![]() Swingin’ liberal Ollie spoke for the counterculture-but also for the working class, the disenfranchised, and the non-white. DC, realizing it couldn’t continue to blissfully ignore the counterculture (and looking to perk up flagging sales on Green Lantern), threw the recently radicalized Oliver Queen into Hal’s book, and the two heroes set off to “look for America.” Along the way, they embodied the different viewpoints tearing America apart. Hal’s status as the vaguely disapproving and painfully square face of Middle America was solidified in the early ’70s with the seminal Green Lantern/Green Arrow run by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams. In part that’s because Tom Cruise is such a big name, with such an outsized “movie star” persona, that he’ll naturally draw all the attention around the project regardless of how much actual screen time he has.Ĭarol gets a promotion, ruining Hal’s love life, in Showcase #22 by John Broome and Gil Kane. Still, even if John is a co-lead in the proposed movie-or the primary lead, if they do something like the protege-mentor relationship Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas have in the Ant-Man franchise-this approach to Hal will forever decenter John, or any other POC Lantern they bring in. It also goes a little way towards addressing the fact that thanks to John’s starring role on the beloved and critically lauded 2001 Justice League cartoon (and its 2004 continuation as Justice League Unlimited), he remains the better-known and more popular Lantern among general, non-comics-reading audiences, despite the 2011 movie and a concurrent Green Lantern animated series, both starring Hal. To be fair to Warner Brothers, the Screen Rant breakdown linked above does go on to explain that Hal might be in more of a mentor role to rookie Lantern John Stewart, which would explain the casting of 55-year-old Cruise. Hal’s first appearance, by John Broome and Gil Kane. But mostly, and especially, at the idea of centering a franchise with such potential for both weird cosmic adventure and multifaceted inclusiveness, in a post– Wonder Woman, post– Black Panther world, around Harold “Highball” Jordan, The Whitest Man in Space. Twitter immediately exploded into jokes, from the idea of Cruise spearheading a superhero franchise when his last attempt to take over a franchise/shared filmic universe- The Mummy-tanked so badly, to the idea of Warner Brothers somehow managing to flounder even harder with the DCEU by taking another swing at Hal Jordan so soon after the disastrous 2011 Ryan Reynolds vehicle. Follow her on Twitter at All posts by Jessica PlummerĪ couple weeks ago, a rumor hit the internet that Tom Cruise was in serious talks to play Hal Jordan, the most comics-prominent of DC’s many Green Lanterns. She loves running, knitting, and thinking about superheroes, and knows an unnecessary amount of things about Donald Duck. Her day job is in books, her side hustle is in books, and she writes books on the side (including a short story in Sword Stone Table from Vintage). Jessica Plummer has lived her whole life in New York City, but she prefers to think of it as Metropolis. ![]()
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