The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 36: A Veritable Barrage of Blows!

From Green Lantern 51 (March 1967; reprinted in Showcase Presents Green Lantern vol. 3), comes this panel in the story "Green Lantern's Evil Alter Ego," written by (according to the credits) "Tiger" John Broome and drawn by "Pussycat" Gil Kane. Green Lantern fights Neoman in the 58th century!

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 35: The Finishing Touch!

I know I've been dipping into the Green Lantern well quite a bit over the last few weeks, but I've been fascinated with the evolution of Kane's style that can be traced through the four Showcase Presents Green Lantern volumes. Volume 1 is virtually punchless, and throughout those stories, Green Lantern tends to use his ring as more of a defensive weapon, or his ring constructs are used more to detain bad guys than to knock them out. This pattern holds true through most of volume 2, though we begin to see more punching occuring around issue 28, when writers Gardner Fox and John Broome start creating plots where GL's ring is useless in defeating the villain. With volume 3, the punches start coming hard and fast, and the typical Gil Kane punch becomes a regular part of Kane's repertoire, often appearing multiple times in a single story.

That brings us to Green Lantern 56 (Oct. 1967), written by Gardner Fox and pencilled and inked by Kane, which is the second part of a punchtastic two-parter that brings together the entire Green Lantern Corps. To mix things up a bit, I've chosen a punch not from Hal Jordan, but instead from one of Hal's mentors, Tomar-Re. Here, a winged Tomar-Re knocks out fellow Zudarian, Zoraldo.



"Now my fist at the point of his jaw--is knocking him out!" Yes, Tomar--on Earth, we refer to that as "a punch." I do like it, though, that Tomar, who is not used to fisticuffs, still leads with his left.

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 34: The Punch Came C.O.D.!

From Green Lantern 37 (June 1965), in a story called "The Spies Who 'Owned' Green Lantern!" comes a rather unconventional punch:


In this story, written by Gardner Fox and inked by Sid Greene, Hal Jordan finds himself under the hypnotic spell of a spy ring, so in order to break that spell, GL commands his ring to shrink him down in his sleep, and then he has Pieface mail him to the spies. This plan doesn't really make any sense, but it does give GL this opportunity to punch his way out of an envelope.

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 33: Right Makes Might!

A few weeks back, I mentioned that Green Lantern 58 (Jan. 1968), was a pretty punchtastic issue. In "Peril of the Powerless Green Lantern!" written by Gardner Fox and inked by Sid Greene, GL finds he is having strange reactions to his adventures, such as overwhelming fear, greed, and sadistic tendencies toward criminals. For example, he really lays into three common thugs:



The Guardians diagnose him with combat fatigue and strip him of his ring, but he still has to face some challenges, as detailed in this earlier post.

Also in this issue, a powerless Hal Jordan spends two pages beating the shit out of a bear:

I can tell you right now, that bear does not appreciate the taste of Florsheim.

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 32: SKROGG!

Sometimes, I just like to open one of the Showcase Presents: Green Lantern volumes randomly and see if I can land on a page with a Gil Kane punch. The first volume is relatively punchless, perhaps indicating that the historical development of the Gil Kane punch evolved over the course of his Silver Age superhero work. By the time we get to the issues collected in volume 3, however, the punch has clearly become Kane's signature move, and we can find as many as five or six punches per issue.

Case in point: this image from Green Lantern 54, "Menace in the Iron Lung," written by John Broome, with a rare instance of Kane inking his own pencils at this time.



This is, by all means, a pretty standard Gil Kane punch, with Hal Jordan slugging the guard of the titular villain's estate (it does, however, get bonus points for the sound effect, "SKROGG!"). But a quick scan through the issue reveals no fewer than seven typical Gil Kane punches, plus several variations. The plethora of punches in this issue, in fact, makes me realize that a taxonomy of Gil Kane punches is long overdue, and I really need to get to work on that.

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 30: What's Batman Got that I Haven't?

The Gil Kane Punch took last week off while I was compiling the year-end/decade-end lists (and I still have one more list to do). So, to make up for lost time, here's a special super-sized edition of the Gil Kane Punch of the Week!

In "Peril of the Powerless Green Lantern!" from Green Lantern 58 (Jan. 1968, reprinted in Showcase Presents Green Lantern Vol. 3)-- written by Gardner Fox, pencilled by Gil Kane, and inked by Sid Greene--the Guardians of the Universe remove Hal Jordan's power ring and force him to take a vacation after some erratic emotional behavior threatens his role as a galactic law enforcement officer. The absence of a power ring, however, does not stop Hal from finding some action:


While confronting one gang, the thugs quickly recognize that GL is sans power ring, so they all gang up on them, but Hal takes four of them down with one "muscle-cracking heave," to quote Gardner Fox's purple prose.

