Bronze Beauties #32: CAPTAIN AMERICA

For comics fans, Captain America has been a sometimes anachronistic symbol of a simpler time, when good and evil were more black and white, when patriotism didn’t carry a sheen of arrogant jingoism. In the 1970s, Steve Rogers, like many others in the “Me Decade” spent a lot of time trying to “find himself,” but at least Steve had a good reason to feel lost. After all, he had only been unfrozen from that ice for a short time. If you have no idea what I mean, you will after CAPTAIN AMERICA hits the theaters this weekend.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #130 (Oct. 1970) by Marie Severin & Joe Sinnott
I love this cover because it features three of the lamest super villalins in comics history: Whirlwind (who spins around really fast), the Porcupine (who has a suit that shoots spikes) and my favorite, Batroc the Leaper (who can jump really well)! Still, the clean lines of the Marie Severin cover are a joy to behold.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #140 (Aug. 1971) by John Romita
In the 1970s, Cap’s sidekick was the Falcon, who was, believe it or not, the first major African-American superhero, introduced in #117 in 1969. I know, right? Comics were not the most forward-thinking medium prior to the Bronze era.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #162 (June 1973) by Jim Starlin and Joe Sinnott
Cap covers often had a poster-like quality to them, which was generally scorned by Marvel’s action-oriented editors. I still remember being blown away by seeing this one on the newsstand when I was in the third grade. I particularly like the drooling dude at the bottom.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #166 (Oct. 1973) by Rich Buckler & Frank Giacoia
Hands down, my favorite Cap cover of all time, and it’s purely because of nostalgia. If that cover were drawn today, those would totally be zombies instead of mummies.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #255 (March 1981) by Frank Miller & Joe Rubenstein In the early ‘80s, writer Roger Stern and artist John Byrne had a memorable run on CAP, during which he actually ran for President. This 40th anniversary issue retold Cap’s origin and featured this cool retro cover by Frank Miller (way before he became a batshit parody of himself).

Rocking the Retro RAZR

The first time it happened, I was shocked. It was April, 2009, I was sitting at the Sinatra Bar at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas with Lysa, Jeff and Alison and a few other people after Mark and Jessica’s wedding. I was loving being enveloped by Sinatra memorabilia and music, but curiously noted hearing some songs repeated. I asked the maître d’ why the selection was so sparse given Frank’s vast recording legacy. He told me that Steve Wynn made three compilation CDs of his favorite Frank songs and they remain in constant rotation.

I couldn’t believe how short-sighted and controlling this was (the idea of the staff getting sick of Sinatra songs made ME sick), so I pulled out my cell phone to text a few fellow Frankophilic friends and share the story. As I tapped my thumb on my Morotola RAZR, correcting T9’s misinterpretation of “Sinatra” as “Phobura,” the sister of the bride let out a gasp, and laughingly exclaimed, “OHMYGOD, look at your OLD-FASHIONED PHONE!!”

My first reaction was to defensively point out that there was no crank, rotary dial or cord attached to the device, and, unlike the iPhone-toters at the bar, I actually had service. I chalked up my phone-derider’s scorn to the fact that she lived in Los Angeles, where anyone who doesn’t have the very latest technology is beyond contempt as a human being (and in all honesty, it would take another year or so before anyone back home said anything about my “old phone”).

But the past few months, it seems as if every time I use my cell—that exact same RAZR—in public, someone has to make some kind of comment. “Look at you, rocking the RAZR!” or “Oh, I used to have one of those!,” they’ll remark with a nostalgic wistfulness, as if I had just pulled a red, white and blue plastic Fisher-Price Chatter Phone pull-toy with the rolling eyes out of my pocket.

See, here’s the thing: While I acknowledge that my phone is now “old” (in the current technological context), I am in no rush whatsoever to get rid of it and replace it with a smart phone, for a number of reasons.

First of all, I have enough distractions in my life, I don’t need to be carting Google and Facebook and video around with me 24/7. The constant pull of media in my home is enough, thanks, I don’t WANT to take it with me everywhere I go. No, really. I probably only bring my iPod with me on treks into the outer world about 30% of the time. I’m aware of my media addiction, and relish the fact that when I run errands or go to work or do social things, I’m forced to step away from the screens and the speakers for a few hours.

