10 Problems No One Wants To Admit About Green Lantern
4. Their Weakness Shouldn't Be A Big Deal
DC Comics
Anyone who derides - or even supports - Green Lantern is aware of two things: Alan Scott's weakness to wood was ridiculous, and so was Hal Jordan's susceptibility to the colour yellow. Both were relics of the Golden and Silver Ages and neither had a place in a maturing industry filled with a fish-man space-cop, a cabal of blue-headed intellectuals, and a sentient planet that was also a space officer.
See what I mean?
Look, no one's saying that having your character be vulnerable to wood and yellow isn't pretty goofy, but so are plenty of things about comics. They're comics, and GL in many ways represents the pinnacle of Silver Age goof when it comes to the DC universe - and that's a good thing.
In a bid to modernise the character both Scott and Jordan's weaknesses have been retconned into something slightly more believable, but did they even need that sort of treatment in the first place?
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
