The light of the Green Lantern

A hero orphaned

Recently we said goodbye to Dave Cockrum, one half of the Cockrum-Claremont duo responsible for the revival of X-Men. Now it's the creator of the original (or "Golden Age") Green Lantern. I never knew his name until today - Martin Nodell.

Martin Nodell, the creator of Green Lantern, the comic book superhero who uses his magical ring to help him fight crime, has died. He was 91. [...]

Nodell was looking for a new idea for a comic book in 1940 when he was waiting for a New York subway and saw a train operator waving a lantern displaying a green light, said Maggie Thompson, senior editor of Comics Buyer's Guide.

Nodell imagined a young engineer, Alan Scott, a train crash survivor who discovers in the debris an ancient lantern forged from a green meteor. Scott constructs a ring from the lamp that gives him super powers, and becomes a crime fighter.

He brought his drawings and story lines to All-American Publications, which later became a part of National Periodical Publications, the company that was to become DC Comics, Thompson said.

See, this is why I poke around train wrecks all the time. You never know what you might find.

(No mention is made in the CNN piece of writer Bill Finger, whose by-line also appears in the old Lantern stories. In similar little-known fashion, Finger co-created Batman with the considerably more famous Bob Kane.)

The original Lantern was just one of many 1940s heroes who got shunted off onto the convenient ghetto of "Earth-2" when comics company DC chose to recreate its characters for a younger generation. That's one way of getting around the difficult fact that serial characters never age - or else age impossibly slowly. I guess one alternative is to ignore your characters' pasts altogether and just start over, ala Smallville or Casino Royale.

Sometime over this holiday season, impress fellow partygoers (since you will almost certainly end up at a party) with a bit of comics lore. Everybody and his mother knows the oath of the modern-day Green Lantern Corps, but do you know the oath of the original officeholder? No, you don't. Turns out that he used several, but Dial B For Blog identifies for us the canonically accepted oath of Alan Scott's Lantern, uttered in the last panel of his origin story:

" . . . And I shall shed my light over dark evil . . . for dark things cannot stand the light! The light of the Green Lantern!"

Makes you want go out and conquer evil or something.

(Cross-posted. And apologies to Paul for have rubbed another man's rhubarb; this is really his bailiwick.)