Michael Netzer Online - Dennis O'Neil | What Would Green Lantern Do? ComicMix

But, in a way, there is a kind of truth in the Green Lantern saga. It's the same truth that's in our mythology, our religion, and much of our popular fiction in general. These things, our make-believe, our fun-makers, often contain representations of our values -- what we really feel, not what we think we ought to feel. And, that being the case, there's always been a problem with superheroes -- not only our superheroes, but all superheroes, from Gilgamesh on. They're warriors. Which means they're violent, and they solve problems by bashing someone. Implicit in their narratives is the notion that right makes might, and might, as manifested by physical force, is the tool of choice for problem-solving. I don't think that's ever been true and maybe you don't, either. In times when nuclear, environmental, and biological holocausts are real possibilities, it's deeply scary.

Which brings us to Green Lantern: here's this guy, a human living on Earth, who takes his orders from a bunch of high-and-mighty blue extraterrestrials and is expected to act on their commands without questioning them. We might assume him to be George Bush's idea of a hero, if we recall that Mr. Bush and cohorts discouraged questioning by keeping as much information as possible secret, and stage-managing what were supposed to be public events, but he isn't my idea of a hero and I hope he isn't yours. Our heroes, yours and mine, are warrior-philosophers, who make their own decisions, do their own thinking and question the hell out of everything.

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Tiina Raisanen - Hey indeed!

|2009-04-27 20:50:06

This is a yet another heureka moment for me, it reminded me of the moment when
somebody asked me, pick one of the comic heroes that I would like to be ?

I
want to create my own superheroes I dont know what the existing ones are about-
created by one author - taken over by another one, I dont want to be anybody's
puppeteer !!!!

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