What's Green in Black and White and Read all over?

When I was a youngster, I knew just what I wanted to be when I grew up. A super-hero. In fact, I'd be perfectly open to starting my superhero career in kindergarten, if that was what the Lord wanted. After all, God was all-powerful and all-wise: He must have placed this desire on my heart because He was going to use me as an instrument for His divine butt-kickin', right? My favorite super-hero of them all was Green Lantern. When I was 5, I prayed the longest prayer I had ever before prayed (in fact, perhaps it is still the longest!): in humble supplication, I beseeched God that He would send me a Green Lantern power ring. I gave God detailed instructions about where He could place the ring for me to find when I woke up. I waxed eloquent to God on all the selfless, beneficent deeds I would do with the power ring, such as replacing my grandmother's ugly grandfather clock with a beautiful green grandfather clock. Basically, Green Lantern's power is that he could make anything he wanted, so long as it was green. Now that's what I call real ultimate power!

Inexplicably, God must have put the power ring in the wrong place, and I never found it. Nevertheless, I still have a certain nostalgia when I think of Green Lantern. To this day, I remember his oath: "In brightest day, in blackest night/No evil shall escape my sight/Let those who worship evil's might/Beware my power, green lantern's light." So when I saw that Amazon was selling the first 20 issues of Green Lantern in paperback, that it was under $10, and that it was eligible for their "4 books for the price of 3" promotion, how could I refuse?

Sure, the early issues were campy. Sure, they were ethnically offensive, as Green Lantern is befriended by his "little Eskimo greasemonkey," named "Pieface," whose stock-phrase interjection was always "jumping fishhooks!" But the biggest problem with the paperback is that the collected stories represented Green Lantern's world in black and white. Literally.

I know, I know. It might not seem like a big deal that DC reprinted former color comics in black and white. Yes, black and white does work on a nice metaphorical level about simpler times, when the differences between right and wrong were more clearcut. It might even seem to work well on the aesthetic level: after all, you might think that a black and white grandfather clock is more pleasing to the eye than a green one. What you fail to take into account is a critical point in the Green Lantern mythos: because of an impurity in its composition, the power ring cannot work against anything that is yellow, which means every issue involves a case in which the ring does not work.

It is interesting to note that the publisher of Green Lantern, DC, got its name from "Detective Comics." DC comics often do offer more mysteries to be solved than do their counterparts at Marvel comics. For example, in Superman 122, Superman's sidekick Jimmy Olsen is dreaming rather loudly, "Foreign diplomats ... to see you ... president Superman," and an overhearing Superman thinks to himself, "Seems Jimmy is dreaming I'm President in the future! But ... it's impossible for Superman ever to be the chief executive of the U.S.!" The caption taunts the reader, "Can you guess why Clark is so positive that Jimmy's dream could never be fulfilled?" Since I am a super-sleuth, I guessed the right answer! For those of you less sleuthful, Superman reveals at the end, "If you'll read the constitution of the U.S....You'll find a provision which states that only native-born Americans can ever be President!" You see, you had to perform detective work and critical reasoning skills to realize that Superman was born on Krypton. Otherwise, he would be President.

I bring in the "Detective Comics" background to point out that DC only intended some elements of the story to require detective-work. While readers might be meant to puzzle out, "How is Green Lantern going to get out of this one?" they weren't supposed to have to guess, "What color is that menacing creature thing?" Knowing whether something is yellow or not becomes of crucial importance in understanding what's going on. I do have to admit that, much of the time, Green Lantern does try to keep his color-blind readers in the loop: for example, on the cover of Showcase Presents #24, Green Lantern informs his readers in a thought bubble, "Yellow beams from that monster's eyes...weakening me...making me powerless to resist." But other times, you just don't know. For example, in Green Lantern #8, when Green Lantern travels to 5700 A.D. to fight evolved gila monsters which are called Zegors, he notices, "the eye-blast of that Zegor and my power beam--are cancelling each other out!" Is it because the power beams are yellow, or because they are beams of magnitudinous power?

Sometimes you can get really faked out--there was a time when Green Lantern's power ring wouldn't work on a red missile, because it turned out it was really "infrayellow," which is just like "infrared," in that you can't see it, but it's there. (Scientists might call it "Infrayellow of the gaps.") As a detective, I had to piece together that not only did the missile not appear yellow to me, but it did not appear yellow to Green Lantern, except that it really was invisibly yellow, even though my first guess was that it was invisibly yellow, but only invisibly yellow to me and visibly yellow to Green Lantern and his original readers. Do you see how confusing this gets?

Still, it makes you appreciate the little things you take for granted. Like not being color-blind. Like gila monsters not having eye beams. Like infrayellow rays bouncing harmlessly off of us all the time, when for Green Lantern, it was a matter of life and death. Maybe I'm lucky I couldn't find that power ring after all.

Note: I'm not sure where the "infrayellow" story takes place, so it's possible I misremembered that it involved a missile. I don't have the patience to read the entire book over again, but if you find out the answer, let me know.

Later Later note (Nov. 13, 2006): an anonymous commenter found the quote! I was indeed misremembering the missile connection. Anyway, check out the comments to discover the infrayellow reference in context!