The second reason is that my old RAZR still works! Why should I get rid of something that still functions perfectly well (and only costs me about $60 a month)? I have nothing but disdain for planned premature obsolescence in the 21st century. Technology has allowed corporations to finally perfect the kind of marketing begun by car companies in the 1950s, where the consumer is made to feel inferior if they hang onto their out-of-style OLD thing (durability notwithstanding) because this year’s model is so much nicer… and it has tailfins!

Granted, the difference between a RAZR and an iPhone is more than tailfins, but the concept is the same. And we’re much bigger suckers than our grandparents ever were. Just imagine going back in time and telling them that they have to buy a new TV and telephone every couple of years or the neighbors will think they’re Communists! Your ears would get a boxing (still not sure what that means, tho’).

I’m no luddite, but I’ve never been a first adapter. I just don’t get people who are in such a rush to pay tons of money to in essence be a beta tester for new technology. Who gives a shit if you’re the first one on your block with the shiny new toy when we all know that in a year or so, version two will have most of the inevitable kinks worked out in addition to new, added features, all for LESS money? Apple may as well strike a deal with Louis Vuitton or Yves Saint Laurent to plaster their ugly logos all over the first iteration of every new technology. It’s the same kind of conspicuous consumption.

I completely skipped the DiscMan, holding onto my old cassette Walkman right up to the moment I bought a third generation iPod. It was the only time I ever felt shamed into upgrading technology. It was somewhere near the end of 2003, I was sitting on the subway, listening to some compilation cassette, the bulky, yellow Walkman safely hidden in my jacket pocket when the tape snapped to an end. As I pulled the machine out of my pocket, I glanced around the train car and saw someone avert their eyes, a suppressed smile pursing their lips. I felt a rush of mortification, and shoved the lemony antique into my backpack. It was the last time I ever took the poor baby out into the world.

I also resisted getting a cell phone at all for as long as I possibly could, buying my first flip phone in 2004. I held on to that one and its subsequent replacement until they died. I only replaced my first RAZR because I dropped in the toilet, learning the hard lesson: If you’re going to text while peeing, hold the phone off to the side. It’s mind boggling to think that three phones (not counting the pee cell) in eight years is, by contemporary standards, a ridiculously low number.

I picture a giant warehouse somewhere filled with mountains of old, discarded, fully functional cell phones, waiting for some kind of resurrection. I actually think there could be a niche market for “old-fashioned cell phones” in the retro world of rockabilly. For the uninitiated, this particular rock and roll subculture is so ridiculously image-conscious that they make Lady Gaga look like Louis C.K. What’s that, Slim? You’re going to wear your cuffed jeans with your motorcycle boots and your black T-shirt tonight? With the mechanic’s jacket or the leather one? Ah, great choice! Don’t forget the pomade and Marlboros!

These people base every single aspect of their lives—clothes, hairstyles, tattoos, cars, beer, favorite movies, authors, artists and of course music—on the rather narrow parameters set by the Rockabilly Handbook. As such, they generally eschew modern conveniences in favor of the vintage (manual transmissions and Zippo lighters are mandatory).

But cell phones have been around long enough that the early small flip phones, with their red LED or black and gray LCD screens and inability to text or snap a picture now seem hopelessly retro. All it would take would be for some smart entrepreneur to find a stash of discarded Motorola 180s, paint some red Hot Rod flame details on them, and BAM! Holly von Hootenanny can call her boyfriend Stu DaBaker if they get separated at the road rally! They just can’t text each other. But that’s not cool, anyway.

There are only a few smart phone features that I truly covet. One is GPS. Knowing that you can’t ever got lost would be a really nice feeling, whether on foot or in a car (and I know that the iPhone is behind the Droid in this area). It would also be nice to always have a relatively good camera with me, just in case the aliens happen to land while I’m heading to the Taco Truck or William Shatner ever stops into the bar for a drink while I’m working.

Another feature I wouldn’t mind having is (he admitted, somewhat sheepishly) Twitter. I signed up for Twitter when it first started in 2007, then quickly lost interest partly because it was 90% worthless dross, but primarily because I realized it was a medium for mobile devices, where brief, reactive thoughts can be posted in real time. As I didn’t have a smart phone, it felt kinda silly for me to Tweet (ghad, I hate that verb) from my home computer, so I deleted my account.

I rejoined Twitter this year on the advice of friends in publishing who informed me that prospective authors simply aren’t taken seriously unless they have a solid presence on the major social media sites (ahem. @karlheitmueller, thanks). And so, I’m back to Tweeting (seriously, can we call it Twatting or something a bit less precious?) via my computers, which means that if I think of something worth posting while out and about, I have to jot it on a piece of paper and stick in my pocket, hoping that by the time I get home it won’t have lost any of its crisp, timely perspicacity / sarcasm / indignation / etc (and yes, I still think it’s 90% worthless).

