Creepastic Moments in Superheroism!: Hal Jordan

[espanolbot]

The audience's attitudes towards certain subjects change as time progresses, so what might seem harmless or even amusing to a past audience comes across as offensive or even creepy by one of today! So, I thought that I'd gather up a few for your perusal.*

*Note: This isn't meant to make light of what they're doing or who they're doing it to, but rather pointing out how unpleasant and strange it is that SUPERHEROES are the ones doing it.

Item One: Hal Jordan, Inappropriate behaviour around a minor.

Starting with one from the olden days, we begin with a tale of one Hal Jordan and young Green Lantern Arisa Rrab, where the then 14 year old Arisa was treated as a surrogate sister to the Green Lantern Corps of the time.


Somehow Arisa got a crush on the kind of doofy Jordan, and somehow managed to will herself to age by some ten or so years. Reasoning that she now at least looks like an adult, Hal promptly sleeps with her.


This was later retconned to Arisa's species aging at a different rate to that of humans, with her being chronologically much older than Hal to work their way around the whole interstellar conscent issue thing... Which doesn't really change the fact that she'd still mentally be the same age she was just prior to accelerating her aging, so effectively Hal (and by extention DC) seemed to be making the "Hey, she LOOKED legal!" excuse. Ew.


Basically? If THIS ends up being a conversation that one of your main superheroes is having, you've probably gone down a path of storytelling best avoided in a mainstream comicbook.


Generally though, Hal's relationship with women in the past hasn't been that great. Whether it's a character quirk or just a reflection of the times the story was written in can be up for debate, however. Things like his casual sexism and racism, for example.




In the years prior to the DC Reboot several years back, however, a lot of these more... questionable attributes of Jordan's character were carefullly removed to make him a bit more palatable (and promptly brought back for his New 52 JLA issues). This was mostly done by transferring the unpleasant sexual stuff onto Jordan's BFF Oliver Queen (who I'll cover in the next segment), but they still had a reference to it in the series Cry for Justice, with Ollie referencing Hal apparently having a drunken threesome with two members of the Birds of Prey.


This last one so angered the actual Birds of Prey creators at the time, and they had to retcon it in such a way that it seemed like Hal or Black Canary spreading rumours about Helena and Zinda behind their backs.


And we close with Guy Gardner, a character that somehow went from being a guy who worked with kids with special needs to the "asshole Green Lantern". Just how much this was the case varies from writer to writer, but in one of the Superbuddies series (a comedy series featuring some of the cast from Justice League International which is so AWKWARD now for so many reasons... as a series involving Maxwell Lord getting mad at Blue Beetle's antics while people joke about Sue Dibny being pregnant could get post-Identity Crisis).

The writer of the series, Keith Giffen, allegedly wanted Mary Marvel (who was between 14 and 16 at the time of this story) to sleep with Guy during the course of the story, causing her to shift from her virginal white costume to her traditional red one. 'Cause SYMBOLISM. Whether this was true or not depends on who you ask, but it's pretty much an example of the kind of creepy stuff going on behind the scenes at DC for a good while in regards to Mary Marvel that Grant Morrison was satirising in Final Crisis.

Guy didn't get to sleep with Mary (thank god), but he still did this, which seems almost as bad.


'Cause a grown man groping a minor and sniffing his fingers afterwards is hilarious, right? Urgh.

Comments

9 of ten people working behind the scenes at DC and Marvel are men and 79% of those are white

[7dialsmystery]

I'm waiting for the MRA slugs at GG to come out of the woodwork and mansplain how this isn't really awful and women and minorities are just overly sensitive.

Re: 9 of ten people working behind the scenes at DC and Marvel are men and 79% of those are white

[kamino_neko]

Please don't attempt to summon them...

Re: 9 of ten people working behind the scenes at DC and Marvel are men and 79% of those are white

[sindra]

Can I agree with you that it's pretty cringeworthy...but still hate the word "mansplain"?

[jlbarnett]

Arisa was old enough to help save the universe

[icon_uk]

So are Damian Wayne, Billy Batson and Bart Allen, and I don't want to see them in sexual situations either.

