

Why is he talking to the fish? Did he go "castaway" in a few hours?

[darklorelei.insanejournal.com]

2nd to last scan clearly needs to be reworded with some sort of zombie-related text.

[sailorlibra.insanejournal.com]

"I may be colder than a witch's kiss...

Nice expression, Hal. I'm not sure whether it's offensive or humorous. Zee would probably bitch-slap him for saying it, anyway.

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

Well, he did use the 'clean' version of that particular idiom, so maybe Zee would cut him some slack.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

You know, I'm no bear expert, but after that first "SWAK!" it seems to me that Hal would be able to have a nice look at his lung.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

He probably dodged out of the way with just enough time to deflect the blow, so that it probably bruised him heavily, but didn't tear him apart. I mean, he may generally solve his problems with a GL ring, but you don't spend that much time fighting bad guys without picking up SOME combat experience.

[xandertarbert.insanejournal.com]

...Why would a fish even bite a string? And doesn't snowblindless work from light being reflected by snow into your eyes? Why would get go snowblind from falling asleep?

[vignettelante.insanejournal.com]

At least the explanation for why he didn't freeze to death after swimming at the North Pole makes sense.

Unless you assume they meant "...because outer space is really cold!"

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Uh... outer space IS really cold. You don't get much colder than outer space. If Hal's uniform was designed to withstand those kinds of temperatures, even if it's just for a few seconds, that would work very well at the North Pole.

[vignettelante.insanejournal.com]

...
Let me give you some physics 101:

Living bodies are warm. Heat loss occurs when an object comes into contact with something colder, because some heat gets conducted away.

Because there's almost no matter in space, there wouldn't be anything to absorb body heat. Also, since there's no atmosphere, you'd be getting the full force of the heat radiating out from the sun.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

You have a point. Let me rephrase my statement - if that uniform is designed to help HAL withstand the temperatures of space, it would be damn useful at the North Pole. Remember, this is probably some fancy-schmancy space fabric we're talking about here - it likely has properties that defy our knowledge of thermodynamics. It might even have heating wires embedded in it like an electric blanket, designed to start working the moment the body is exposed to sub-zero temperatures for longer than thirty seconds or so. (Batman has a costume like that for winter weather - I mean, minus the automatic turn-on stuff, but still.) However it works, my point is that, if you're stranded at the Pole and need an appropriate garment, you can't do much better than a suit designed to withstand who-knows-how-many-degrees below zero.

[raattgift.insanejournal.com]

No magic necessary; bulky white space suits seen on astronauts are more protection against incoming radiation than anything else. A space suit replaces a minimum of a hundred kilometres of Earth's atmosphere with respect to protection from high energy photons and massive particles, and manages the temperature balance in the face of an infall of about 1400 W/m^2 of solar energy.

To protect against heat loss (for instance, in the shade, or far from any star), all you need is to reflect enough of the outgoing photons back to the person radiating them that the astronaut does not feel uncomfortable. Engineering solutions usually use a working fluid that's absorptive to much of the spectrum human bodies emit (air or water, for example) trapped close to the body by a partially insulating shell. Full insulation would stifle a busy astronaut (at rest, she or he would emit about 100W, when working hard that might double or triple).

Black spandexy fabric that is airtight would probably do the job quite nicely.

Of course, in the full glare of the sunlight falling at the top of Earth's atmosphere (or anywhere within about an Astronomical Unit of the sun), black spandexy fabric is a highly suboptimal choice to protect against solar radiation.

Arctic and antarctic animals manage quite well with only a few millimetres of air-trapping fibres (fur and feathers). Those fibres are actuated by musculature and the animals manage to arrange the fibres optimally and dynamically (as the wind changes, for instance, or as they enter and exit the sea); fibres in human clothing are unpowered and as a result human winter clothing tends to be bulkier and must be kept dry. "Wear layers!" as anyone from a cold climate could tell you; that keeps bulk down by creating more stable pockets of still air, although you really technically only need one such pocket of partially trapped air, as wearers of the fanciest new gore-texy shells (or ski racers) could tell you.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Oh, now you're going all 'Science!' on me. All that you say may be quite true - you obviously know more about the subject than me - but keep in mind that, regardless, Hal's uniform is not made in accordance with OUR knowledge of science. It was made by the Guardians, an ultra-advanced alien race who probably know more about how to subvert the laws of thermodynamics to their own advantage than we could ever imagine. We don't know HOW it was made, we don't know what it's made OF, and we damn sure don't know how it works - and if we had a Guardian show up in person to explain it to us, we probably still wouldn't understand, half-evolved monkey-men that we are compared to them. The specifics of how it works are not the POINT - the point is that, however it works, if that thin body-sheath of a uniform CAN keep you alive in the unimaginable chill of deepest, darkest space, with nary a trace of solar radiation to be found, then it would be a very handy thing to be wearing at the Pole, which is cold, but not THAT cold.