Other than those things, I think I can live without everything else a smart phone has to offer, as I have for, well, all of my life. I have an iPod if I wanna take my music with me, I always carry a pen and a little notebook for moments of inspiration or information, I have my brain, which I prefer to use over Google when trying to remember the name of the girl who played that part in that movie with that guy, you know the one, what was it?

I realize I’m sounding very grumpy Grampa here, but any time I’m with a group of people and a question of historical or cultural fact pops up, it drives me batty that the reflex has become to just grab the iPhone and look it up. If you know that the information is buried somewhere in your brain, doesn’t it make sense to work that muscle and wrest it from the cranial wrinkles? (Of course, if the info was never there in the first place, then Google away, my friend.)

But I’m not kidding myself. I know the day will eventually come—probably sometime within the next year—when I end up carrying a damn mini-computer in my pocket like the rest of the neck-craned masses. And, as with every other modern convenience that I was slow to adopt, I’m sure once I have an iPhone or Droid or whatever, I’ll soon wonder how I ever got along without it. I’ll load it up with apps and I’ll play Scramble on the train or check Facebook in a bar or use the Star Trek phaser app to pretend to stun some self-entitled double-wide Bugaboo pusher on the street.

I just hope that at least part of me will hate myself for doing it.

POSTSCRIPT, June 11, 2012
Well, I made it almost another year.... but after a very busy extended Memorial Day weekend during which I found myself often wishing for mobile technology, I finally gave up. Today, almost a year after this post, I bought an iPhone. Farewell, old RAZR.... you served me well. But I need a phone that can let me know when it's raining outside.

COLLECTOR'S EDITION excerpt #3: Buttons and Blows

My KISS fanaticism continued for a few years, but in early 1979, during my freshman year of high school, I was introduced to the music that would totally change my life. Shortly after Christmas break, one morning on the bus, I was talking with my friend Kevin about how I really liked some of this “new wave” stuff I was hearing on the radio, like Blondie’s “One Way or Another” and the Cars’ “Just What I Needed.” Kev’ told me that he had a few records I had to hear, and one day after school, I went over to his house. Kevin pulled an LP with a green, black and fluorescent orange cover, removed the vinyl from the sleeve and put it on his turntable, skipping to side two, track two, his favorite song on the album.

Drums, bass and guitars exploded in my ears, following a singer passionately exclaiming in a distinct, guttural British accent, “They offered me the office, offered me the shaaaaaa-op! They said I’d better take anything they gaaaaaaa-ot! Do you wanna make tea at the BBC, Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a caaaaaaahp?”

“Listen to how angry he sounds!” Kevin instructed. And I listened. Oh, how I listened.

The song was “Career Opportunities” off of the debut album by the Clash, and thus I was ushered into the previously-dismissed world of punk rock. Granted, by 1979, the movement was almost over, and, being a 14 year-old white boy in suburban Pennsylvania, it’s not like I could relate to much of the political content, but the energy, the anger, the intensity was all ridiculously inspiring. Kevin loaned me that record as well as the equally incendiary NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, HERE’S THE SEX PISTOLS to take home and get to know. Finally I had found music besides superhero themes that spoke to me. A few weeks later, I gave all of my KISS albums to my younger brother (a gesture I would later come to regret).

In short time, I was an avid fan of this music and began acquiring records by Elvis Costello, DEVO, Joe Jackson, the B-52’s, the Pretenders, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Specials, 999, the Romantics, XTC, the Psychedelic Furs and other bands that fell under this wide, but unifying anti-mainstream umbrella. For the first time, I felt a genuine, deep connection to rock and roll, and it started to change the way I looked at the world, as well as myself.

In December of 1979, the Clash released their third album, LONDON CALLING, a two record set that remains, to my mind, the single (or, technically, double) greatest rock album ever recorded (I usually don’t like absolutes, but this one I hold). I bought LONDON CALLING the week it came out—January of 1980 in the states—at the record department at Sears at the Park City Mall, and vividly remember showing it off to the friends I ran into at the Salad Haus.

