In 2018, DC comics published a mini-series titled Heroes in Crisis, by writer Tom King. It was a murder mystery that centered around a facility called Sanctuary, an unassuming house in the American heartland, set up by Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman so that the superhero community would have a safe place to go whenever the pressure of the job became too much to bear. At Sanctuary, heroes could anonymously interact with a staff of robot attendants, and talk through whatever’s on their mind, in complete privacy, and in some cases offered fascinating insights into the way these characters see themselves.
As you would imagine, some Green Lanterns pass through Sanctuary. Guy Gardner talks about how nobody sees him as being good enough, which is the major driving force of his character. Jessica Cruz talks about how going to outer space alone is comforting for her, the implication being that there’s nobody around to make her feel anxious. Jessica suffers from anxiety and agoraphobia, so there's value in her having a quiet place to go where she can be completely alone.
So far, pretty much everything we’ve seen reinforces the idea that writer Tom King has a decent understanding of these characters…who they are, what makes them anxious, it all feels right. Then we come to Hal Jordan, who says “Let’s be honest, right, I don’t even know what the hell ‘WILL’ is. Do you?”. This one panel has infuriated Green Lantern fans for years. At worst it’s been seen as a disrespectful misrepresentation of Hal Jordan, and at best a bewildering misunderstanding of the character…except we know that Tom King does understand the character of Hal Jordan very well. Two years earlier, in 2016, he wrote a one-shot tying into the Darksied War storyline running through Justice League titled Justice League: The Darkseid War: Green Lantern #1. It was a story about Hal Jordan exploring the nature of his own Humanity and the role that Free Will plays in all of our lives. After reading that issue, I’m very confident that Tom King understands the character of Hal Jordan, and Hal’s relationship to Willpower…so where did that Heroes in Crisis panel come from? And since this has been such a point of contention for Green Lantern fans for so long, I decided to just ask him. I politely tweeted to Tom King, asking what he meant by that line, and he told me. Basically, it boils down to the fact that willpower is just a concept, it’s an idea, and it’s one without a strict definition that everyone agrees on.
There was a meme someone made in response to the Hal Jordan panel, where they edited the text of Captain Atom’s testimonial to say “Let’s be honest, I don’t even know what Atoms are” because a Green Lantern not knowing what willpower is seems as ridiculous as Captain Atom not knowing what atoms are…but without realizing it, this person created the perfect example of why the Hal Jordan panel is fine. Because Captain Atom saying this about atoms is ridiculous, since atoms physically exist and are observable, and can be tested, studied, catalogued, and definitively known and quantified. Willpower can't, because it only exists in the abstract. Again, willpower is just an idea.
We take for granted the fact that Green Lantern rings are pieces of advanced alien technology, and I think we tend to forget just how advanced they really are. There is not a single member of the Green Lantern Corps, past or present, who knows how the rings work. They know how to interface with the rings, and they know how to recharge them, but that’s it. Not a single one of them knows how the ring, as a machine, functions. The only exception is Ganthet, who joined the Green Lantern Corps for a short time, but that doesn’t count since he’s a Guardian, and the Guardians and their peers are the only ones who understand the inner workings of the rings. So when Hal Jordan fires up his ring, he’s using a piece of equipment he knows nothing about, that runs on a power source that can only be understood by going outside of the current limits of Humanity’s knowledge. And he gets along just fine, because the ring has an incredibly intuitive user interface. So really, a ring is a device that doesn’t require its user to understand very much at all in order to get the most out of it, and most of the time that suits everyone just fine. But there’s only so much impossibility that someone can live through and live with, so of course it would bug Hal once in a while that he doesn’t really know much about this thing that he relies on while facing down mad gods, this thing that’s his only life line in the vacuum of space, this thing that’s come to define so much of who and what he is.
DC did attempt to side-step this layer of complexity and ground the whole thing by introducing the concept of the Emotional Spectrum, which was immediately compared to the Electro Magnetic Spectrum as a point of reference, because the Electro Magnetic Spectrum is a real thing that people have some degree of understanding of, or have at least heard of. From there, it became all about how each Emotional power interacts with the others…Hope strengthening Will while weakening Greed which drains Will, and so on…and all of that provides enough structure that it can feel like this makes sense, like these powers have been explained. But they haven’t been. Because you can sit there and tell me everything you know about how the Emotional Spectrum works, you can tell me every word ever printed about how Guardian technology works, and you still won’t have explained how something that’s purely conceptual can physically exist. There’s a reason why writers spent decades calling the ring’s power Plasma, or Light, or just plane Green Energy…because it’s easier to understand and it’s not abstract.
So when Tom King wrote Heroes in Crisis, he wasn’t disrespecting Hal Jordan, and he wasn’t showing a lack of understanding of Hal’s character, he was just allowing Hal to have a brief moment of frustrated vulnerability about something that’s probably always in the back of his mind as he soars across the cosmos to save the day. And if that seems out of character, well, that’s what Sanctuary is for. It’s a place where you can let your guard down, and present a version of yourself that you’d never show to the rest of the world. And all that means is that people are complicated…maybe even more complicated than alien rings from outer space.
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