Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Green Lantern: Secret Files and Origins 2005!

This is one shot that had been sandwiched between the Green Lantern: Rebirth and the beginning of the immediately following Green Lantern reboot. I imagine this exists to completely catch new readers up on the circumstances that led up to the Rebirth arc, as well as other much-needed information before the new run kicks off proper.

At any rate, this one shot is along the road chronologically, so I must read it. And must read it I will. Thank you for joining me, and I’ll see you all soon enough for the real beginning of Green Lantern Vol. 4. I just need to, you know, catch up on what those fuckers Batman and Superman are up to these days again. And by “these days” I mean “1993” or thereabouts.

Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins 2005 [June, 2005]
Written by: Geoff Johns
“Flight / The Day Before”

“Flight”

SPACE SECTOR 2814. EARTH. “We take it for granted. We take a lot of things for granted. It’s human nature. Get wrapped up in your own microcosm of life, never taking time to step out and look.”

“So this is it. Look. It’s what I did. It’s what I was finally able to do with a little help. I lost years of my life. Friends and family. But I got a second chance.”

Kyle Rayner is tagging along with fellow Green Lantern buddy Hal “Air” Jordan. As in, they’re flying through the “air”. Jordan is smiley and Rayner is not as smiley because he has no idea where Jordan is leading him. “You’ll know when we get there,” Jordan grins. But Hal, the strip club is THAT way!

Hal Jordan’s ring was given to him by a member of the Green Lantern Corps. A dying alien, probably E.T. or Alf. At first the ring was awkward, but in no time the ring became a part of him like that cancerous mole on his right buttock that he hasn’t noticed yet and will kill him in roughly six months. You hate to see it.

Hal Jordan was chosen. And he knows Kyle Rayner was chosen too, he just doesn’t know it yet. Jordan knows what Rayner doesn’t, being chosen and everything. Without Rayner, Hal Jordan wouldn’t been a sad sack on the couch eating Pringles. “The Green Lanterns would’ve been extinct.”

Let’s flash back to Hal Jordan’s Secret Files and, dare I say, Origins. He’s at the Edwards Air Force Base no older than, let’s say, 9 years old. His mom bends down on one knee and tells her son to stop walking to school. The bus stop is only three blocks away, kiddo. Take the motherfucking bus! “I like walking to school,” Hal says, and why shouldn’t he? Encourage the walking, it keeps you in shape.

Your father is always avoiding the bus. What is it with you Jordan men and buses?

But no, he’s actually hiding something, isn’t he?… Mom tells him to hurry up to the bus or he gets no TV, but Hal has already bolted out the door and is running toward school.

Hal’s friends cannot believe their eyes! Hal Jordan? Running toward the bus?? That’s positively incredi– oh wait, he’s running past it. Heh, well, screw him. We’ll go to school without him if we need to.

Hal sneaks over to the restricted area of the base where he’s going to get rained upon by artillery fire! “I used to watch him every morning,” Hal thinks as he eyeballs a large fighter jet. “Quarter past seven he’d come climbing right over the horizon.” Young Hal drops his lunch on the ground and cheers! Hoots and hollers! Go Dad, you da man!

“Mom never asked where I spent the first fifteen minutes of every day. She was afraid to. Afraid of what it meant for the future.”

Later, while Hal puts together a really cheap-looking model airplane set, he overhears his parents having a tense conversation in their bedroom. Mom all like “stop encouraging the child” and Dad all like “no”.

“It was dangerous and sexy and fun when we were twenty. But now? With the boys… it’s not.”

“It’s my job, Jessica.”

Hal pipes in from the doorway. “I want to fly,” he says simply.

Ok son, here you go! *tosses kid out of the window* Flap those wings!

From that moment on, Mom drove Hal to school and Dad stopped flying in the mornings over the field. All parties were disappointed, but no one ever said anything. “The first five nights I cried myself to sleep.”

“The sixth night was different.” Dad creeps into Hal’s room at 2am. “Grab your jacket,” he says. Oh boy!

You see what a finski can do to a guy’s attitude?

Daddy takes Sonny to the base where he bribes a guard with a crisp Lincoln. Really breaking the bank on that one, Pops. Hal admits that he’s scared as they traverse the dark, empty airstrip. “Don’t worry. You’re flying with me, son.” Ha, oh, ok that makes him feel better. He thought you were going to each pick a plane and do some dogfighting, but maybe some other time.

Hal is still terrified, and dare I say, to use a TomWritesAboutStuff trademark phrase, pooping his pants. Dad flips switches and revs the engine and shifts gears and tunes his radio to the oldies station and checks his windshield wiper fluid and makes sure his mirrors are all set and turns on his hazard lights. The plane makes a lot of scary clanging and bumping noises, but since Geoff Johns knows a lot about airplane tragedies he knows how to be ultra-specific with any impending fuel tank explosions. That doesn’t happen, though, unfortunately. “Hang tight. I’m taking you to the stars, kiddo.”

That’s unsafe, sir.

Hal kept this excursion a secret from Mom. He never told anyone until a fateful date with Carol Ferris “Bueller’s Day Off”. Hal takes her on a date and does the old bait-and-switch. Instead of a nice, romantic dinner at Faustino’s, he’s going to take her to the fucking airstrip so he can do loop-de-loops while she cries.

The same damn security guard is there 20 years later. Hal makes nice and the forces Carol to cough up the bribe money; 10 dollars this time. Inflation is a bitch.

There goes my walkin’ around money.

