One of the things that people who only know me through this feature here might not realize is that I am crazy for 1960s Green Lantern stories. I love them, I seek them out, I will shell out a reasonable amount of money for the pleasure of reading them.

As everyone knows, there’s a lot of sexism (and racism — though I don’t see why we can’t bring the Hal’s mechanic back and call him “Tom” now. They’ve retconned out far less significant details than a racist nickname) in 1960s comics. There’s a lot of women fainting, preening and scheming to get married that is simply silly and embarrassing now. I know time and time again I see a panel from the 1960s posted with “It could be worse, girls!” or I see someone at a convention talking about how far we’ve come with female superhero portrayal since the Silver Age. And we have come a long way in some ways, but to be honest I can think of a few instances were things were done right early on, where the portrayal of a female character was revolutionary and the writers since have made it worse while updating the stories.

The biggest one that comes to mind, of course, is Green Lantern’s girlfriend. Carol Ferris, for all her 60s sexist flaws, had to be one of the most progressive love interests in the Silver Age. She was a professional woman who turned away Hal because she was his boss and dating him would have been unprofessional. He could date her in his secret identity, but it wasn’t a matter of shallowness on her part but practicality. Rather than try and trick Green Lantern into proposing to her, more than once she actually had it in mind to propose to him. She could fly her own plane, and even though her father had only reluctantly put a girl in charge (”she’s proven herself as good as a son!”) she ran his aircraft company competently. On a rescue-to-appearance ratio, she plays damsel in distress less often than Hal’s brother Jim (he was put in danger everytime he showed up).

Then there was the Star Sapphire thing. I was actually surprised when I read this one, because I’d always heard it was much worse than it was. As John Broome wrote it, Carol was contacted by alien Amazons interested in taking her off of the planet for a ceremonial leadership role. When she said she’d rather stay and marry Green Lantern, they set her up against him so that she could defeat him, see he wasn’t worth her time, and go with them. When she lost, they erased her memory and left her with the jewel because they figured life on Earth as a woman was pretty bad and it might help to have a surprise in the back of her head.

It was an easy “Feminists have taken over my girlfriend’s brain” plot idea (these plots were pretty common in 60s sitcoms, where perfectly happy women would meet a feminist group and get brainwashed — possibly because the sitcom writers couldn’t imagine that women who joined the women’s movement may have been actually unsatisfied with their lot in life on their own and the whole thing seemed like brainwashing to them), but it didn’t quite work out that way. Carol didn’t have a sudden change in personality, she was compelled to attack Hal but she was still herself in her head. (The next two or three stories had a personality change, but not much of one. She was basically Carol without remembering she was Carol.) She was intrigued and sympathetic to the Zamarons, and already knew she had an uphill battle on Earth as a human. She wanted to keep trying for the superhero husband and doing things her way instead. The Zamarons, for their part, couldn’t have cared less about Hal except that he was the only thing they knew of that would keep Carol on Earth.

Broome’s stories about Star Sapphire show feminist thinking creeping into an extremely sexist cultural setting. Its not a backlash, because Carol and the Zamarons are never villains like Sinestro or even like Dela Pharon (an alien Star Sapphire who challenged Carol and tried to rape Hal — yes rape, she was using mind control to get him to marry her. What do you think the intent was?). They’re antagonists, and the situations that put Carol as Star Sapphire up against Hal as Green Lantern are much more complicated/contrived than later instances of “She’s been mind-controlled to HATE MEN” as seen in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s stories. Its like an early redefinition of women’s roles in comics. She’s still a love interest and still has a lot of stupid stereotypes to her, but there’s some potential here. Ideas that went into making Carol and Star Sapphire may very well have evolved into future female superheroes.

After John Broome and Gardner Fox left, Star Sapphire seemed to degrade into a horrible backlash against feminism. When Carol changed, instead of being a lighthearted rival or an adventuress on her own she became this vicious harpy who absolutely hated men. Englehart even wrote a split personality into her backstory to explain it (and later I think it was Jones who retconned the “masculine side” of Predator to an Oan Demon possessing her). Eventually they just put Star Sapphire aside during the Kyle years, she was just too messed up and wrapped up in Hal to use then.

Enter Geoff Johns, and his attempt to “fix” Star Sapphire’s continuity in Green Lantern #18-20. Now, I am for the most part very fond of the Geoff Johns and his Green Lantern run. He brought Hal back (and wrote an awesome Kyle while he did it), that makes me love him. That doesn’t mean I have to love everything he writes, though. Sure, he had some elements in this story that made me disgustingly happy. The Zamarons looked like aliens (and their Caucasian human looks were explained away as an illusion) and seemed very clearly grossed out at the idea of kissing Hal. He remembered that Carol can pilot her own plane, and he got rid of that stupid marriage that kept her from being Hal’s love interest. He also did satisfactorily explain why Star Sapphire was such an insane and inconsistent character.

Like Parallax was a grasshopper entity made of yellow fear (nicknamed the “Fearbug” by fans) and Ion is a being of green willpower that closely resembles a dolphin (or “willpower whale”), Star Sapphire is a butterfly creature made of purple love (I like the term “loverfly” for this one but Melissa’s insistent on “lovebug” — no idea what the message board posters have named it). And it possesses women because it is trying to sleep with Hal.

Not even taking into account the weird conflagration of “love” and “lust” we have here (that’s a post for another blog and I think it can lead back to the Zamarons not actually understanding the emotions they are messing with), that revelation is devastating to a 60s-era Star Sapphire fan. With that revelation a plotline that is supposed to start and end with Carol Ferris, that is about Carol Ferris, becomes entirely about Hal Jordan. A woman’s story becomes a man’s story. And for the sake of continuity, they explained away decades of crappy story ideas with an explanation that retcons out the good parts of the early Star Sapphire stories but keeps the bad parts of the later stories. All the progressive ideas in Broome’s and Fox’s early stories were eradicated with this, and most of the reactionary ideas that made Star Sapphire into a man-hating psychopathic parody of feminism were kept along with some brand new hyper-sexualization.

This sort of thing happens all the time with retcons. We pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves on how far we come that we no longer see women fainting at danger or checking their makeup in the middle of a fight but even as we lose that, we’re losing some really good stuff. We’re losing the early good stuff. The little hints of awakening. We lose the baby steps.

By no means is this a call to go back to the days of screaming on tabletops about mice. I just don’t think writers should be so quick to throw everything from that era away and assume it was all the sort of trash no one would miss.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 10:11 am and is filed under Just Past the Horizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.