Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

The Prototype Corps

DC's Silver Age Green Lantern presented a unique take on the superhero concept, making a character that served as part of a space-spanning police force rather than a peculiar figure accidentally vested with superpowers by some improbable accident with chemicals, lightning, or radiation. The notion of a superhero answering to an authoritative body like the Guardians represented an element foreign to the likes of a Superman or Batman, and the existence of a legion of like-powered peers would remain a fairly unexplored concept in comics outside of Superman's titles.

Green Lantern seemed to represent a rather original view of the superhero, even if his powers, name, and Golden Age domino mask all reflected a lineage from the original Green Lantern. But can we truly claim originality for this character?

Refurbishing Green Lantern

Comics historians, both amateur and professional, recall that, between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, DC enjoyed considerable success by recreating Golden Age superheroes in new forms and placing such characters in Justice League of America and in their own titles. Characters like the Flash, the Atom, and Hawkman got such a treatment.

In 1958, DC decided to rework the Golden Age Green Lantern. Modelling his powers on those of his prototype, and having the delightful Gil Kane craft him a more up-to-date costume, the new GL's writers fitted him with a new origin, new alter-ego, new weaknesses, and a new background.

Whereas the original Green Lantern simply stumbled upon an artifact that fell from the stars, passed through other hands, and finally landed in his hands, where he used it to fight crime in the 1940s, this second Green Lantern enjoyed an entirely different relationship with the source of his power. He belonged, by a battlefield promotion, to a cosmic police force called the Green Lantern Corps, wherein he served as an interplanetary policeman. Therein, he answered to the control of the aloof Guardians of the Galaxy (later, Guardians of the Universe).

This remade Green Lantern, then, did not represent a simple remanufacture of an older model, repainted with 1958 detailing to conceal the rusted-through forties chassis. One could note that Green Lantern and his role within the Corps represented something new to the character and therefore original.

Such an observation, however, might fall to some examination of the writings of E. E. "Doc" Smith, particularly his Lensman works.

Smith and the Galactic Patrol

Green Lantern, version two, appeared in 1958. Ten years previously, E. E. "Doc" Smith completed his last revisions to the collected works or a space opera he had written that contained titles such as Triplanetary.

In this series of works, Smith told about a multi-million year struggle between two rival powers, the benevolent Arisians and sinister Eddorians. The Arisians possessed a powerful tool, the Lens, which gave its bearer great power; and they planned, over the thousands of millenia, to create an army to use this device against the Eddorians. To this end, they created and bred humanity until the race achieved a level where some of its members might bear the duties of bearing the Lens.

The Arisians chose Virgil Samms as the first human to receive the Lens, and thereafter he bore the title "First Lensman," using the telepathic (and other) powers the device gave him to create a space-spanning Galactic Patrol. The Arisians conceived the Galactic Patrol as a body both immensely powerful and completely incorruptible, dedicated to stopping evil in general and the swarming Eddorians in specific.

Sounds Familiar....

One might demonstrate considerable boldness by suggesting that a simple substitution of the words "Green Lantern" for "Lensman," "Green Lantern Corps" for "Galactic Patrol", and "Guardians" or "Oans" for "Arisians" would produce a recognizeable description of the basic structures that constituted the reworked Green Lantern of the late fifties and beyond.

No doubt two similarly inclined minds could come up with concepts that parallelled so well, but certain facts suggest that this set of concepts did not appear in a vacuum, nor erupt, fully-formed, like Athena from Zeus' brow (or something). One can note that the DC comics of the fifties and sixties enjoyed a strong science-fiction component that did not have precedent in the comics of the Golden Age. Incredible gadgets, invading alien monsters, time travel, parallel universes, and miscellaneous cartoony takes on advanced physics all appeared as regular and welcome guests.

A number of the writing and editorial talents that shaped DC in those days brought with them to that company a passion for science fiction, which, owing to time lag, would mostly include the influence of pulp science fiction and particularly space opera. Posterity records Julius Schwartz as one avid fan of the writings of that day, and the talents he worked with somewhat represented a peerage of creators with similar tastes.

We can, therefore, cautiously assume that a number of minds in DC enjoyed at least a passing familiarity with Smith's work, enough so to walk to the front office and say, "Hey, why don't we do an homage to..." or "Hey, doesn't this look like...?"

Homage or Appropriation

Perhaps my inability to say who really came up with the ideas and what they had read, and when they had read it, allows me to steer clear of actionable statements. Comics did, after all, frequently appear without credits (in DC's case, until about 1970); they felt free to rummage through public domain; they certainly referred to the culture at large and other comics, even by other companies, if the story demanded or the writers desired; and they used specific single science-fiction concepts as a chef might generously fling garlic over a sauce.

With so many parallel elements all seeming to derive from a single and particular source, though, common sense and suspicion seem to travel a parallel course. In truth, most of the differences between the Green Lantern Corps and the Galactic Patrol tended to revolve around inherited baggage (Green Lantern's powers) and conventions of the genre (crime-fighting on earth). Remove the inevitable elements of superhero comics and one finds something very like the Galactic Patrol underneath a new coat of paint.

That DC could milk the concept for about 36 years of stories before declaring it exhausted and dispensing with it entirely attests to the potential the concept held, both in Smith's and DC's versions; and, apparently, DC has suffered some second thoughts about its decision to do away with the Corps entirely, having occasional "teaser" Corps appear in the recent pages of Green Lantern.