Defunding the Space Police
Green Lantern: Earth One and Reimagining Stories Away from Law Enforcement Framing
If you've followed me on Twitter or know me at all you know I like comic books and superhero stories. They're fun, thrilling and can be a nice escape from the world around us. So this past month as we've seen a horrible explosion in Beirut, massive police violence against people protesting police brutality and just the crushing slog of inequality, I picked up the two volumes of Green Lantern: Earth One. To my surprise, the comics not only reimagined the Green Lantern concept away from being space police but actively reinforced that shift the more it went on.
Green Lantern (at least the modern, sci-fi version; the magically powered Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott is awesome and far less problematic) draws from a lot of classic science fiction, including Lensmen. In essence, the Lanterns are space police, patrolling sectors of the universe, with partners, looking for suspects. That aspect of being “The Man” hasn't gone unnoticed; in the 1970s Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams famously teamed up space cop Hal Jordan with the leftist Green Arrow for a revolutionary series that took a hard, left-wing look at social issues. Although there have been some great stories with the Corps— “Sinestro Corps War” was an action event that didn't feel as overblown as many comic event series, John Stewart and Kyle Rayner are well-rounded characters with good drama around them — the Corps itself has been unsettlingly totalitarian, if not fascist at times. After all, who gave them the right to police others? What makes the Lanterns' bosses “the Guardians of the Universe” so worthy of such a title?
What's surprising is not only how much the Green Lantern: Earth One comics remove the Green Lantern-as-space police narrative, but how much they make the series work without it. Every so often when the idea needed a revamp (beyond the mid '90s when Hal went crazy, killed the Corps and Kyle Rayner became the sole Green Lantern) the idea has always been to refocus and ground it as a police thriller, just in space.
The Earth One line was meant as kind of standalone reimaginings of the characters. In ways they read a lot like movies, self-contained, with adapted versions of familiar characters. Superman: Earth One gave us a moodier Clark Kent trying to decide how to use his powers as an alien invasion took place, while Batman: Earth One imagined a far less mythic dark knight in a story heavy with deconstruction. And with Green Lantern: Earth One, the creative team of Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko stripped the concept away from its superhero and police genre trappings and into more of an action thriller. It finds Hal Jordan not as the archetypical cocky flyboy but as a jaded astronaut and space miner, a former NASA guy in a near-future where our world has taken a (somehow) more dystopian turn. When he finds a crashed alien ship and a barely powered ring, he ends up on a journey with other people who have these rings in the aftermath of the Green Lantern Corp being wiped out by the robotic Manhunters, who are oppressing the galaxy in some twisted view of law and order.
From Green Lantern: Earth One Volume 1, credit: DC Comics/ Bechko & Hardman
The first volume of Green Lantern: Earth One came out in early 2018, with volume two only released a few weeks ago, after a delay from earlier in the summer. Neither one was created after the anti-police brutality protests broke out this summer in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of police officers in May. Floyd was suffocated by an officer's knee to the neck for eight minutes. He told them he could not breathe but they did not let up. Those words galvanized activists and gave a movement of defunding the police and shifting resources to harm reduction and social services new life and new members. It's with that lens that in the last six weeks I read both volumes of Hardman and Bechko's fresh take on Green Lantern. I'm writing this now while haunted by the video of Kenosha, WI police shooting Jacob Blake seven times in the back. As of now, he is paralyzed and protests against police violence are happening and those in turn have been disrupted by a far-right teenager who killed two people. And this summer we've seen serious discussions about “copaganda” and the amount of police-POV media, from procedurals like Law and Order to even sitcoms like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the effect those have on our views of policing.
And I'm not trying to make some grand gesture about how a comic book can fix our culture of impunity, systemic racism and police brutality. But as I was reading the first volume, I was struck not only by the storytelling but the sense that Hardman and Bechko had fixed a problem intrinsic to the character without making it feel like it wasn't Green Lantern. That's a start in reshaping how entertainment can skew views on public safety. There have been jokes online that Brooklyn Nine-Nine will come back randomly about the Post Office with no explanation, but if a concept can work outside of the police framework, that's something.
The last of the Guardians says that the Manhunters were created “to serve—to protect.” It's an explicit link to the idea of law enforcement. Someone who witnessed the destruction claims that the Oans were threatened by the power of the Corps; the idea of the Corps bringing “order” is dismissed with a nod to the authoritarian implications of that phrase. I don't know the full extent of the creative team's politics —from their Twitter accounts they seem liberal and anti-fascist—but some of the politics in these books, of the way security systems keep getting turned against the people, is left wing.
