'Lanterns' Makes Even More Sense If You Know About DC's Iconic 20-Year-Old Meme
One of fandom's strangest projects is still up 20 years later
HBO Max's Lanterns has made the cosmic side of the DC Universe more popular than it's been in a while. Largely due to the adventures of the Green Lantern Corps, DC has a well-established galactic scene, full of feuding aliens, killer robots, space cops, and a giant wall made from dead gods that marks the far edge of existence.
Some of that's a little too out there for a live-action TV show, but Lanterns still packs a great deal into its first season, including a reference to the planet-sized Green Lantern Mogo. Notably, it did remember to include the most important part of the entire Green Lantern mythos: Hal Jordan spends a lot of time unconscious.
Through sheer coincidence, the first episode of Lanterns came out a month after the 20-year anniversary of one of the internet comic book community's longest running gags: the Hal Jordan Head Injury Project. More surprisingly, due to the inexplicable immortality of both Flickr and Blogspot accounts, most of the HJHIP is still online today.
Put together by "Sleestak," who still blogs occasionally at Lady, That's My Skull, the HJHIP is a tongue-in-cheek tracker of the sheer number of times that Hal Jordan, in his nearly 70-year history as a character, has taken a shot to the dome.
To be fair, any long-running superhero has likely been knocked unconscious on multiple occasions and in ridiculous circumstances. Spider-Man is something like 0 and 4 against his Aunt May beaning him with a vase. The difference is that Hal Jordan, unlike many of his other superheroic contemporaries, was traditionally depicted as a reckless maniac for the better part of his existence as a character, as he is in Lanterns. Hal typically runs head-first into situations with a zeal and lack of foresight that's usually reserved for heroes with some degree of invulnerability, healing factors, and/or suicidal tendencies. Especially in the Silver Age, or in stories that feature a younger Hal, he caught a disproportionate number of straight chin checks. If the ring didn’t have healing abilities, Hal would’ve ended up medically retired by 1970.
The best/worst part of the HJHIP is that two of the greatest Hal Jordan skull cracks aren't currently in the archive. The best one that is, however, might be from a particularly wild Silver Age story.
1 "Crisis in Triplicate!"
Justice League of America vol. 1 #148 (1977), written by Martin Pasko and Paul Levitz with art by Dick Dillon and Frank McLaughlin, is a good example of the sort of crazy inter-universal crossover that would eventually spark Crisis on Infinite Earths. It’s got two alternate timelines and time travel!
Long story short: the Justice Society and Justice League have been mind-controlled by demons into fighting the Legion of Super-Heroes. At one point, the Legion's telepath Saturn Girl manages to use her powers to force Hal to punch himself out.
It isn't a knockout blow and Black Canary defeats Saturn Girl three panels later, but this remains a useful visual metaphor for how Hal Jordan has historically been his own worst enemy.
2 "The Sign"
Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn is a six-issue limited series from 1989. In the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the DC Universe had received a full reset, so Emerald Dawn was used as a deck-clearing exercise to establish Hal Jordan's origins in this new continuity.
Issue #1, by Jim Owsley (now known as Christopher Priest) and M.D. Bright, picks up with a young Hal Jordan following in his father's footsteps as a test pilot. However, the operative word there is "young," therefore “stupid.” When Hal tries to drive home drunk, he rolls his car, which lands him in the hospital and badly injures his brother Andy.
In the wake of that, still fuzzy from head trauma, Hal is chosen by Abin Sur to become Earth's first official representative in the Green Lantern Corps, and he doesn't take it well.
That sequence of events goes a long way to explain why Hal chooses to blame a random road sign rather than his own poor decisions, and further, why his attempt to destroy the sign ends in him flat on the ground. Canonically, post-Crisis Hal Jordan's first-ever superhero fight was with an ordinary billboard, and he lost.
3 "The Man Who Murdered Santa Claus!"
Justice League of America v1 #110 (1974), by Len Wein, Dick Dillin, and Dick Giordano, is the issue when John Stewart first joined the team. Recently introduced in Green Lantern's own comic as Hal's official substitute in the Corps, John would receive the ring and tag in if Hal was unavailable or unresponsive. It wasn't until years later that John received his own ring.
Batman and Superman try to assemble the team in response to the Christmas Eve murder of an actor playing Santa Claus. A note and key found near his body suggest that if they can't find the door the key matches before midnight, which could be anywhere on Earth, a bomb will explode and take out a city block.
Unfortunately for Hal, the JLA signal goes off right as he's getting into the shower. Distracted, he slips on a bar of soap and knocks himself unconscious. His ring goes ahead and answers the call for him, running off to fetch John and leaving Hal in a heap on his bathroom floor. Hal sits out the rest of the adventure, while John joins the JLA to help find the source of the mystery key.
Hal isn't quite as prone to getting knocked out in modern DC stories. The ring is less fallible in current comics, thankfully, so there are fewer opportunities for Hal to get KO'd by random thugs or yellow bricks. Just the same, though, any time someone punches a superhero in the back of the head, Hal Jordan and the Hal Jordan Head Injury Project are there in spirit.