With this next move, though, I don't even know how it would work physically:

You would have to be extra bendy to simultaneously grab two guys by the head and kick them in the guts. But there it is.

Missing his normal powers, GL has to rely on his basic fighting skills and brute strength, causing him to channel Batman. While asking the eternal question, WWBD?, Hal turns introspective and starts to make some broader comparisons between himself and the Dark Knight:


I also want to point out, earlier in this story, Hal spends a page and a half beating the shit out of a bear. I'm going to be spending some more time with Green Lantern 58 over the coming weeks, when I'll be sure to share the awesome experience of the Gil Kane Bear Punch!

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 26: Jump Him...All Together!

Here at Spec Headquarters, we have all our DC Showcase volumes specially flagged for Gil Kane punches: each book that contains Kane's art has relevant punches indicated by a sticky note. I mention this because, for today's punch, I decided to do a little experiment, where I pulled Showcase Presents Green Lantern vol. 4 off the shelf and randomly opened to a particular punch. Here is the result:



This punch comes from Green Lantern 71 (Sept. 1969), in a story titled "The City that Died," written by John Broome and inked by Joe Giella.

In the story, Green Lantern is mysteriously losing the power in his ring, but he has no problem taking out these crooks with plain-old fisticuffs. GL's word baloon is a little cut off in the gutter, but Hal nicely insults the thugs' body odor as he takes them all down with one punch.

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 19: Power Ring Style!

Here is yet another variation on the Gil Kane punch, where Green Lantern sends a bunch of Weaponers of Qward flying using an emerald energy fist:

From Green Lantern 75 (Mar. 1970), story by John Broome, inks by Joe Giella (reprinted in Showcase Presents: Green Lantern vol. 4). This punch is also notable for being the last Gil Kane punch in Green Lantern before the book becomes Green Lantern/Green Arrow under the team of Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams, and Dick Giordano. However, this will not be the last time we feature this issue...

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 17: The Old-Fashioned Way!

I take no pleasure in bringing you this week's Gil Kane punch, but it is only in my role as archivist that I feel compelled to include it in the catalog of punches.

From Action Comics Weekly 603 (1988), in a story titled "Retribution," written by James Owsley, we get Green Lantern vs. Star Sapphire:



And I will leave it to you, the reader, to provide whatever commentary these panels might warrant.

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 8

That's gotta hurt! Necks are not supposed to bend like that!

Traitor punches out Hal Jordan in "Traitor's Revenge!" first published in Legends of the DC Universe 29, written by Steven Grant, art by Gil Kane and Klaus Janson.

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 7

I'm a little late with this week's Gil Kane punch, so as an added bonus, I'm giving you a Green Lantern tag team on the villain Captain Challenge from "Thoroughly Modern Mayhem!" in Green Lantern 61 (June 1968) written by Mike Friedrich and drawn by Gil Kane and Sid Greene (reprinted in Showcase Presents: Green Lantern, Vol. 4).




I also declare "Thoroughly Modern Mayhem!" to be the Gil-Kane-Punchingest story of all time!

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week

I've been doing some research this week on Gil Kane, and this research has led me to a very important conclusion:

No one could draw someone getting punched like Gil Kane could.

Gil Kane's punches were dynamic, exploding out of the page with a sense of power, drama, and action that is unmatched. So, to honor one of the greatest superhero artists in the history of the genre, I'm going to start a regular feature called "The Gil Kane Punch of the Week."

Here's the first entry:

From Green Lantern 68, art by Kane and Joe Giella, story by Denny O'Neil.

Final Crisis Post Mortem: Rogues' Revenge

Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge, by Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins, was probably my favorite of the tie-ins, though I'm liking Legion of 3 Worlds a heck of a lot (I will cover that series once it's completed). Though I have read complaints that Rogues' Revenge was not tied in to Final Crisis enough, I would argue that it was tied in just enough. While it isn't essential to the main series, Rogues' Revenge does follow a logical tangent from it that comes out of the first few issues without contradicting them. This makes for the best kind of tie-in to a major event like Final Crisis: the main series has created a space for a story like this, yet it can also stand on its own, as the reader is given all the necessary exposition. And the story is told in a tight three-issue series.

The primary purpose of Rogues' Revenge seems to be bridging the gap between, on the one hand, the death of Bart Allen, Salvation Run, and Countdown (the Pied Piper and Trickster plot) and, on the other hand, the upcoming Flash: Rebirth series. That may seem like a lot of continuity to keep up with, but this is one of the things Geoff Johns does well: tie together continuity threads while still managing to tell an entertaining story.

