Every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without retconnng away the previous story. Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of Abandoned Love. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.
Today we look at the abrupt turnabout that led to the creation of Emerald Twilight, the story where Hal Jordan went nuts...
During the Reign of the Supermen storyline in the Superman title, one of the returning Supermen, the Cyborg SUperman, turned out to be a villain. Working alongside Mongul, he destroyed the entire city of Coast City, which is where Hal Jordan used to live.
So in Green Lantern #46 (by Gerard Jones, Mark Bright and Romeo Tanghal), Jordan took on Mongul...
Mongul then distracted him by pointing out that Hal was accessing the kryptonite gas that powered the alien craft they were aboard. This led to Mongul beating up Hal, breaking a number of bones, but Hal was able to fix himself up and take Mongul out...
Nice stuff.
So the next issue, Jones' last issue on the title, Green Arrow comes out to help Hal deal with things (Hal was relieved to learn that Carol Ferris survived the attack) and Hal, well, deals with things...
The problem, was, though, that DC wanted to do something drastic with the title to shake things up, and Jones' plans weren't drastic enough.
Go to the next page to see what Jones had planned for #48 and #49 and then see what we ACTUALLY got, as we abandoned Hal's sanity...
Here are the solicits for the next two issues of Green Lantern, written by Jones...
And here is the next issue of Green Lantern, with new writer Ron Marz (who was just doing what was asked of him, of course) having Hal recreate Coast City with his ring...
And when it falters due to his ring losing power...
He goes on to kill the Guardians and destroy the Central Green Lantern Corps battery to charge himself up so that he became the being known as Parallax so that he could fix the past.
In other words, wow, that's an abrupt piece of abandoning the previous writer's story!
Okay, that's it for this installment. If anyone else has a future suggestion for a dropped comic book story, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com (or my old e-mail address, bcronin@comicbookresources.com - it all goes to the same place).