“And I shall shed my light over dark evil. For the dark things cannot withstand the light. The light of the Green Lantern!” What, that oath doesn’t sound familiar? That’s probably because it belongs to Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern. Introduced in “All-American Comics #16,” the character pre-dates both Hal Jordan and the GLC by nearly twenty years, as he first appeared in 1940.
We rarely ever delve into the origins of Alan Scott, as he doesn’t quite fit the neat and still vast mythology of the Green Lanterns. But the character has been leader of the Justice Society, a member of the DC spy organization Checkmate, and so much more over his time in the DC Universe. So for this list, we’re showing the respect due to the First Lantern.
10 HIS ORIGIN
Alan Scott might have the coolest origin of all the Green Lanterns. Long ago, a strange green meteor landed on Earth. The power within the meteor manifested as a green flame, which said it would bring first death, then life, then power. The meteor was turned into a lantern, and the people killed the lamp-maker for it, only for the lamp to incinerate them all in a green flame. Next, a man in an asylum came out sane after finding the Lantern. Finally, Alan Scott was in a terrible train accident...but instead of dying, the Lantern granted him magic powers that saved his life. He would go on to fashion a ring out of it and take it’s power everywhere.
9 HIS WEAKNESS TO WOOD
For ages, Alan Scott’s weakness happened to be to wood. His ring could affect anything other than wood, which was slightly less idiotic than being weak to a color, as the GLC were. But eventually, that weakness was retconned and explained: in one of his earliest outings as a Green Lantern, someone snuck up behind him and hit him with a wooden club. Alan then thought his ring couldn’t affect wood, and his subconscious made it so. But this weakness was always fake, and in the years since it hasn’t been an issue.
8 STARHEART
It’s worth asking exactly where Alan Scott gets his powers from. The other Green Lanterns get their powers from tapping into the collective willpower of the universe and using it as energy. Alan Scott gets his powers from his Lantern, which of course was once the comet that was represented as a Green Flame. That Green Flame comes from the Starheart, which has even seemed sentient.
7 CONNECTION TO THE GREEN LANTERN CORPS
It’s a bit weird that a character who never interacted with the Guardians or the GLC somehow has the same name and virtually the same motif as the Corps. And to be honest, this really only happened because creators decided to take the name and reboot the character.
But in the DC Universe, the connection is deep: the Guardians of the Universe collected all the wild magic in the universe and concentrated it into a single power: the Starheart. Deciding everyone would be better off if there were less chaos like this, they chucked the Starheart away and it landed on Earth, eventually becoming the Green Flame that would light Earth’s first Green Lantern.
6 OPERATES OUT OF GOTHAM
Probably one of the least known facts about Alan Scott is that he at one point operated out of Gotham City. He ran his own communications company and was the president of Gotham’s broadcasting stations. This is probably not used very often because since Gotham became Batman’s turf, we would need an explanation for why the city is so terrible because it makes him look terrible. It’s one thing when a guy is rich but ultimately just a human being with good training and they can’t stop crime in a city. It’s another thing when another guy is rich and owns the powers of a godlike being and isn’t stopping the crime.
5 SUPERMAN ANALOGUE
Over the years, we’ve seen tons of Superman analogues appear. Characters like Captain Atom, Majestic, Apollo, and Icon show the influence the man of steel has had on superhero creators. But the retcon that occurred when the Justice Society and their Earth-2 was merged with the Justice League’s Earth-1 was that there could be only one Superman and one Batman. So Earth-2’s Kal-L went away, and Alan Scott morphed into becoming Justice Society’s powerhouse member, their Superman.
4 HAS TWO "SUPER" CHILDREN
Alan Scott has a pretty weird family set-up. Briefly married to a woman who was actually the supervillain Thorn, Alan had two children he didn’t even know about for years. One was Todd Rice, a young man who would come to be known as Obsidian, tapping into the powers of the Shadowlands.
The other was Jennie-Lynn Hayden, who would come to be Jade. Jade has a more direct connection to the Starheart, and can use it’s powers without a ring. The two of them initially were apart of the superhero team Infinity Inc, a collection of superheroes that were the children of the Justice Society.
3 HAS LOST CONTROL OF HIS POWERS
As the Starheart happens to be a collection of wild magic which is also sentient, it’s unsurprising writers have told the story of Alan not being entirely in charge of his powers from time to time. The Starheart has acted out once to pretend to be a version of Harlequin, one of his old villains. And right before the New 52 era, the Starheart went full blown villain and took control over Alan, influencing magical beings all over the Earth for a while. He always manages to wrest control back and become the Green Lantern again, however.
2 AVATAR OF THE GREEN
During the second wave of New 52 stories, we got an Earth 2 comic that placed Alan Scott back on a separate Earth. The character underwent no small amount of changes, but the primary one was that in a universe with no Guardians, the powers had to come from somewhere else. In this case, he got the powers as an avatar of the Green, along the lines of Swamp Thing but with considerably better fashion. His worst enemy in this world was Solomon Grundy, Avatar of the Grey, which represented death and decay. This tied in to Alan’s “weakness to wood”, as he was now connected to all plant life on Earth.
1 POTENTIALLY IMMORTAL
This isn’t really proven, but there’s no reason Alan Scott can’t be an ageless immortal. The power of the Starheart is vast, and enough that he’s been able to conquer the minds of superheroes with a connection to magic. We know for certain it’s power has been enough to frequently make him a man in his early 30’s, and when we see him as an older gentleman he’s actively choosing to be so. If Alan were to ever fully take on the power of the Starheart, he could theoretically remain that age and become the Green Lantern of Earth forever.