Green Lantern Lore: Then And Now

I'm about 20 issues into my Silver Age Green Lantern re-reading, and I can't help but pick up on some of the areas where the current GL mythos is at odds with what was originally published. This isn't really even a continuity problem, since Crisis on Infinite Earths provided a vehicle for modern DC writers to diverge from what was established previously. However, unlike the Superman family, for example, Green Lantern was generally felt to have been left largely unchanged by the history-rewriting effects of 1986's Crisis (other than around Earth-2 stories, obviously). So are these changes just plain laziness (lack of research), or a conscious attempt to update the character? Since it's usually Geoff Johns at the helm, I'm more inclined to think the latter.

Here are a few examples that I've spotted so far.

1) It was pretty clear in the old days that anyone who happened to find himself - or herself - in the possession of a Green Lantern ring could wield it pretty effectively, right away. In the 2nd story in Green Lantern # 18, which I just finished, hobo Bill Baggett (not to be confused with Bilbo Baggins, although Mark Waid did once in our Trivia Panel!) stumbles on the ring while Hal Jordan's conducting tests to see how far away from the ring he can still control it. Incredibly - to modern readers - this down-and-out loser makes off with the power ring immediately, figuring out in seconds how to create new matter with it, as well as fly! This conflicts completely with a very powerful scene that Geoff Johns wrote recently, in which Oliver "Green Arrow" Queen tries to make the ring work in order to save his friend's life, and almost kills himself in the process because of the extreme effort apparently required. When he later asks Hal something along the lines of, "Is it that hard for you?" Jordan replies with, "Only every time!" While this is cool, it's pretty inconsistent with tons of previous stories.

2) In the recent - and excellent - Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special we're told that Sinestro was one of the established Green Lanterns who trained Hal Jordan in the use of his ring, after the Earthman received it from dying alien Abin Sur. I think this new wrinkle was introduced before the Special, but until I recently re-read Green Lantern # 7, in which Sinestro was introduced, I hadn't realized that this twist was impossible in the original continuity. Back in the Silver Age, the first time Hal encounters the Guardians, it's because they've summoned him to Oa to explain that a renegade GL, once the greatest of the Corps, went bad and set himself up as dictator of his home planet of Korugar. Once the Guardians discovered what had happened, they stripped him of his ring, insignia and power battery, and exiled him to the planet Qward, within the anti-matter universe. This is all told to Hal as a flashback, prior to them sending him to Qward to stop Sinestro's schemes with the Qwardians. That sequence of events, where Hal learns about an already-disgraced and exiled Sinestro in his first meeting with the Oans, doesn't allow for any possibility of GL-Sinestro previously being assigned to be his mentor.

3) Currently, we're led to believe that only rookie Green Lanterns suffer from the "inability to affect anything that's yellow" weakness, rather than it being an absolute physical limitation, as it was always shown back in the Silver Age. What makes that seem unlikely is that Hal was constantly meeting more and more Green Lanterns back then, some of whom had been at it for decades. And yet all of them struggled with the same yellow impurity restriction. Clearly a retcon, that one.

4) A minor change I've seen is around Sinestro's motivation in the final days of him being a Green Lantern. Originally he was portrayed as imposing himself as absolute ruler because the power of being a Green Lantern corrupted him. Nowadays - and central to one of the themes of the Sinestro Corps plotline - Geoff Johns has made it abundantly clear that Sinestro simply wanted order, over chaos... and went to whatever great lengths he thought were required to achieve that somewhat altruistic goal (such as placing himself in charge of the whole planet). Definitely the newer take is more interesting and allows for greater empathy toward the villain.

Other than those, though, it's rather striking how similar the current run of Green Lantern is to the one forty-five years ago! Certainly the violence is amped up considerably, and the themes are darker, but there's a surprisingly direct line that can be drawn from the old stories to the new, especially with the Sinestro Corps storyline that's just started up. Back in the Silver Age, you could count on ol' Sin showing his purple, scowling face quite regularly... moreso than I'd ever imagined, having previously only read the old Green Lanterns in bits and pieces. And here he is, in 2007, right smack dab in the middle of the biggest GL event in ages!