On Thursday, March 6, 1980, I attended my very first rock concert: The Clash on the LONDON CALLING tour at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby PA just outside of Philadelphia. The ticket cost $7.50, and I went with my friends Kevin, Bill, Al and Nathan, as well as Kevin’s dad. We bought our T-shirts (including bootleg shirts outside the theater) and I got a copy of THE ARMAGIDEON TIMES "program" from the tour and we settled into our seats. Kevin's dad was cool enough to get a seat a few rows away from us so as not to cramp our punk rock style.

There were three openers: The B-Girls, a somewhat middling new wave combo and two reggae acts, Mikey Dread and Lee Dorsey. To say that the reggae acts were cooly-greeted is an understatement, but it points to how diverse and forward-thinking the band was. Finally, the rightly-tagged “Only Band That Matters” took the stage and tore into “Clash City Rockers,” beginning an hour and a half of incendiary punk magnificence.

At the time, of course, I had no idea what a big deal it was that I was seeing this band, at this time, on this tour. In fact, despite being near the back on the orchestra level, it was still so loud that I went to the lobby to sit out the encore, something that makes me wanna go back in time and kick my 15 year old butt back into the theater. But I couldn’t have predicted that over thirty years and literally thousands of rock shows later, as far as my concert history is concerned, nothing would ever measure up to number one .

Despite my worship of the Clash and the Pistols, I made a concerted effort to not refer to myself as a “punk rocker” mostly because I didn’t feel I deserved the honor… I wasn’t quite that downtrodden. Unless you count the non-stop abuse my friends and I received from our classmates for liking this music, an animus that even extended to the Police and U2, two bands that were in 1981 considered too freaky by the jocks and the preppies that were our arch-enemies.

In the Twenty-Aughts where, to quote Jane’s Addiction, nothing’s shocking, it’s hilarious to remember how the mere addition of a Dead Kennedys button to your sweater could garner you an afternoon in detention, as my friend Mike learned. Granted, it was a DK’s “Too Drunk to Fuck” button, but buttons and T-shirts didn’t have to bear profanity to garner us “punkers” (a much despised term) ridicule and abuse.

The day after seeing DEVO in Philadelphia on their NEW TRADITIONALISTS tour in 1981, my friend Bill and I wore our concert tees to school. But, as with most DEVO merch, these weren’t simple white shirts emblazoned with a logo; They were the same shirts worn by the band on the cover of that album, blue shirts with a black V-neck collar and black short sleeves. The left sleeve said “New Traditionalists” in red arcing letters over the face of an astronaut, and the DEVO logo was on the left breast in red and black circles. Yeah, they were kinda goofy. That was the point. But Bill and I received non-stop abuse the entire day (especially if we happened to be together at any point).

I also got loads of shit for the Go-Go’s baseball shirt I bought at their concert on the University of Pennsylvania campus a few weeks later, due to its fuchsia sleeves. My homemade B-52’s shirt, emblazoned with the line “I’m not no limburger!” drew much ridicule, and not due to the intentionally bad grammar. And the one day I wore a skinny new wave tie to my no-tie-required public school… you’d have thought I was walking around in a ballerina tutu. But to me, their rejection was a badge of honor.

The thing that made our social ostracism relatively easy to bear was that my friends and I (well, most of us, anyway) weren’t passive about this punk rock thing. We worked at it. It wasn’t easy to find this stuff back in those days before technology made everything instantly available. We’d buy Trouser Press and expensive imported copies of British music mags New Music Express and Melody Maker to read about new bands. We’d listen to the two local college radio stations, Millersville State College’s WIXQ and Franklin & Marshall’s WFNM and hope that the DJ would say the name of the band of that cool song we just heard so we could go to the mall or downtown to Stan’s Record Bar to try to find it that weekend (a number of my friends also made frequent drives to Philadelphia or Baltimore to go record shopping, but I only joined them once or twice).

One popular means of acquiring music that was not an option for the new wave fan was any of the record and tape clubs that advertised in seemingly every magazine in the 1970s and ‘80s. While the prospect of 13 LPs for 1¢ might have been enticing to the financially challenged teen, the selections left much to be desired if you were of the punk persuasion. An ad for the Columbia House Record& Tape Club in the August 1979 issue of PLAYBOY lists 259 selections (available on LP, 8-track, cassette or reel-to-reel). Of those 259, the only ones I would’ve considered buying at the time were The Cars’ selt-titled debut, Blondie’s PARALLEL LINES and PLASTIC LETTERS and Elvis Costello’s ARMED FORCES. That’s four out of 259, and by that point I think I owned all of those already .

