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

[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.

[mrstatham]

He had used elements like rape before, in Starman, but even there it was done by a villain who was well-developed and it played into her development as a villain and the development of the lead character, so it wasn't just some shock plot device. So that was actually pretty surprising and well handled, which is overly rare in comics. And as much as I don't like how he's shilling certain characters at Marvel, now, I do like his additions, like Radiance, who seems really interesting.

But yeah, it's really weird. I have to imagine part of CFJ was editorially mandated given it played into what they were doing afterwards, with Brightest Day, but the execution is squarely on Robinson's shoulders with that one.

[espanolbot]

He has admitted in the years since that it wasn't very good though, apparently, so there is that.

[jaybee3]

It is strange that Robinson has basically all but disowned it Cry for Justice (just read between the lines of his introduction to the trade edition) but DC rolled with it as some big event even as it was being mocked. I imagine most of CforJ was editorially mandated in the way Amazons Attacks was basically written by editorial with dialogue by Will Pfeiffer. Robinson has openly said his editors (aka Eddie Berganza) wanted Mia/Speedy killed along with Lian and the original plan was to destroy all the fictional DC cities (Fawcett, Ivy, Coast, Keystone) except for Gotham and Metropolis. Obviously those weren't Robinson's ideas.

[deh_tommy]

What's worse is that, in Rise of Arsenal, Star City looked undamaged (which leads one to ask what killed Lian Harper).

[espanolbot]

Same thing that erased Clark Kent and Lois Lane's marriage and Wally West's kids: Children and stable relationships are seen by people at Marvel and DC as boring or for old people, which isn't what the people writing the comics want to write about.

Easier to have them to have no responsiblities in their personal lives (or cheap drama by killing off their kids) than show people in one continuous relationship rather than a series of failed ones, a la Post-MJ Peter Parker.

[jekylls_salvation]

There's some sense to that though. If you were Batman, would you have kids (that weren't raised by assassins)? We've seen futures where that's a thing, but a little fridge logic obviously kicks in when we realize the batcave gets infiltrated about once a year and guys like the Joker can be downright ungentlemanly.

[q99]

He was iirc out of practice for awhile before CFJ, which may have played a role. The editorial direction for the series can't have been good. And obviously no-one told him to do re-writes it desperately needed (unless, of course, the editors were telling him to add in crap stuff).

[philippos42]

I've read one issue of his run of Starman that I really hated. It was basically a whole bunch of superheroes jobbing to his pet villain and dying.

I may have read one or two more issues, or parts of them, but that's the one I remember. So, yeah, I don't trust Robinson with other writers' characters.