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Today, we look at when Hal Jordan first had his temples go gray.
In “When We First Met”, we spotlight the various characters, phrases, objects or events that eventually became notable parts of comic lore, like the first time someone said, “Avengers Assemble!” or the first appearance of Batman’s giant penny or the first appearance of Alfred Pennyworth or the first time Spider-Man’s face was shown half-Spidey/half-Peter. Stuff like that.
My pal Gene B. wrote to me to ask if I had ever covered this, but I hadn’t, so here we go!
HOW HAL JORDAN’S GREY HAIR CAME ABOUT
In 1987, Mike Grell wrote and drew a miniseries called The Longbow Hunters starring Green Arrow and in the series, Green Arrow celebrates (well, “celebrates” is probably not the right term) his 43rd birthday…
The miniseries was a major hit and it surprisingly led to an ongoing Green Arrow series the following year (I don’t think even Grell really thought that Longbow Hunters would lead to a Green Arrow series). This series, while excellent, also sort of solidified a number of things that occurred in comic book culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which is the idea that comic book superheroes were almost inherently silly in nature, that superhero names were almost inherently silly and that we needed to allow these old characters to grow up. Throughout Mike Grell’s run on Green Arrow, Oliver Queen was almost never actually CALLED “Green Arrow” and he celebrated his 44th birthday soon into the series. When Hal Jordan guest-starred in the book in Green Arrow #20 (by Grell, Ed Hannigan and Dick Giordano), it was just as “Hal Jordan, Oliver Queen’s best friend” and not as Green Lantern…
But that’s sort of the rub, though, right? If Oliver Queen was now in his 40s and Hal Jordan was his longstanding best friend, then wouldn’t that suggest that Hal Jordan was ALSO in his 40s? If Hal was on some sort of hot streak, it would be an easy thing to ignore, but instead, Hal Jordan was in a bit of a funk. The Green Lantern comic was actually briefly hot for a time in the mid-1980s and Steve Englehart and Joe Staton’s Green Lantern Corps had a bit of a buzz on it, but then the idea came about that Green Lantern would be used as the lead feature in Action Comics Weekly, a noble experiment in comic book anthologies that didn’t really work out that well, and with Hal gone from his own title and “only” appearing in Action Comics, Hal lost a bit of his place in the DC Universe. After all, one of DC’s most popular superhero comics during this period was Justice League International, which starred a whole other Green Lantern, Guy Gardner!
Still, by the time that Hal’s Action Comics feature came to an end in Action Comics #635 (Hal would make a few other appearances before the series went back to a monthly Superman title), Hal’s hair had no grey in it…
That changed when Green Lantern received a new book in 1990, Green Lantern, with Hal being just one of three Green Lanterns who would get the spotlight in the book, along with John Stewart and Guy Gardner…
The book (by Gerard Jones, Pat Broderick and Bruce Patterson) opens with Hal Jordan, sort of aimless at this point in his life, reflecting on the FIFTEEN YEARS since he first became Green Lantern. We can all debate the merits of a shifting timeline for superheroes, but I think it is still pretty shocking to see a comic book suggest that Hal Jordan had been a Green Lantern for FIFTEEN YEARS…
And yet that was the state that the DC Universe was in around this period, where it was really starting to lean into the idea of distinct generations and that the Teen Titan generation was becoming adults.
What’s weird is that Broderick doesn’t even have any real consistency with the grey hair, as the comic opens with Hal’s grey just sort of mixed in there, but later in the issue it is more specifically on the temples…
HAL JORDAN’S GREY HAIR DEVELOPED OVER THE YEARS
Interestingly, you can see how Broderick just sort of kept it at a sort of fleck of grey on the temples…
It was really when Mark Bright took over that the grey temples grew in size…
What’s interesting is that when Hal Jordan was on the way out from the book, Darryl Banks had the grey wrap entirely around Hal’s hair…
In that issue, Green Lantern #50, Hal Jordan becomes Parallax and is replaced by a young man named Kyle Rayner, seemingly completing the idea that was suggested in those earlier issues that these heroes had gotten too old and a new generation was needed (Oliver Queen was soon killed off, and replaced by his son, Connor Hawke).
THE SHOCKING REASON BEHIND HAL JORDAN’S GREY HAIR
Parallax later sacrificed himself to save the Earth from a dying sun and he was then briefly the host of the Spectre, the Spirit of Vengeance, but years later, he was resurrected in Green Lantern Rebirth and in the third issue (by Geoff Johns, Ethan Van Sciver and Prentis Rollins), we learn that Hal was possessed by an evil yellow entity KNOWN as Parallax and its first effects on the hero was to cause his hair to go prematurely grey (perhaps as something that Hal feared would happen to him? I’m a bit unsure about that part of it all)…
Suffice it to say that whatever the current setup in the DC Universe is now post-Infinite Frontier, Hal is likely not supposed to be old enough for grey hair anymore.
Thanks to Gene for the suggestion! If anyone has a suggestion for a notable comic book first, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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