And Rogues' Revenge is a lot of fun. During his run on The Flash, Johns understood the importance of these villains to the series, and he had managed to flesh out their backstories to make them more interesting characters and to give a clear motivation as to why they would work together (they are mainly held together by the strict leadership of Captain Cold, who understands each rogue's damage enough to keep them in line).

Rogues' Revenge opens with the villains on the run for some time after the events of Salvation Run. They are being pursued on two fronts: the heroes want them for their responsibility in the death of Bart Allen, and the villains are after them because they refuse to join Libra's new society of villains. They choose to fight the society while also evening the score by killing Inertia, the villain truly responsible for Bart Allen's death.

Johns is a straightforward, entertaining storyteller who uses continuity as a launching pad for new stories. In this sense, his style contrasts that of Grant Morrison on the main series. Though I find both approaches to comic storytelling equally valid, I can see why many readers preferred Johns's more accessible approach. I'm entertained by Johns's comics (though I don't quite understand his obsession with traumatic arm loss), and I tend to follow whatever he does. However, it's also clear that we have a lot of the same touchstones when it comes to the comics of our youth, and that may very well be influencing my enjoyment of his stories.

To look at one particular characteristic of Johns's storytelling style, I'm using a couple of scenes not from Rogues' Revenge, but from Final Crisis: Rage of the Red Lanterns, a tie-in that many readers cited for its failure to connect to the main series.

Early in the book, the reader is reminded by the following image that the Guardian known as Scar is connected in some way to the Sinestro Corps, as indicated by the Yellow Lantern symbol that appears in her pupils (the Black Lantern symbol also appears there in an earlier panel).
Later, when Green Lantern John Stewart questions how the Sinestro Corps managed to ambush them, we get a cut to another panel showing Scar's pupils.
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On the one hand, this is just clear storytelling, repeating information in order to make sure the reader is following along and can continue to follow. On the other hand, however, this is an unnecessary repetition that doesn't account for readers' intelligence or attention to the details of a comic that takes less than 15 minutes to read from cover to cover. In Final Crisis, Morrison would not have cut back a second time to Scar's eyes, as the first shot pages earlier should have done the trick.

I will say one more thing about Rage of the Red Lanterns: despite the claim on page one that "these events take place between Final Crisis #1 and #2," that connection seems unlikely. Hal Jordan, John Stewart, and the Alpha Lanterns have a pretty tight continuity in Final Crisis, and there is just not enough time for these events to occur. That being said, Rage of the Red Lanterns is still an entertaining story regardless of where it fits in relation to Final Crisis. It probably would have been best, however, if DC had left off the "Final Crisis" label from this book.

DC has recently solicited some of the Final Crisis collections. Here's the copy for the Rogues' Revenge collection:

FINAL CRISIS: ROGUES' REVENGE HC

Written by Geoff Johns, art and cover by Scott Kolins.

In the face of Final Crisis, Johns and Kolins revive the most ruthless Rogues Gallery of them all! At times, they've been laughed at, ridiculed and hunted -- but The Flash Rogues Gallery has had enough. The team of villains decides to remind the world why they're not to be messed with in this hardcover collecting their return in Final Crisis: Rogues Revenge #1-3 as well as a couple of their greatest hits from The Flash #182 and #197.

144 pages, $19.99, in stores on July 15.

It's nice that DC is padding the collection out with two of Johns and Kolins's best single issue stories from The Flash: the origin of Captain Cold and the new Zoom, respectively. I would say that Flash 182 is the best issue of their entire collaboration. However, due to the importance of Weather Wizard's son to the story's climax, I would have liked to see Flash 175 and 176 added as well, which established the relationship between father and infant child.

I'll have more on these collections in a later post, along with my comments on Final Crisis: Revelations.

Great Moments in Pedagogy

I was teaching an introduction to poetry unit today in a freshman English class, and, for no apparent reason, a student suddenly asked a question about Green Lantern's Oath--was it poetry or not?

So, to make sure everyone was on the same page, I started to recite the oath.

And, once I started, something miraculous happened. I noticed a couple of students mouthing the first line with me. Then, on the second line, a student joined in aloud. By the third line, four students were reciting the oath in unison.

More than any other moment in my 17-year teaching career, this has given me the strongest sense of hope for the future.

The class has 11 students total, so that means about 36% of them knew the Green Lantern Oath. I wonder how this statistic holds up elsewhere.

It's not just the number that surprises me. I haven't talked about comics at all in the class, though I do make frequent pop culture references, so there was no real context in which to just start talking about Green Lantern. Yet, they assumed the reference was well-known enough.

Of course, one might also ask, "What the hell are you teaching these kids?"