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.

[jlbarnett]

Arisa was old enough to help save the universe

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

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...

[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.

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"?

[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.

[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]

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

[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.

[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.

[espanolbot]

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

[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).

[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.

[bruinsfan]

I actually thought Billy becoming involved with (age-appropriate) Courtney Whitmore and the old guard of the JSA going to Defcon One over what they thought was a grown man behaving inappropriately toward a teenager was an interesting story. That version of the JSA got retconned out of existence before any of the adults found out about Captain Marvel's juvenile alter ego, didn't it?

[jaybee3]

The Giffen stuff comes from Jerry Ordway (still under contract to DC and still works with Keith Giffen) as seen from Espanolbot's link above. And I totally believe it. I don't really think Mary is portrayed well in that series (which Giffen/DeMatteis has openly said caricatured ALL the heroes in it) but that aside the real problem with it is that mini-series is seemingly the only Mary Marvel story the writers of Countdown ever read so she was always depicted as..."less than bright" and easily gullible - unlike any other depiction of her.