Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #1

Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #1
Cover Date: Summer 1992
Writers: Various
Artists: Various

Previously...

Last time we talked about how Hal Jordan hooked up with a 14 year-old (which gets retconned down to being a 13 year-old in this issue). Anyway, that relationship lasted for the rest of that run of Green Lantern, but, by 1992, Arisia had kind of fallen off the map. Now, you might think that the writers of Green Lantern would celebrate the fact that they no longer had to deal with that...unpleasantness, but Gerard Jones wasn't your typical writer. No, Jones decided to address the situation head-on....

Plot

So the framing story for this anthology is Hal and a bunch of other Green Lanterns looking at the Book of Oa, which tells them about famous Green Lanterns. The other stories are particularly memorable, but eventually Gerard Jones gets his chance to explain what happened to Arisia after we say her last.

Well, at some point after the end of the second volume of Green Lantern, Arisia decided to make a trip back to the old Green Lantern Corps headquarters in L.A., which unfortunately coincided with Guy Gardner and Kilowog accidentally demolishing it. The upshot is that Arisia gets hit on the head and reverts back to her 13 year-old personality, but still has the body of an adult.

This inspires her to have a flashback where it's revealed that she never really had a fully mature brain, but instead was using her power ring to fake having an adult personality so she could seduce Hal Jordan, which, uh...turned out to work like a charm.

You know, it's funny, because Gerard Jones was the writer who objected to the story where Hal went crazy and killed the Green Lantern Corps because, you know, he felt like it would ruin Hal's character, but revealing that Hal was sleeping with what was essentially a 13 year-old, that's apparently okay.

Anyway, Arisia, using her quasi-adult brain, also became a model, because apparently Jones felt like his story wasn't making the audience feel uncomfortable enough:

Anyway, her brains still scrambled, Arisia manages to get into a car wreck, which gives her amnesia. Meanwhile, back on Oa, Hal and his buddies have been watching the whole fucking story, and Hal vows to fix everything, whenever he gets a chance to head back to Earth. Then he decides just to go onto the next story, since, you know, what's the worst that could happen leaving a 13 year-old with amnesia and the body of a fashion model alone for a few weeks? To Be Continued!

Commentary

Here's the thing, when Hal Jordan got replaced as Green Lantern in 1994, this was probably exactly the sort of shit that made DC editorial say to themselves, "Yeah, it's time for a new Green Lantern." The Jones version of Hal Jordan was interesting, if only because Jones seemed to really have it out for Hal. I mean, this was a period where Hal was portrayed as a chronically unemployed, graying ex-test pilot with jail time on his record. And then you add the fact that his last relationship was retconned into having the mind of a child? Hal would've better off getting written out of the book three years earlier.

Damage Stars: *****