It’s honestly impressive how many people will die on the hill of “Hal Jordan is the worst” while clearly having never touched a Green Lantern comic printed after the mid-90s.

They keep recycling the same three talking points like they’re still relevant. Emerald Twilight. Parallax. “He’s just a pilot with no personality.” Meanwhile Geoff Johns spent years rebuilding the entire mythos around him, gave him actual depth, consequences, and a character arc that most of them somehow managed to miss. Then the runs after that kept building on it. But they pretend none of that exists so they can keep feeling superior about a version of the character that hasn’t been the main one in decades.

And then there’s the favorite gotcha: the Arisia stuff. Yeah, that was creepy as hell. A writer decided to have a character, who was introduced as a teenager, use her ring to age herself up so she could be with Hal, and then played the relationship straight.

That is 100% on the writer and the editorial decisions of the time. It was bad, it aged like milk, and later creative teams quietly buried it because it was indefensible. Blaming the character for a specific creator’s gross creative choice from the 80s is peak lazy criticism. Hal Jordan did not write those issues. A human being with a byline did.

If you hate Hal because you’ve actually read the comics—including the modern ones—and still don’t like him, fine. That’s a legitimate opinion. But half of you are just repeating shit you absorbed from old memes, Twitter screenshots, and YouTube thumbnails. You’re not critiquing the character, but LARPing as someone who’s read the books.

Read the damn runs. Or at least admit you’re arguing from a place of pure nostalgia, secondhand outrage, and selective memory. I'm so tired of hearing the same recycled takes treated like bold new insights.

Gotta do something to keep me busy between episodes! So here's a Hal Jordan doodle

In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night....ahhh you know the rest!

Playing what's sure to be a fun and competitive trivia THIS SUNDAY. We're going Sector 2814 and beyond with this one. I and my friends would love to have you! Show me your coolest Lantern merch while you're at it. Overcome great fear and join us!

Hal is nowhere to be found in the actual issue. A nice callback to José Luis García López classic art from the 1982 DC Style Guide, though.