Green Lantern and Tom King don't mix?

Tom King is a pretty popular comic book writer, or at least he was while he was still writing Batman during "DC Rebirth." He may still be, but I'm not in-tune with what's going on in comics right now. I've been reading trades digitally via Hoopla, so I'm probably a couple years behind.

Anyway, Tom King used to be a CIA operative, and then he went on to write for DC. He also wrote a critically-acclaimed mini-series about the Vision for Marvel. His stuff can be kind of creepy, but I don't think he's primarily a horror writer. From TV Tropes:

"King's work is notable for tackling the psyches of his characters, darker leanings that hearken back to the 2000s, somewhat topical undertones, slow-paced rhythmic dialogue, Dissonant Serenity-brimmed stories and for implementing many of stylistic trappings of his own favourite authors — most notably Alan Moore and Frank Miller."

("Dissonant Serenity" refers to characters being calm while massive chaos takes place around them, since they're so used to it.)

I liked King's Vision mini-series even though it was creepy. I liked most of his work on Batman even though I hated how he wrote Wonder Woman and what he did with Booster Gold. And then came Heroes in Crisis.

I could write a whole post reviewing Heroes in Crisis. A lot of people hate it. I like the premise - superheroes addressing their hidden traumas - but I think it falls apart as the story goes along. But all I want to do here is highlight one panel that didn't go over well with me or probably most fans of Green Lantern:



This is Hal Jordan's only appearance in the whole series, I think, and I'm pretty sure what he says is meant to be funny. But within the context of the DC universe at the time, it doesn't seem like something that a man who created a brand new Green Lantern ring from scratch purely through the power of his own will would say or feel.

Some time later, I was reading a trade called Darkseid War: Power of the Gods, a tie-in to the main Darkseid War trade that came from the Justice League series. These two books took place before "DC Rebirth," near the end of the "New 52" era. The plot doesn't matter. All you need to know is that, in the Green Lantern chapter, Hal has what appears to be a combination of a vision and a flashback, involving himself as a kid lighting a candle for his late father who died in a plane crash.





God doesn't have free will? He worships us? Sounds pretty blasphemous to me.

When I got to the end of the story, I saw that its title was, "Will You Be My God?" and that it was written was written by Tom King.

I don't think I've seen King write any other Green Lantern stories, and I kind of feel like he and the character don't mix based on these two instances.

P.S., there was one interesting panel in Heroes in Crisis that didn't have anything to do with GL, but it did reference God. Not sure how to feel about it:

Whoah!! Lots worth commenting on here!

With a little re-wording, some of this armchair theology could work, in a sense. God does choose to limit his intervention as an outgrowth of his perfect character. For God to do different than he does would be less than perfect, since God only does what is perfect. So it would be true to say that God cannot choose to sin. And that is a superior quality of his, not a shortcoming.

Now the worship thing...hmmm. If I try really hard, I could observe that worship is basically the intense prioritization of something or someone. It's a submission of self to something considered greater or more valuable. That doesn't really work to describe God's involvement in our worship services. What I WOULD say is that God delights in our worship in part because he delights in us, is fixated on us out of deep love and affection for us. He adores us as precious children. That kind of prioritization and focus has qualities in common with worship, but is still (as it should be) very different.

So yeah, even with my best efforts of applying a preferred head-canon, this is just a mess. Thanks for the heads up. I'll make a note of skipping any Tom King GL trade paperbacks as I slowly catch up with DC comics.

And Hal not knowing what "will" is? I need context. I can make it work as a bit of philosophical pondering. The nature of will is a huge mystery to me. Where, ultimately, do our choices come from(on a non-calvanist view)? They are influenced by many things, and yet we still have the power, and accountability, to make the choices we do despite influences. If that is something like what he is pondering, I can go with it.

But the idea that humans have free will but God doesn't is just logically incoherent. God has to possess an ability (or something superior to it) in order to give it to us.

The only thing that makes those panels readable is the folksy way Hal's dad is talking, which makes it easy to imagine that he just plain lacks sophistication of any kind regarding the issues he's talking about. It's probably supposed to read like one of those striking moments where great wisdom comes from an unlikely source, like a country bumpkin or a little child. But here the dialogue style just makes it easier for me to imagine that Hal's dad is one more person blabbing about stuff they are totally and willfully ignorant about.

Still hard to read, though.

Lastly, the Corrigan quote sounds familiar, like I've seen that panel before or that quote originates elsewhere.

It has poetic truth to it, in that it conveys the real compassion God has for us. But it's not a satisfying answer to the question. Then again, what was the motive behind Corrigan's question? We don't know. In that situation, would God showing his compassion rather than answering be more of what Corrigan needed to hear? Proposing that is really just trying to help the writing with head-canon, however. I think God's tears AND an answer would have been more fitting. But the evidence here seems to indicate that King's theology isn't up for that.

Doctrine/theology aside, this doesn't make me confident that King knows what makes people want to read Green Lantern. And that the GL Editor is either tone deaf or coldly uncaring about what their Christian readers might think.

Paeter wrote:So yeah, even with my best efforts of applying a preferred head-canon, this is just a mess. Thanks for the heads up. I'll make a note of skipping any Tom King GL trade paperbacks as I slowly catch up with DC comics.

I don't believe King has written for the main Green Lantern book. Robert Venditti did pretty much all of Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps during "Rebirth," and the Grant Morrison took over for The Green Lantern. These Tom King examples are from separate mini-series that are more related to the Justice League as a whole.

Paeter wrote:The only thing that makes those panels readable is the folksy way Hal's dad is talking, which makes it easy to imagine that he just plain lacks sophistication of any kind regarding the issues he's talking about. It's probably supposed to read like one of those striking moments where great wisdom comes from an unlikely source, like a country bumpkin or a little child. But here the dialogue style just makes it easier for me to imagine that Hal's dad is one more person blabbing about stuff they are totally and willfully ignorant about.

It's not Hal's dad. They're talking about Hal's dad posthumously. It's actually …

Spoiler Alert:

It's some sort of flashback/vision thing he's going through while considering taking the power of a god via the Mother Box. Which makes it even worse that he's equating the God of the Bible with all the finite gods of the DC universe.

This is fascinating. The perspective echoes Jim Butcher's work in the Dresden Files. To some it up: mortals have free will, immortals only have their nature. Immortals have no choice in how they act or react, it is bound in their nature - much like the story of the scorpion and the toad.