Amazing as it is consider in 2011, I also discovered cool bands by watching SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. The Monday after the B-52’s performed “Rock Lobster” and “Dance This Mess Around” on SNL in 1980, my friends and I convened before homeroom to discuss how mind-blowingly awesome they were as most of our classmates derided the Athens band as “weird,” “stupid” and that most suburban of pejoratives, “gay.”

The ridicule extended beyond my classmates. One particularly notorious event occurred at the one and only “Bring Your Own Records Dance” held at my high school. Barely anyone who attended the thing dragged their heavy vinyl along, but my friends and I did, and so GJ the DJ (no, really) was obligated to play some Buzzcocks and Rezillos, to which we merrily pogoed on the squeaky gym floor.

Until one of the teacher chaperones, Mr. Meany , came up to our little group of new wavers and said that no more of our records were going to be played. Stunned, we asked why, as we were practically the only people who were actually dancing at the “dance.”

“You guys aren’t dancing. You’re doing THIS,” Mr. Meany said as he, I shit you not, bolted forwards and slammed his shoulder into me, knocking me backwards. My friends stood stunned as I regained my footing only to have him slam into me again, repeating his judgment (I wonder if he’s a fan of SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE these days).

Somehow, probably because I was a giant wuss, I was able to maintain my cool and pointed out that we weren’t even gently slam dancing, that our skanking and jumping may have been unusual in the eyes of those who only did the grinding, hand-on-butt slow dancing, but was totally harmless. Even at the time, I realized that Mr. Meany was trying to get me to physically retaliate so he’d have a legitimate reason to eject us from the dance, but, despite a steady diet of superhero vengeance coursing through my psyche, I refused.

Instead, we just took our records and sat on the bleachers, feeling righteous indignation over the breadth of our ostracism from the mainstream. Fuck this school, basement parties were way better anyway.

And we did have basement parties. I’d drag my stereo and records to the basement and set them up on the washer and dryer, move the piles of boxes out of the way and make room for my pals and I to pogo around the metal poles to Black Flag and Dirty Looks and GenX. As I was a non-drinker in high school (although I never applied the term “straightedge” to myself), my friends would do their illegal imbibing outside throughout the evening.

Towards the end of my senior year in high school I started a relationship with one of the girls in our little punk clique (It was her Elvis Costello t-shirt that first caught my eye, and for that reason I shall refer to her as Alison). Our punk rock devotion was the main thing that Alison and I had in common, much to her parents’ chagrin. They far preferred her prior boyfriend, a conservative, slightly older guy who worked in a bank and hated the music Alison listened to. Of course, her parents didn’t know that he was also a giant cokehead, but I have a feeling that even if they had, they still would’ve liked him more than this rebel-rousing “punker.”

Due to this disdain, Alison’s parents refused to allow me to take her to our senior prom, which was actually okay with me, as the prospect of renting a tux to dance to Journey songs didn’t exactly thrill me, nor most of my other pals. And so we planned our own unofficial prom. We got dressed up in our new wave finery and had a fancy-schmancy dinner at a downtown Italian restaurant before adjourning to my parents’ basement for some formal slam dancing. Man, how I wish I had photos of that event, especially after it was crashed by a bunch of people who ditched the official prom to come join us in the basement.

See, a funny thing happened during the last semester of my senior year. All of a sudden, this new wave / punk stuff started to become a little more popular, thanks in part to this new cable channel called “MTV,” which stood for “Music Television” and showed these things called “music videos.” And since new wave bands were practically the only artists who had videos ready to go when the network premiered, suddenly acts like the Buggles, Wall of Voodoo, DEVO and Siouxsie and the Banshees were getting wider exposure than ever they had ever dreamed possible.

And suddenly, the popular kids at Hempfield were hosting “Punk Parties,” where they’d, at least for one night, stick safety pins in their polo shirts and spike their hair and play music that just a year earlier was deigned unfit for human consumption. Of course, they didn’t go out and BUY any new wave records, they just asked to borrow them from one of my punker peers. I never, ever agreed to loan any of my precious vinyl to any of these posers, and not just because they STILL wouldn’t have invited me to the party.

Finally, in June of 1982, I graduated from high school, and while our official graduating class song was Bette Midler’s “The Rose,” for me it was the Clash’s “Clampdown,” with its empowering message, “Let fury have the hour / anger can be power / do you know that you can use it?”
________________________________________________________________________________________
from the forthcoming book, COLLECTOR'S EDITION: Confessions of a Pop Culture Obsessive-Compulsive
by and © Karl Heitmueller Jr.