Even in Volume 2 when we see the new Green Lantern Corps established, none are acting as law enforcement per se. Hal Jordan is not trying to police Earth, but trying to offer support and consulting as a wider expert on space. John Stewart (reimagined here not as a Green Lantern, but as an engineer named Jonathan Stewart who gets caught up in an interplanetary conflict) serves as a POV to people impacted by Hal's presence, but in no way under his thumb. Kilowog has no real control over his planet's security forces and even is at odds with them at time. The Green Lanterns are more portrayed as armed humanitarians. Now that raises issues of its own, but it offers a more of a left-wing approach to the idea of security. Much of the discussion in liberal-left foreign policy in the United States has been over the purpose of American military might, for imperialism or as peacekeepers justified via the “right to protect” idea that came out of the 1990s. But the baseline is the same, that might would be used. Given the “Blob” nature of D.C. (that is, the real place, not the comics company), much of that approach over the last 40 years (and particularly the last 19 since the start of the Global War on Terror) that isn't changing, but this comic tries to imagine peacekeeping might truly in a defensive light against the oppressing and then later raiding threat of the Manhunters.
The one brief moment the series' take on the Lanterns-as-police narrative is in an interesting reimagining of classic Greeen Lantern-turned-villain Sinestro in Volume 2. Here, when actually given a protection assignment, he's tasked by an authoritarian to do political assassinations to continue an oppressive regime—in essence serving as an extension of a security force. In response, Sinestro breaks, directly challenging orders and saying that is not who he is. It's a reinforcement of the idea that in this universe, the Lanterns view themselves as a protective network, not as part of some power or authority.
On a pure reading experience level, these comics are great. If there's a flaw, it's that both volumes feel too short and the story moves a bit too fast. The universe Hardman and Bechko constructs feels tactile and engaging and you want to spend more time seeing it through Hal (and later Jon's eyes). Familiar concepts are made fresh and as storytellers the creative team can do thrilling action and some great sci-fi payoffs, especially at the end of volume one. The creators have said they have a third volume planned but it has not been officially announced so we'll see. But on a broader level they also show one of the best uses of the Earth One line's ability to update classic heroes.
Today's Panic Reading
Speaking of policing and our society's framing of the idea, Jack Mirkinson at Discourse Blog wrote about what pundits mean when they talk about law and order. Mirkinson also deftly refutes the classist and racist elements of the arguments people like Sullivan and Stephens are making, which for some reason have been seen as legitimate simply because these are established pundits.
My former colleague at Los Angeles Downtown News, Eddie Kim, has a major feature at MEL Magazine about the wives of prison inmates in California fighting for their release as their spouses are endangered by COVID-19. Prisoners are heavily at risk to the disease given their cramped conditions and their plight has not gotten enough attention.
Meanwhile Alex Pareene over at the New Republic — whose 2016 piece “Don't Blow This” continues to haunt me every day and serves as a sadly urgent warning in 2020 — took a look at a specific case of police impunity and partisan attack in Portsmouth, VA, in which the police are trying to silence political opponents.
Then there's this Slate piece from May 31. Yes, it's a few months old. I know. But, it's the most accurate headline on this so far and honestly the headline applies to so much of what has been happening in Portland, Los Angeles and so many other cities this summer.
Also, if you hang around certain segments of Twitter, you might have seen one of Orson Welles’ radio show segments make the rounds recently. In it, Welles talked about the plight of Isaac Woodard, a Black military veteran who in 1946 who was brutally beaten and blinded by a white police officer in South Carolina. Luke O’Neil, whose Welcome to Hell World newsletter is essential and features the kind of writing I aspire to, looks not only at Welles’ searing address but also what Welles railed against, the kind of systemic racism and bruality that leads to riots, not riots themselves.
Today's Panic Music
I try to use this section to sort of share music I truly enjoy or what I have been listening to as I write these newsletter entries. But to stick with the theme, the other week it was The Clash frontman (and my personal hero) Joe Strummer's birthday. To honor the late singer I listened to a ton of Clash and Mescaleroes songs, including “Guns of Brixton,” which inevitably led to me listening to Jimmy Cliff's brilliant cover of the song. There's something amusing about the full circle-ness of it all, as Cliff played Ivan in The Harder They Come, a character and movie Strummer and The Clash namecheck. Plus, the song feels as urgent now as it did four decades ago. Check it out.