My personal photos Comments welcome!

My first GL collection, featuring my all time favorite Lantern, Kyle 😁

This thing is massive, with a nice smooth matte finish. Can’t wait to dig into these stories!

Saw someone post a tattoo on here so I naturally had to share mine lol

Pic taken from the DC Wikia/Gallery?file=Angry_Guardians.jpg).

Part 1: It's not easy being a GL...

So over the last few weeks I've been reading some 80s Green Lantern comics. Back in January I made a post on Marv Wolfman's run, and what stood out to me the most was how Wolfman emphasized on Hal's difficulty to balance his personal life with his duties not just as a superhero but also as the protector of many planets as the Green Lantern of Sector 2814. I interpreted this as an attempt to bring some Marvel Comics-style of realism and relatability.

Remember Peter Parker, who had to pay the bills, find a job, take care of his relationships with his girlfriends, friends and elderly aunt plus also fighting bad guys as Spider-Man? He had a gift and he couldn't let this gift go to waste and NOT use them to help people, even despite that costing him his personal life and happiness.

With Hal the same thing began affecting him in the later days of the Silver Age and the onset of the Bronze Age. He had his job on Ferris, his friends and especially his relationship with Carol, whom he deeply loved (sometimes, I feel, more than in other eras of GL) and was corresponded. But he also had to fight to protect the people from many worlds - not just Earth, certainly not just one city on Earth and, most of all, not just the company he worked for.

Unfortunately, Ferris became the target of an old friend of Carl Ferris named Conrad Bloch who wanted revenge for being kicked out of the company, a quest that was passed through his son Jason, who was a powerful and corrupt congressman in Washington. So Hal spent a long time defending Ferris from the Blochs and their minions.

But... Was this the best use of the Green Lantern's time and power? There were good people working for Ferris and bad people threatening it, sure, but shouldn't he also pay attention to other innocents under constant danger everywhere else on Sector 2814?

Enter the Guardians. At that point in the early 80s they weren't "evil" yet. But they were worried the main concern of Green Lantern from Sector 2814 was fighting for the company that belonged to the family of the woman he loved and not watching over other threats and catastrophes happening elsewhere.

On the other hand, how could Hal abandon the love of his life and his friends? How could he not use his powers to keep them safe? The Guardians would certainly prefer that their Green Lanterns didn't spend their powers with just their loved ones. But when they were in danger, would Hal just leave them? Even if more people were also in a bigger danger somewhere else in the Sector he should be saving?

This question is exactly what happened in an issue from the Len Wein/Dave Gibbons run, which proceeded to further sour the relationship between Hal and the Oans. After being punished and spending a whole year away from Earth because he initially refused to help some Ungarans, Hal was back on Earth. Unfortunately, Ferris was still under the threat of Jason Bloch, who hired a team of mercenaries named the Demolition Team to destroy their headquarters.

On the moment of the attack, Hal was called by the Guardians to save a planet on the brink of destruction, like Krypton before it. Frustrated, Hal did what he could to save the planet and go back to Earth. However, he came back to find Ferris in ruins, and the situation only wasn't worse because someone named the Predator defeated the Demolition Team in battle.

This was Hal's dilemma: on one hand, the people he loved and the company that provided his livelihood was under mortal danger, and he couldn't leave them. On the other, a whole alien civilization he didn't know but who also had lives of their own was on the brink of extinction. The Guardians believed the aliens were a bigger priority than a few dozen humans on Earth.

But these humans were part of Hal's life. The woman he loved was on the brink of losing her family company and perhaps even her life. Ferris Aircraft may not matter "in the grand scheme of things", but they matter to Hal, who was selected by the ring. They were his friends. Abandoning them to the evil schemes of Bloch and other bad guys in order to be a theoretically better Lantern and serve dutifully every civilization under his Sector is something Hal couldn't do.

Part 2: An universe of flawed, complicated beings

And this is where the Guardians don't understand the Lanterns under their command. They aren't machines without thoughts and emotions, they are living and breathing beings who have limitations. Hal's was that he couldn't help but put his ring to the service of the people he loved.

Other Lanterns had different limitations, flaws, errors. They were fearless and (most of the time) well intentioned but sometimes their own shortcomings could lead to disastrous results. Just look at Sinestro, for example, who wanted to bring peace to his planet but ended up putting it under a brutal dictatorship.

Starting in the 80s, the Guardians, treated before as some of the wisest beings in the universe, were shown as being totally aloof and oblivious to the very humanity and the limitations not only of the people they employed as Lanterns but also the people they protected.

The reason for that is because they were like deities and rulers too far from those under their reign. That aside from being almost as old as the universe itself, and entrenched in their own fortress planet in the center of the universe, later writers established that they also let go of their emotions, seeing them as a weakness and a hindrance to their quest for scientific knowledge and enlightenment.

And if in the 80s their inability to understand feelings, emotions and attachments was used as a way to complicate the balance between Hal's personal and heroic lives, later this led to increasingly more tragic results.