Bronze Beauties #31: GREEN LANTERN

It’s an undisputed fact that DC Comics’ trinity of most iconic superheroes is Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. But who’s #4 in the DC Universe? Until now, it’s been kind of a toss-up between the Flash and Green Lantern, but after this weekend, the scales may tip in GL’s balance with the release of Martin Campbell’s big screen adaptation of the story of Hal Jordan.

I have no idea what’s going to happen with the GREEN LANTERN movie. Like most fanboys, I wasn’t initially crazy about the casting of Ryan Reynolds (Hal Jordan is not exactly a smart-ass) and the toe-baring CG costume. But with each subsequent trailer, it looks like they nailed the vast scope of this part of the DCU and have done a remarkable job of priming the general public as to the concept of the Green Lantern Corps. Whether they have interest in this unique combination of superheroics and sci-fi remains to be seen. The main drag for the fanboys is that we know in advance how the movie’s going to end (ditto CAPTAIN AMERICA).

In 1959, editor Julius Schwartz re-envisioned the mystical ring-bearing golden age Green Lantern as a science fiction hero, our space sector’s chosen recruit for an intergalactic peacekeeping force, the Green Lantern Corps. As written by John Broome and drawn by Gil Kane, Green Lantern was one of the key figures of the 1960s Silver Age superhero renaissance.

But GL was perhaps even more important to the emergence of the socially relevant Bronze Era. In early 1970, Neal Adams’ striking cover to GREEN LANTERN #76 (now cover-titled GREEN LANTERN / GREEN ARROW) indicated that the times were (yes, I’m going to say it) a-changing. DC Comics was being infused with—some veterans said taken over by—fresh, idealistic young writers like Denny O’Neil, who took over the title with this issue. Using the comic as a platform to tackle social and political issues, O’Neil paired GL (depicted as a conservative symbol of the establishment) with Green Arrow, who had recently been revamped from a mere Batman clone into a radical, van dyke-sporting leftist. Along with Black Canary and a member of the Guardians of the Universe (who oversee the GL Corps from the planet Oa), the “hard-traveling heroes” crossed America in a beat-up pickup truck, tackling such Earthbound issues as environmental abuse, racism, poverty, sexism and, most startlingly, drug abuse.

GREEN LANTERN / GREEN ARROW was one of the first superhero comics to push the boundaries of the formerly staid genre, ushering in the Bronze Age of Comics. In GL #87, John Stewart was designated as the new sub for Hal in case of emergency, becoming one of the first African-American superheroes. Neal Adams and Dick Giordano’s realism-based illustrations further signaled a change in the medium. And while the series only lasted until #89, its impact has never gone away.

Green Lantern bounced around the DCU for the next handful of years, starring in backup stories in THE FLASH, appearing in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and other random titles, until his own comic was resurrected in 1976. This time, the series went back to its more science fiction ‘60s roots, and over the next few decades, readers met more and more members of the universe-spanning Corps.

To sum up what came in the next few decades would not only take another couple of thousand words, but the taste in my mouth would go from sweet to sour as Hal Jordan was one of the main casualties of the so-called “Dark Age” of comics in the 1990s. Suffice it to say that Parallax (the evil entity of the new movie) was involved and Hal Jordan died and there were some replacement Green Lanterns with really awful costumes and eventually DC Comics realized that they needed to bring back Hal and everything’s kinda back to normal now (the number of times DC’s gone back to the core characters after failed “reboots” makes you wonder if they’re ever going to learn their lesson…. Based on recent news, apparently not).

Despite GL #75 being released in 1970, it’s still very much a Silver Age book, and I include it here primarily to showcase the stark change from that issue to the groundbreaking #76 (which, coincidentally, hit the stands the very month I started buying comic books).

From top to bottom:
GREEN LANTERN #75 (March 1970) by Gil Kane
GREEN LANTERN #76 (April 1970) by Neal Adams
Incidentally, a copy of this comic book recently sold at auction for $50,000, making it the highest price paid for a Bronze era comic book.
GREEN LANTERN #86 (November 1971) by Neal Adams
GREEN LANTERN #88 (March 1972) by Neal Adams & Dick Giordano
(This issue reprinted old stories)
GREEN LANTERN #123 (Dec. 1979) by Gil Kane
Years after he'd left GL, Gil Kane returned to work sporadically on the comic, starting with this beautiful cover harking back to the character's Silver Age iconography

All artwork ©DC Comics, inc.