Now Hand Over Yer Bat Lunch Money

Green Lantern:Rebirth was the recent GL mini-series that took Hal Jordan out of his Spectre duds and put him back as Green Lantern Numero Uno. A lot of people got upset about this.

Remember Emerald Twilight? That would be the storyline that removed him as GL top dog and replaced him with Kyle Rayner (Incidentally it's also the storyline where Hal goes crazy and massacres the entirety of the Green Lantern Corps single handed, a moment of comic greatness I'm sure I'll cover in a future post). A lot of people were upset by that too as I recall.

Get rid of him? Bring him back? You just can't seem to win with these gosh-durned comic book fans!

As for me, I liked them both, I thought they both had their good points.

One such good point in GL:Rebirth was the tension between Batman and Hal throughout the last issue of the mini-series:

C'mon Bats. Blink dammit! I really need to pee!

In case you've forgotten, at one point Hal became a big bad named Parralax and tried to erase existence and start over again - like some kind of galactic Etch-A-Sketch! Old Brucie is still a bit touchy about the whole thing - he's such a drama queen!

The confrontation comes to a head in a great scene at the start of #6. Hal and his ragtag GL Leftovers - I mean Corps - want to go off and save the universe but Bats wants to flap his lips some more. Hal convinces him that now is not a good time:

No way, you blinked first you big cheater!

You had to see it coming people. Hal is a big, snooty, jock flyboy, Bruce is a computer nerd in a rubber suit - it doesn't take a genius to figure out who's going crying home to their butler after this scuffle.

I have to tip my hat to how Geoff Johns handled the GL comeback in this series. He gave nods to a lot of Hal history . To the great Emerald Twilight (Bats being a jerk was such a nice touch), to Hal's time as the Spectre, to poor, down trodden Kyle Rayner. Whether you were crazy about the Parralax revelations or not, if the GL franchise had to be relaunched with Hal in the driver's seat - this series was a good way to start.

Also just in case you missed it. Hidden in amongst the bat-bopping madness is a little message from Geoff Johns to the fans he knew would complain about this series no matter what he did:*GASP* That bastard! I take back all the nice things I said. I am outraged! I am so gonna send angry e-mails to the editor about this! No wait - I'll boycott all DC Comics, yeah that's teach them! No, even better - I'll find out where Geoff Johns lives and egg his house - yeah, that's it. This is gonna be sweet.

Oooh not right now though, I gotta go bid on a skanky Mary Jane statue on EBay.

Laters