[burkeonthesly]

So are the Runaways, and a couple of them aren't even close to "age of consent" range.

[reveen]

*Looks at last scan*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld2nWfIap2k

Why the hell would you write that and why the hell wouldn't you be immediately fired for letting it get published? I mean, I guess if the writer didn't know Mary Marvel was a minor... but no, still fucking creepy.

[icon_uk]

How can anyone writing Mary Marvel NOT know she's a minor, she's Billy's ruddy TWIN. If HE'S a minor, SHE'S a minor.

[alschroeder3]

TRUST me. The writer, Keith Giffen, DEFINITELY knew Mary was a minor (it was mentioned repeatedly in the story) ---although for some reason the writers of SHAZAM decided to put Mary in an adult form when super-powered just as Billy was, rather than looking her age as she was in the Golden Age.

I suppose it's possible that GUY didn't know, since she WAS an adult in body, but he DID know she was woefully naive, and later SOMEONE filled him in, because in the book itself he later apologized to Mary, saying, "You're just a kid". They actually esablished a rapport, once they got past that.

It doesn't make that particular scene any better, though, but nevertheless, EXCLUDING that scene, Mary is FANTASTIC in that series, especially driving Fire crazy with her love of POLLYANNA and other Disney films, and her studied disbelief of Fire cursing like a sailor. (Booster Gold hit on her repeatedly, too, but Beetle stopped it in time.)

I really have trouble believing Giffen was going to have Mary sleep with Guy. Does anyone have a definitive reference to that effect? I'd hate to think this group is spreading rumors that aren't verified.

[thatnickguy]

Not that I'm even remotely defending the scene, but wasn't the bit with Guy just a scenario that Max was picturing in his head? I thought that's what it was, but it's been a long time since I read it.

[icon_uk]

Not sure if it's a "What if" or a memory... either way, the creators must be aware of the scene they are depicting, and it ain't pleasant.

[espanolbot]

Considering Mary went and made Guy apologise later for doing it, yeah, it happened.

[icon_uk]

Not sure if it's down to being gay, having no sense of smell, or my chronic naivete about certain matters but it wouldn't have occurred to me to read that last panel with Guy that way, I think I'd have assumed he was just stifling a laugh. With the additional context though.... Who the hell would DO something like that... seriously... is it a thing?

[burkeonthesly]

Someone super-extra-creepy. Like, the guy on the train or bus who you can hear breathing from the other end, and who's been staring at the same person with the same expression the entire trip.

[lilacsigil]

Google Troy Bussell, recent former premier of Western Australia. He, as a "joke", would sniff chairs that women had sat on, among other charming habits.

[gnarll]

When I originally read that, I assumed Guy was pinching her ass. I didnt notice the fingers in the next pic. Its even worse now.

[jekylls_salvation]

I'm hoping that's not it and he's just old-timey snickering.

[beyondthefringe]

Oh, Englehart. Such a strange, strange writer.

And I never realized Guy was sniffing his fingers. Cannot unsee.

[mrstatham]

The Hal/Ollie stuff with Hal bragging about Huntress and Lady Blackhawk is just completely out of character even for Hal. But then, it *is* from Cry For Justice, which features Hal and Ollie basically kicking Dinah's Justice League to the curb because they can't do what needs to be done with her leading a team.. Which happened to include stuff like Ray fucking Palmer doing THE EXACT SAME THING TO A VILLAIN AS HIS WIFE HAD DONE TO SUE DIBNY.

[espanolbot]

The baffling thing is is that James Robinson (the writer of Cry for Justice) is SO GOOD in other series'. Starman? Great! The Shade? Awesome! JSA? Good too!

Where the sexism and glorification of violence came from in CfJ I have no idea, as the comics he wrote both before and after were actually pretty progressive.

[superboyprime]

And just to tie it all together, Robinson mentioned in an interview that Olli''s line was originally going to be about Hal, Fire, and Ice. Robinson decided to changed it because of Hal and Guy's friendship, what with Ice being the closest thing the latter's had to a true love.

