Hal Jordan has got to be one of the most abused heroes ever created in comics. In the whole history of the field, no other hero -- in my opinion -- has been through such a mishmash of soap opera wallowing and evil plotting.

In the beginning, Hal Jordan was one of the coolest heroes ever in the 1960s. He was the second hero to be brought back to be updated to modern times and given a makeover in Showcase comics (as long as you don’t count Lois Lane). As a test pilot, Jordan was fearless. He was a skirt-chaser and always out for a good time. I loved those intergalactic adventures he had in the early books.

Then the 1970s came along and Denny O’Neil paired him with Green Arrow, turning the whole series into a tour through the social issues and growth problems the United States was going through. I enjoyed that run and thought it was great, especially since Denny recreated Green Arrow into the fantastic, opinionated character he now is. However, I didn’t see how showing Hal Jordan having questions about whether or not he was doing the right thing during that era was undermining what Green Lantern was all about.

One of the scenes Denny did that I will take to the grave with me was of an old black man talking to Hal, saying how he’d heard Green Lantern had helped a bunch of purple skins, and orange skins, but why hadn’t Green Lantern ever helped people with black skins? Words to that effect.

At that time, I thought that was powerful writing. And it was. Except for that whole little bitty thing of putting the cracks into Hal Jordan. Later writers came along and made Hal more human. By that, I mean they turned him into a failure. They gave him an alcohol problem that seemed straight out of the pages of Iron Man.

Then they destroyed Coast City, his hometown, on his watch. And they turned him into Parallax, the worst villain EVER in the DC Universe. (Except maybe for Superboy-Prime at this point.) They even had his old friend Green Arrow kill him with an arrow through the heart.

After that, they turned Hal into the Spectre, the spirit of vengeance. The Spectre is another character that’s been all over the place as writers have each tried to put their unique spins on that hero. So you had these two out-of-control entities somehow going to make a better hero together. (Kind of the you-got-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter/you-got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate thing I suppose.)

The Hal Jordan/Spectre combo didn’t work for me at all. The costume looked dumb. All the personal issues the writers created seemed to come out of left field.

In the end, Hal Jordan had been stripped of everything that had made him unique and likeable as a superhero. When I’d been young, I’d wanted to be Hal when I grew up. (During those times I hadn’t wanted to be Batman, and I have to admit that the Batman thing is still there. I’ve grown more realistic over the years, you see. But if power rings are ever discovered, the Batman thing is subject to change.)