[raattgift.insanejournal.com]

Humans are also excellent blackbody radiators (temperature 305 kelvins) and radiate away a lot of photons with a peak wavelength of about 9500 nm and a typical power of 100 watts.

Still air is a good insulator because it absorbsradiation at that frequency. (Air absorption is one reason why infrared astronomy is done on orbital platforms (moreover molecular ozone is almost entirely opaque in the longwave infrared, so there is a huge opacity notch thanks to the ozone layer), and why fibre optics are used instead of wave guides in telecommunications. Infrared cameras pick up humans because they see non-peak parts of the blackbody spectrum we radiate.)

Even in the absence of a breeze, on the surface of the Earth there is a significant gravitational potential so the heated air is convected away since it is more buoyant than cooler air. In still air at temperatures near or warmer body temperature, you will quickly stifle, which is why many people who have low mobility die in heatwaves. Likewise, air which is trapped in fibres (feathers, fur, fibreglass, styrofoam, aerogel) is an excellent insulator against cold, since it attenuates radiative loss and it is a slow thermal conductor.

"Warm air rises" is only true when there is a gradient in the gravitational potential. In microgravity, like on the ISS or in the Space Shuttle, heated air just forms a bubble of warm air; the bubble is very stable in the absence of a breeze. In still air in microgravity, body temperature would be carried away mainly by thermal conduction, which is slow. Human-occupied space vehicles have fans which generate a breeze, to simulate convection.

In outer space, in the shade, and naked, you would get cold very quickly because of radiative energy loss. Because of the lack of absorption and the sharper temperature differential you would freeze faster in space than even in a mighty wind in one of Earth's polar regions in the dark. (The wind can only optimize convection such that the insulating properties of trapped air effectively vanish; it will still be a couple hundred kelvins hotter at the pole than in outer space).

The spectrum of the sun approximates a blackbody radiator at 5800 kelvins, peak wavelength 540 nm, and an overall typical power of 1400 W/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere. Since you radiate about 100 W total and have a ventral surface area of a bit less than a square metre, you will be gathering up excess energy comparable to the highest-powered microwave ovens. Not only will that cook you rapidly, you will also be exposed to lots of photons at such short wavelengths that they will break apart molecular bonds, which won't do you much good either (ionizing radiation is unhealthy).

The atmosphere insulates against most of the short-wavelength photons, and the planet as a whole is much better than you are at reflecting and radiating away the remainder, which is why the poles can be cold.

So you get marks for your last sentence, you should consider the reciprocal of your second last sentence (i.e., there is nothing to reflect your body heat either), and your third last sentence is incomplete.

(As an aside, the wolf in the GL scans should surely be white, as arctic wolves are, for reasons of camouflage and protection against overheating in the sunny months).

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

...Why would a fish even bite a string?

Fish will often bite something moving in front of them sinply because it is moving. How he scooped it out of the water is another matter.

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

Apparently snow blindness is kind of like a sunburn (of the cornea, ahhhh!) and may not be noticed until several hours after exposure (one source says about 12 hours after). So maybe the damage was already done, but the pain only intensified later when the nerves started registering the burns. The blindness 'suddenly' occurring is a little odd, but it's possible he was gradually losing his vision for a while, and due to being distracted and half frozen he didn't realize until he was in a situation to notice a radical change*.

As for the fish biting the string...I assume it had grown tired of living and simply bit on the string and held on in order to end it all. Hal's not good at reading fish facial expressions, that little guy is actually jubilant knowing that soon its life of existential angst will be at an end.

*Possible case of 'SNOW BLINDNESS DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!' but I can only spin what Marv gives me

[yaseen101.insanejournal.com]

Somehow I can imagine young!Didio and young!Geoff Johns reading this comic and drooling all over themselves, going 'ooh' and 'aah' at how 'strong' and 'awesome' Hal is. Still I like this story and Hal Jordan in this.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

I will say this: Joe Staton is sadly overlooked and forgotten.

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

I'm trying to imagine what the other Earth Lanterns would do in the same situation. I figure snow blindness would have occurred to John...and probably Guy too. Kyle...I don't know why, but I keep imagining Kyle wandering in circles for some reason.

[nalanzu.insanejournal.com]

No sense of direction. ::is giggling now, thank you::

[silverzeo.insanejournal.com]

Is this the first time the lantern eye-glow happens?

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

I couldn't tell you. I can't decide if it's kind of cool or really lame.

[sleepymax.insanejournal.com]

I couldnt stop laughing at the bears hand sticking out of the water.