[jaybee3]

The real question for me is why Robinson felt the need to make that throwaway line and make it about other heroines who don't appear in the book (and WERE appearing in other titles at the time) at all.

[jaybee3]

After Countdown, Final Crisis and the JSA arc, all in the space of less than three years - not to mention even before that putting Mary Marvel in a frikkin coma while Freddy Freeman gets a big upgrade to main hero of the franchise (why nobody ever calls out the fundamental sexism of that move I don't know) - there is NOTHING, nothing that DC would do to Mary Marvel that would surprise me. I totally believe Ordway's story about Giffen's plans for Mary in that mini-series.

And yes, DC Editors are well aware of how old Mary really is - she is Billy's twin and he is frequently called a kid and was treated like an "golly, aw, shucks" 12 year old (even when 16). The fact that DC continually had sexual references to her (Geoff Johns even had 90 year old Wildcat ask Captain Marvel if his sister was "married" because he liked her homemade cookies), which was at its height in the tiny leather skirted Countdown!Mary and Morrison's overtly sexualized (complete with plastic surgery enhancements) DeSaad!Mary in FC was all purposeful.

As Mark Waid said (and I will always use this quote because there is no getting around the purposeful degradation of the character across several titles): "A lot of what Mary’s gone through over the past decade or so has nothing to do with what’s broken or not broken about the concept, and everything to do with a bunch of creepy-ass older men working out their issues. Just thinking about it makes me want to take a Silkwood shower."

[deh_tommy]

*potentially sexist remarks below*
To be honest, I don't really think that Green Lantern having a drunken threesome with Huntress and Lady Blackhawk is that bad. That sort of occurrence is not uncommon, nor would that be out of character for anyone involved. People like having sex, sometimes they regret the act and at least they all gave consent. What I don't like is how Green Arrow brags about that, as if Hal has performed some achievement, in addition to the claim that "everybody heard about it".

I'm also not sure how Arisa is underage when she ages faster than regular humans; that would be like an Asari and Salarian dating (Asari live for generations while Salarians only live for sixty years or so).

At least he's good in the current Green Lantern series (I presume, I don't read Green Lantern).

[thezmage]

The threesome was brought up in this series here pretty much entirely like it was an achievement of Hal's and, for the purposes of a throw away joke are treated entirely as sex objects.

As for Arisia, while I wasn't reading the comics at the time, I believe the main problem was that she was treated pretty much entirely as an underage young girl and little sister figure up until somebody decided to have her and Hal sleep together. Also, growing up is only partially biological. There's an experiential portion as well. Just because both species are at the same degree of biological maturity doesn't mean that there's not a huge gulf of experience separating them, with the inherent power discrepancy as well.

[thezmage]

You know, now that I think about it I'm gonna have to object to that Cry For Justice page being used as an example of Hal Jordan being a creep. As originally written, he had what we have no reason to believe was not consensual sex with two single ladies, told no one about it, then upon finding out that people have been talking about it, became very uncomfortable and refused to brag about it like Green Arrow wanted him to. One or both of the women told their friend Dinah, who told her husband Ollie, who apparently told everybody.

Post-retcon, he went out partying with two single women, passed out drunk, then either Dinah told Ollie that he had had sex with them or someone else told Dinah, and he only just found out about the lies people have been telling about him. The worst he did was not deny it, and as he apparently just found out about the story I'm not sure what his reaction should be.

Frankly, I think Dinah comes off creepier here.

Mind you, all of that is in character. It's still an incredibly creepy male entitlement story from the real world perspective.

[jekylls_salvation]

These posts are great.

I feel like even Guy wouldn't do that in front of people. Unless Guy was a giant manchild acting out as some form of defense mechanism. Which come to think of it I think they addressed in Red Lanterns.

And I don't think Hal and Dinah would spread rumors like that.

But oh the racism and sexism and questionable aging issues of Hal Jordon. The sexism especially. His connection to Star Sapphire didn't really help.

[lamashtar]

Guy used to have severe mental problems after coming out of his coma and the torture. He had strange obsessions about the hero community. Red Lanterns was a way of having him confront some of his old demons.

The less seriously old comics are taken the better, IMO.