It worked so well, in fact, that by the start of the '60s, DC was digging through their back catalog to find more characters for the same treatment. Rather than just bringing back the original, they kept the name and the super-power, but tossed everything else in favor of a whole new character. In 1956, DC Comics found some success rebooting another all but forgotten Golden Age character, the Flash. It seems random, sure, but it did come into play pretty frequently when it turned out his arch-enemy was a swamp zombie.īut then came the Silver Age. In this case, Scott's weakness was originally characterized as him being "only immune to metals," but it was later refined into being weak to anything made of wood. Martin Nodell, on the other hand, presumably realized the benefit of giving a character with ill-defined, seemingly infinite powers a weakness in order to create drama. Superman wouldn't have his Kryptonite until 1943, and even then, it was introduced first on the radio show, partly to incapacitate Superman and allow the voice actor a break from the daily broadcasts. That was actually something of a novelty at the time. Perhaps most importantly, that story introduced the idea of a weakness for the ring. The first was the ring's insistence that Scott's power was nearly infinite, as long as he believed in himself, and that "willpower is the flame of the Green Lantern." The second was the idea of an oath that Scott would recite when he charged the ring, which originally went, "I shall shed my light over dark evil, for the dark things cannot stand the light of the Green Lantern!" Not quite as catchy as the little poem that would become a sort of nerd shibboleth after the Silver Age, but it definitely set a precedent. There were, however, a few elements in that first story that would endure for the next 80 years. The bridge was blown up by a rival engineer, but Scott survived, and the lantern granted him the power to get his revenge. Finally, it ended up on a train that was crossing over a new bridge designed by engineer Alan Scott. Hundreds of years later, with no explanation, the lamp wound up in "an asylum for the insane," where it flamed again and cured a man named Billings of his mental illness after he recarved it into a lantern, thus granting life. When the rest of his village tried to attack him to get rid of what they assumed would 100 percent be cursed, the lantern flamed and killed them all. With that, a lamp-maker named Chang decided to carve the meteor into an oil lamp, which is an interesting choice when you're confronted with a talking rock from space, but lamp-makers gonna lamp-make. It got a complete origin story of its own, starting when a meteor crashed in ancient China and, speaking with its own voice, delivered a prophecy that it would flame three times, bringing first death, then life, then power. While the guy who would eventually use that name as a superhero, Alan Scott, was right there at the start of things, the star of the story was absolutely the Lantern itself. While the lamp is the item most commonly associated with Aladdin and his genie, the original version of that story has a second genie that appears when Aladdin rubs a ring, through which he can create anything he can imagine. Before it's turned into its traditional shape, the green lantern in Green Lantern is actually an oil lamp, like the kind seen in Arabian Nights, which is also where we can find the other connection. There are plenty of magic rings in fiction, going all the way back to mythology, but there's one in particular that seems relevant here. The broader strokes of the origin story, however, are a little easier to figure out. Scott Fitzgerald's use of color symbolism to the first appearance of Green Lantern is something even the most daring high school essay writer wouldn't try. The closest thing to a magic green light that would've existed in pop culture at the time would've been the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock in The Great Gatsby, and linking F. The idea of a ring that can create solid images of anything the wearer can imagine doesn't really have an obvious immediate predecessor. Green Lantern, however, is a whole lot harder to pin down.
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