“I’m not dressed for this, you know,” Carol complains. “You could’ve told me where we were going.” I’m with Carol on this one. Surprises are never, ever good. Surprise parties? No? Surprise blowjobs? …eh, still no. I gotta make sure I’m dressed appropriate for such an occasion. “I finally agree to go out on the town with you – not above it.”

Very funny, Carol. You’re a regular Brad Garrett, but I don’t watch TV at 3:00 in the afternoon and you should just suck it up and enjoy the ride. But no, this ain’t anything special anyway. She grew up on airfields her whole damn life, so being here sucks, Hal. It sucks like a surprise blowjob.

But because Hal is a smooth motherfucker, enough talking gets Carol thinking. She caresses the plane a little bit. “I thought she was going to slap me right then and there. But it came out of Carol when she got close to the plane. The little girl who lived to fly. Growing up on a tarmac all her own. When her father had his heart attack, Carol stepped in to run Ferris Aircraft. She hadn’t really been up in the air since.”

Next thing she knows, it’s bam, zoom, straight to the moon! And Hal takes her up into the cold, desolate night sky. And she loves it. She loves every second. She feels ALIVE, son. And they kiss, Hal away from the controls and the plane flying over residential zones dumping its poop water all over the place because Hal ain’t paying attention to the road. “Looking at it all now… looking at Carol. Letting her go was the worst mistake of my life.”

Even worse than chopping down the cherry tree and not being able to tell a lie about it?

The parallel to Kyle Rayner not knowing where Hal is taking him is funny to me. If I see a panel where they kiss up in the air I’ll post it here for posterity. They land at the airfield, lol. Sexy times ahead.

So much like your father, right down to the unbridled hatred of buses.

Once again, a nice fat bribe sends these two onto the empty airstrip. One of these days the guard is going to prison for his many crimes. “This is it?” Rayner gripes. “You want to take me for a flight?” Pffft, not just any flight, m’boy. This is an evening alone with Hal “Sex” Jordan, and once you go Green you never go… Lean.

Being a Green Lantern trumps any stupid airplane, by the way. Those things can’t even reach the stars, no matter what Mr. Jordan told you. “Kyle coughs on the fumes when we start up. The suit doesn’t fit him right…” Already a fantastic start. “Soon as we break the sound barrier, he holds his breath.” Yeah, how did you know that if you didn’t hear it? OOOOOHHHHH. Then he feels the thrill. The thrill of flight. The thrill of spending a cozy evening with Hal Jordan. “YEAAAHAHAAA!” he shrieks with childlike glee.

“He shouts out into the stars… and finally learns how to fly.”

“The Day Before”

The second story begins with Kyle Rayner fighting an enormous, greasy space bug by conjuring up one of those vision thingies that the ring can do. Constructs? Is that what they’re called? It’s a polar bear, which is the natural predator of space bugs.

When the Green Lantern Corps was developed, the Guardians divided the universe up into 3600 sectors. Rayner is fighting the bug in Sector 3599 near the outer limits of the universe. Since he’s the only active Green Lantern, I guess he has to do his duty of saving all 3600 sectors from… giant bugs, I guess. A one-man wrecking crew, this guy.

Rayner smiles as he stands in a sea of other creepy crawley bugs. They’re the good guys. I’m sure they’re thanking him for eradicated the giant bug, but he can’t. He can’t speak their language of stars and moons. BUT THAT’S NOT A PROBLEM: Rayner’s Green Lantern secret decoder ring will save the day. Now let’s see here… Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine. Heeheehee. Also “Parallax is coming”. Yeah, no shit, we did that already.

Parallax ain’t nothing on Hal Jordan’s mind! He’s down at the airshow watching the F-15s fly around. He talks to a young boy about how he used to fly one of those bad boys until a mishap in the Air Force caused him to lose his penis and his balls. Now he just hangs around airshows talking to minors.

Suddenly, an airplane putt-putters and falls out of the sky. Hal wants to help, but the Spectre that possess him is like “fat chance, you’re not helping shit”.

Boys, boys, cut out the fighting. Do I have to separate you two??

Spectre exits Hal’s body for a minute and begrudgingly saves the airplane. “Saving this man is a waste of time. He would have been welcomed into God’s Kingdom. Reunited with his father.”

Yeah, well, we’d all like to be welcomed into God’s Kingdom and reunited with our fathers, but sometimes that’s just not in the cards.

“While here in Italy – a boy rides his bike through the night and is struck DEAD by a drunk driver. The murderer has been arrested and imprisoned, but that is not enough. He must feel his insides pop open as his victim’s did. His rotten soul must be crushed like the boy’s skull. That killer will taste the vengeance of the Spectre.”

Hal does NOT like this idea. He thinks it’s rude, to say the least (and the most). “I won’t be part of your sick and demented justice!” Hal cries, even though he really has no choice in the matter. Possessed, remember? Even though he won’t cross that line, Spectre reminds him that he was the one who destroyed the Corps. He was the one who became Parallax. He needs Spectre to help fight it. He needs Spectre. And if that means we’re killing drunk drivers, then we’re killing drunk drivers. Get your coat.

NO! Still more resistance. Then Parallax takes over and jumps out of Hal’s body to taunt and mock him into a crying ball of mush.

And this is how it all began.

Final Thoughts

WHOA DOGGIES! I didn’t learn anything new, but gosh was this entertaining nonetheless. We’re going to keep moving along with the Geoff Johns run, but for now let’s see what that Batman dipshit is up to. Gotta keep rotating around or some of these superheroes might start taking it personally.