Convergence: Green Lantern/Parallax #1 (DC)

writer: Tony Bedard

artist: Ron Wagner

The thing about Convergence is that it could drive you crazy trying to reconcile when, exactly, these snatches of DC history would have been gobbled up by Brainiac and/or Telos.  Green Lantern/Parallax, for instance, freeze-dries history apparently in the middle of Zero Hour, and obviously no such thing actually happened in Zero Hour.  Maybe Convergence itself will explain, and maybe that doesn't really matter. There are other things to care about.

One of which is certainly to have the ability to revisit favorite eras.  Hopefully new fans can use these stories to discover older stories, too, but there's a certain nostalgia built into Convergence.

One of the things to keep in mind about Green Lantern/Parallax is that it doesn't involve the later developments from Geoff Johns.  This is the Parallax you will remember from "Emerald Twilight," Zero Hour, and other stories prior to Green Lantern: Rebirth.  There's a remorseful Hal Jordan involved, but that's because he's spent a year completely powerless just after the point where he punches Superman upon the big reveal in Zero Hour, the moment depicted in the included panel.  The Kyle Rayner present, meanwhile, is taken from just after the infamous murder of his girlfriend Alex (I won't get into the controversy here, but the one thing you will always have to grant DC is that it's never let the girl be forgotten; at this point she's about as crucial as Gwen Stacy to Kyle's narrative).

Hal is remorseful up to the point when the domes are lifted and powers are reactivated.  Then he turns right back into Parallax and is right back in full Parallax mode.  The interesting thing Tony Bedard does is depict Hal in a remorseful mode at all.  He's suggesting that the guy (not Guy) was redeemable all along, with or without changing the nature of Parallax.

There's a fair bit of manipulating the classic story involved.  At one point Kyle suggests that Batman doesn't hold Hal's actions against him.  This is not the case in other stories like Day of Judgment and Green Lantern: Rebirth, for instance.  Batman does hold a grudge.  (Uh, would he be Batman otherwise?)  Kyle even has Hal killing off the entire Green Lantern Corps, although Hal at first limits his greatest atrocity to genocide of Oa.

It's funny to me that it's possible for anyone familiar with comics at all who don't identity Hal Jordan as Green Lantern.  It's much more likely that they "know" comics from other media, the way the kids were at the time of Tim Burton's Batman who subsequently had no idea who Robin was.  No, Hal is synonymous with Green Lantern.  But he's also synonymous with Parallax.  And seeing that made clear again is one of the great pleasures of Convergence.