1.
This is a story with a happy ending.
2.
It's July 1970. I am 8 years ago. In the Ashtree Newsagent's wire rotating magazine rack, I find a new copy of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adam's "Green Lantern/Green Arrow" # 83. I will soon discover that it contains the single most affecting panel that I will ever come across in more than four decades of reading comics. There are no punches thrown in this panel, no world-quaking explosions, no capes, cowls and or eye-rolling machinations for world conquest. You can see the panel above.
In the panel, a man and a woman are hiding from the rain. The man is a superhero, Green Lantern, but there's nothing super-heroic about him here. Hal Jordan, as Green Lantern's called in his private life, is a deeply unhappy man, something of a beaten man, and he's struggling to speak about his feelings to a woman who he clearly loves.
The woman is Carol Ferris, less important in the panel, but central to the tale, an old lover of Green lantern's now confined to a wheelchair. Here, her face in profile is the focus for Green Lantern's adoration and regret. The panel is his, but the power is hers. It's his loneliness for her and his sense of failure as regards their relationship that we're expected to fasten on to. When I later read Graham Greene's "The Heart Of The Matter", and came across the passage where Scobie watches a young girl "go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years", I remembered Hal Jordan's face here, recalled the struggle on it as he wrenched the squirming, unfamiliar, unsatisfactory lonesome words out of himself, andI thought, I saw that depth of loss in a Green Lantern comic book when I was 8, Mr Greene. I understand it more now, so thank you, but I got the gist of it then.
3.I'm told there is a word in Russian for a form of nostalgia which we English-speakers know nothing of. The Russian word means "nostalgia for a past which we ourselves never experienced". And the moment I heard that, I realised that I had felt that, felt it often and deeply. I feel it every time I see old black and white film of New York in the '50s and '60s. I feel that I ought to have been there, and that in some way I was. That I'm familair with the taxi cabs and winter snow drifts, skyscrapers and jazz clubs. That I was happy there, that it was my moment, and that I have no idea what I'm doing here, now, at all.
How much more do we feel, intensely feel, and never know we feel because we lack the language to recognise our own powerful emotions?
4.I love super-hero comics, but I've little interest in watching customed musclemen and women knocking seven bells of Hell out of each other. In this, I'm on a par with those afficionadoes who adore experimental electronic music for the sing-along choruses, or the lovers of the transitional ballet scenes in Shaw's "Arms And The Man". When it comes to super-hero comics, I tend to like the bits without the superheroics, I'm far more interested by who super-heroes are when they're off-duty than I am by who they're slapping around when they're out at work.
I can't remember a single way that the Justice League Of America have defeated their nemesis Starro The Conqueror in any of their dust-ups since 1960. Lord knows, you'd think I'd remember. Starro is one big, orange, telepathic trans-stellar starfish. Easy to recognise, hard to forget, you'd think, but I've forgotten lots about him. Oh, I have a good grasp of how each of the battles probably worked themselves out. The Justice League will have struggled, the celestial starfish will have cackled telepathically in triumph, the Justice League will have regrouped after one of them had reeled out the standard pious pep talk about sticking together and never giving up, the Justice League will have hit the big starfish a great many times until it turned tentacle-suckers up in yet another defeat. I'm glad the Justice League triumphed. I have no faith that intergalactic starfish have any respect for human rights. But there's a limited number of ways in which the victory-against-impossible-odds can be won at the last minute. In 44 years, I've seen them all. I've seen them all so many times that I've forgotten them all in weariness and disinterest, like an old audio tape that's been host to one too many my-favourite-party-tunes compilations.
But I remain enchanted every time I read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's "For The Man Who Has Everything", where Batman, Robin and Wonder Woman bring Superman their presents for his birthday. I adore Dan Slott and Ty Templeton's "I'm With Stupid", which follows the friendship of Spider-Man and the Human Torch across four decades of misunderstandings, over-competetiveness, and a mutually-suppressed "please-don't-mention-it" fondness for each other. I want to know what the fantastic people are doing when they're not being fantastic. I want to know how Batman keeps the Batcave warm and clean. (It's a huge place to heat, so a few radiators and a foot-warmer isn't going to work, and Albert The Butler can't possibly wipe down all those Bat-Planes, Batmobiles, office-block-tall robot dinosaurs, and the trophy-room giant penny.) I want to know what our mundane world would be like if these super-heroic wonders moved in down the road. And I want to know what they would like if we were neighbours, friends, colleagues, if one worked for the traffic police, or if my sister married one.
If I had a sister. Sisters were as mythical, as legendary, as super-heroes to me, though in many ways it was the having of a sister that was harder to imagine.
5.The truth is, I was a lonely boy. I think, or rather I know, that I was looking for friends.
6.Before I came upon that panel, I understood something of longing and I knew something of what unhappiness was. But I never realised that both longing and despair could go on and on for a very very long time, as the panel tells us it has for Green Lantern. It hadn't struck me that it might be time beyond measuring before rescue might appear. This was a shock. If I'd been a more self-aware lad, I would have realised that the unhappiness I felt on, say, a Wednesday, was the same unhappiness I felt on the following Thursday. I would have grasped that I was a permanantly miserable child, and realised that I didn't know that there was anything other than unhappiness to feel. I thought happiness was the emotion a boy felt when distracted by comic books. I thought unhappiness was an extreme of despair. I din't know that unhappiness was different to despair. Despair I felt occassionally. Unhappiness was my default setting. When I thought I was feeling normal, I was feeling a deep, deep blue.