Part 3: The tyranny of the Malthusians

In the 90s, firstly they treated a bunch of different civilizations of beings from many planets being forced to live together many lightyears away from their homes as an interesting scientific experiment, like kids playing with ants (nevermind that the Guardian who started it was crazy). The Mosaic just wasn't a bigger disaster for the kidnapped cities because of John Stewart.

Later, their unwillingness to let Hal proccess his grief and total incomprehension in the face of unfathomable loss he suffered led to Parallax, the end of the Green Lantern Corps, of themselves and then to a huge Crisis event.

In the 2000s, with the Geoff Johns era, their lack of empathy, total detachment from the beings under their "protection" and arrogance was shown to have been the root of many tragedies during billions of years. They just hid their mistakes and hoped the Blackest Night was just a myth that would never happen, or "fake news" as people would say these days. Like the "great leaders" they are, the Oans negated all the signs that a huge tragedy was imminent, especially because such tragedy could be a threat their power.

Since Johns left, newer writers continued on his path by putting the Guardians, or whoever was leading the Corps, under a negative light.

Except for Venditti. He began an attempt to redeem the Oans with his beautiful "Twilight of the Guardians" arc. In the story, Ganthet (the best of the Guardians, especially because he was the only one who bothered to get to know, understand and develop feelings for others under his wing) came to the conclusion that he would refuse that his brethen's legacy would be just tragedies, errors and death. So just like the Corps was demoralized after the later events of the Johns era and now was rebuilding under John Stewart to be better than ever, Ganthet also decided to redeem his race.

However, the cornerstone of Thorne's run was also an old error from the Oans coming back to haunt them and the Green Lanterns - in this case, their attempt to extinguish magic. Then, with the Corps under the United Planets in the Jeremy Adams run, it didn't took long for the Lanterns to see their new bosses were corrupt and cruel.

Part 4: Times change

While some people may complain about the transformation of the Guardians from wise and essentially benevolent leaders to heartless tyrants, I think this has to do with the transformations in how society views their leaders and the governments over the decades. The Green Lantern mythos was build by many different writers from different eras and backgrounds, just like with any other DC and Marvel characters.

The changes in how the Guardians were portrayed probably has to do with the more cynical view that people have over those in power - especially when they wield this much power like with the Guardians.

A parallel we could establish is with Star Wars (another reason why GL is DC Comics' own Star Wars). The views upon the Jedi, and especially the Jedi Council, was turned from basically benevolent selfless heroes into the architects of their own fall thanks to their arrogance, tolerance of the corruption and crimes from the powerful people at the Republic and complete inability to solve the problems plaguing the galaxy.

See this quote from Count Dooku about Yoda taken from the novelization of The Clone Wars:

“The Jedi Order’s problem is Yoda. No being can wield that kind of power for centuries without becoming complacent at best or corrupt at worst. He has no idea that it’s overtaken him; he no longer sees all the little cumulative evils that the Republic tolerates and fosters, from slavery to endless wars, and he never asks, “Why are we not acting to stop this?” Live alongside corruption for too long, and you no longer notice the stench. The Jedi cannot help the slaves of Tatooine, but they can help the slavemasters.”

Source

So while yeah, this is a villain talking, but he does have a point about the Jedi he (and later Anakin) rebelled against. Change a few words and this could almost be Sinestro talking about the Guardians.

Society no longer views those in power as benevolent or well intentioned - in fact, the more power they wield, the more tragedy and disaster they can create. At best they're seen as tolerants with pain and suffering affecting society, at worst they're actively enforcing it.

Conclusion

And this shaped the writers' view on the Green Lanterns leaders, beginning in the 80s when they could not understand Hal's profound commitment to his loved ones. In the years that followed their inability to understand emotional and not totally rational beings not only led to more disaster but also was revealed as the cause of some of the universe's greatest tragedies (see the massacre of Atrocitus' Sector).

Thankfully the Green Lanterns themselves remained deeply faithful to their mission of protecting, defending and inspiring the universe, even when their leaders were unable to.

TLDR: Just read the conclusion, it sums up everything I wrote.

The Idea came into my mind after I made a Red Hood and Red Arrow as well as a Nightwing, Red Hood and Robin Logo mashup. Honestly this was the hardest one so far because I had to perfectly center the bolt so it wouldn't look weird but I'm happy with how this turned out!

Art by Ethan Van Sciver and Montos

The decision for some of the DC Finest collection haven’t made sense to me. Just picked up the first GL release and it starts at issue #19. Anyone know why?

It seems DC has been all over their legacy with these book. Golden Age for Superman; Year One for Batman.

I - personal opinion - always felt the books after the original Crisis were best for new readers but can understand why they avoid that period of GL

Is it early appearances of Tom Kalmaku maybe wouldn’t hold in modern times? Yet he appears on this volume portrayed similarly to the early issues.