So I looked at this Green Lantern, wracked by the return to his life of a long-lost girlfriend, and I suddenly saw that feelings were more powerful and dehabilitating than I'd ever realised. I had those feelings too, I realised, but I'd lacked the self-awareness to recognise it. I had been bereft of the language I needed to recognise myself. I'd needed a comic book to start to explain myself to myself. And I saw myself not in the intergalactic superheroic cop. I saw myself in a shattered man trying, and somewhat failing, to find the words to express himself honesty to Carol Ferris. I saw someone who felt human things deeply, and who understood that he couldn't express them, and who knew that he'd acted unwittingly to hurt the very woman he so loved.
And I thought how I'd recognised something important here. And I would return to that panel, to Neal Adam's underlying composition as well as the finished drawing, to how the lines described by the falling rain and the side of the shack and by the people's bodies themselves are all running away at an angle to the vertical, as if the world was twisted sideways of itself. It's a twisted world, an unhappy world there, just like it is here. Wasn't it staggering that somebody saw that too?
7.Whenever I thought of this panel, I remembered it as the panel in which Green Lantern tells Carol Ferris that he loves her. And though that's true, in its own way, Denny O'Neil doesn't have Green Lantern say those valentine-card words themselves. In fact, to my shock, it was only tonight that I realised that there's nothing directly romantic in the words he's saying at all. He's changed, he says, and he might know abit more about things than he used to, he says, but he isn't nearly as happy as he was when he knew her. That's all he says.
In my memory, Green Lantern is always saying "I Love You". But he doesn't. His eyes say it, his gaze says it, his face, apparently tilted to one side as if in amazement that Carol is there before him, says it. But his words are all in code. (The sub-text is so over-poweringly obvious that I mistook it for the text.) He can't say how fundamentally he has missed her, so he says he's less happy now. He can't say that he was immature when he knew her, so he says he's changed. And he can't say that he'd never treat her as stupidly as he did before, so he makes the claim that he's wiser now.
If he doesn't get the tone of his delivery right, he'll sound like an arrogant buffoon with a penchant for depression.
8.
In Nick Hornsby's "High Fidelity", the pop-music-obsessed Rob Fleming wonders how much his despondant nature owes to his conspicious consumption of loved-and-lost ballads when young. "What came first - the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all these records tunr you into a melancholic person?" I've thought the same about comic books, and those stories like the one we're discussing here. And my conclusion, every time, is not that of Rob Flemings, who believed that sad people had been listening to sad music for longer than they'd been unhappy, meaning the causal variable was surely the music and not the life. For I had been carrying the bleakest landscape inside my head from as far back as I could recall, and I was so used to it that I thought, as a thousand blues songs would have it, that it looked like up to me. Comic books, and certainly not this comic book, didn't make me violent, or maintain any youthful illiteracy, or make me see women in a hyper-sexualised fashion, or indeed cause me to suffer any of the ills that super-hero comics have traditionally been blamed for. Instead, they showed that people with great advantages should fight annoymously to help others rather than make quick bucks for themselves. They showed me that woman were just as important to a super-team's wellbeing and power as men. They constantly encouraged me to look up new words - "omniscient" being the first I reached for the dictionary to grasp - and they inspired me to plough through novels as well as more comics.
And even more importantly to me, they showed me that strong, powerful, decent men like Green Lantern could screw up, and realise it, and feel shame and loss, and then struggle to put things right. I didn't learn passivity in the face of misery. I learnt, in my own barely-comprehending fasion, that you could take on unhappiness with candour and decency just as you can take on Starro The Conqueror, though I still can't recall the mechanics of how to do the latter. I just accept that it has be done.
It wasn't until I understood I was so down that I realised I would have to fight. The Invention Of Loneliness was the first step of The Crusade Against Misery. That's how I saw it. In comic book terms.
I was 8 years ago.
But I wasn't wrong.
9.
Decades after this story was published, DC lost track of what had made Green Lantern so special, as publishers will, and the comic book, not for the first time, was dying on the comic racks. The corporate solution was a radical one, a scorched earth policy that had an insane Green Lantern - my Green Lantern - slaughter all of his fellow inter-stellar policemen, before progressing to even greater crimes and a career as a supposedly terrifying super-villian.
I never believed a word of it.
And it took a long while, but Hal Jordan, Green Lantern, got better. He wouldn't slaughter anyone, let alone his comrades in arms. My 8 year-old self from 1970 was sure of it. I knew it too. He's Green Lantern.
And so, too, after a long while, though a long while mercifully free of galactic slaughter outside of the pages of comic books, I got better too.
So, you see, this story does have a happy ending, for both of us.
10.
Always ask yourself: what would Hal Jordan try to do?
The Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams "Green Lantern/Green Arrow" stories from the 1960s and 1970s can be found in "The Green Lantern/Green Arrow Collection" volumes 1 and 2 from DC Comics.
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