Alan Scott
1899 - Alan Scott is born.
1917 - 18-year-old Alan enlists in the Army during WW1.
1919 - 20-year-old Alan returns home a decorated war hero & goes to school to study journalism & electronics.
1923 - 24-year-old Alan begins his own radio network.
1931 - 32-year-old Alan finds the Starheart, a dense meteor of condensed Oan Energy, and feels compelled to craft it into a lantern & ring & become the Green Lantern.
1934 - 35-year-old Alan battles Solomon Grundy, driving him back into Slaughter Swamp.
1937 - 38-year-old Alan again battles Solomon Grundy when he's revived by a pair of escaped convicts. Grundy is turning into a wooden statue.
1939 - WW2 begins.
1941 - After the attack on Pearl Harbor, The Justice Society is formed, including 42-year-old Alan.
1943 - 44-year-old Alan again fights Solomon Grundy when he is accidentally resurrected by scientists. With the help of the entire Justice Society, he is finally buried so deep into Slaughter Swamp that they believe he'll never escape.
1945 - WW2 ends. 46-year-old Alan begins restructuring his networks for television.
1948 - 49-year-old Alan tracks the alien criminal Evil Star into space, where he meets Abin Sur, discovering the origins of his own ring, the Starheart. Together they save an entire planet, with Scott overloading the Starheart to reverse the effects of Evil Star's technology. Abin is able to preserve Alan's body and bring it to Oa so he can be rebuilt.
31 years ago - 49-year-old Alan, his body reconstituted by Oan technology, is returned to Earth, walking with a cane and cut off from his own powers. He chooses to retire to South America.
29 years ago - 51-year-old Alan meets Rose Canton in Buenos Ares. They become insperable.
26 years ago - 54-year-old Alan has an affair with Rose Canton. He does not know that she gave birth to his twin children, Jennifer-Lynn Hayden & Todd James Rice.
10 years ago - 70-year-old Alan discovers the existence of his children Jennifer-Lynn Hayden & Todd James Rice, and searches the world to find them, introducing them for the first time, & teaching them to use their powers.
There were a lot of overpowered characters in the Golden Age; the Spectre and Doctor Fate come to mind. At the time, Alan Scott's Green Lantern was pretty on par with the other heroes of his day, but as the years passed, he became a sort of figurehead for his era of comics. He's often now referred to as the most powerful hero of his generation, and honestly he just fits that role so well. Superman is no longer considered to be part of the world these characters lived in, and in his place, Alan Scott has very much become the hero they all look up to.
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Alan Scott's Comic HistoryAlan Scott appeared for the first time in All American Comics # 16 in 1940, a co-creation of artist Bill Finger (who notably was the artist responsible for all things Batman) and a guy named Martin Nodell. Weirdly, while so many of the creators of the day would go on to be celebrated for their creations, Nodell seems to be little more than a footnote in comic history. He's more famous for having left comics and moving into advertising where he invented the Pillsburry Dough Boy. I'm not kidding.
The Green Lantern as he appeared in these classic Golden Age comics was a far cry from the Green Lantern we know now. There were no green light constructs, those were added retroactively after the Hal Jordan Green Lantern was introduced. Instead he spent most of his time empowered by his magical Lantern to just fly and punch people. In short he was far more analogous to that era's Superman. Nodell seemed to have a knack for creating mysterious bad guys and waiting until late in the story to reveal their quirk, creating characters like Solomon Grundy and Vandal Savage. |
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The character was clearly a runaway hit, appearing over in All Star Comics with the Spectre and the Flash even before joining the JSA in issue #3. He appeared prolifically across this era, although his book gets harder to read when he's joined by a fat bumbling sidekick.
Most of the superhero comics of the day were discontinued as the industry moved on to other subjects, but when editor Julius Schwartz started to bring in new versions of classic comics heroes, Green Lantern was one of the very first to be reimagined. Unlike the Flash, however, who had basically the same origin and powers with a new identity and costume, the new Green Lantern was WILDLY different. As the Multiverse was introduced, and the Silver Age characters started to mingle with their Golden Age counterparts, the vast differences between the Sci-Fi Green Lantern and Alan Scott's clearly mystical powers drew a stark contrast between their worlds. The JSA and Earth-2 continued to gain in prominence, and when Infinity Inc, a new team of young heroes made up of the children of classic Justice Society characters, appeared in All-Star Squadron #25 in 1983, two members, Jade & Obsidian, were the children of Scott. These characters continued to operate in their own distinct version of Earth... until the Crisis of Infinite Earths made things VERY complicated. |
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Leaving aside the complications that came up in the pages of Infinity Inc, one of the biggest challenges was the fact that the Lanterns suddenly needed to share a timeline. Alan Scott's Ring and Lantern, previously ancient magical artifacts, were now forged from the Starheart, a living flame forged by the Guardians centuries ago. The various members of the Justice Society underwent several upheavals over the course of the next few years as their place in the timeline fluctuated, and Alan himself was de-aged to briefly serve as the character Sentinel.
Alan was a major character in a few expanded elseworlds stories, most notably in Kingdom Come, where he serves as Earth's sole Green Lantern, and even more importantly in James Robinson's Golden Age, where he's depicted as this epic Superman-like figure that everyone looks up to with awe. This is the series we're basing a lot of our Golden Age worldbuilding on, and we're absolutely using his characterization from this series. Alan saw a pretty big update in James Robinson & Geoff John's 1999 JSA series, which did so much legwork to resolve characters with discordant continuities; Alan was an elder statesmen hero, incredibly powerful as his body contained the living flame of the Starheart. He served in this role for all subsequent Justice Society series, right up until the New 52. He wasn't used right away in the new continuity until a new Earth-2 series started in 2012. This new version of the character was a gay man, and was given more media attention than he'd ever gotten because of it. |
Our Alan Scott StoryFor starters, we should establish WHERE we're going to use Alan. He is a Golden Age character, through and through... and while he's one of the very few members of the wartime Justice Society that we want to bring forward into modern times, we're making the very specific choice to not have him move to modern times with his powers, or even his full health, intact. He's going to walk with a cane,
During his heyday, however, he's absolutely the Superman of his era. He's incredibly powerful, even on a team that includes the Spectre and Doctor Fate. His magical green flame makes him virtually indestructible and gives him near unlimited strength... although I do kind of like the idea that while he COULD make constructs, that wasn't generally his first plan. More often he would use the flame to make swords and the like... Alan Scott really fits the title of 'Emerald Knight' On the subject of Alan's sexuality, I think the idea of him being a queer man living in the 1930's and 40's is actually pretty fascinating. He was pretty much always depicted as a committed bachelor, but from this perspective, he's actually a stoic, complex person harboring this intense secret for his entire life. Then, in an imperfect but more tolerant future, he finally discovers that he has teenage children, and discovers that one of them is gay himself... The life journey of Alan Scott becomes absolutely inspiring. |
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Alan's ReturnSpeaking of Alan's children; they're going to be part of the modern timeline, which means that Alan is going to have to transition out of our past timeline and into the modern one. The big thing to remember here is that he's not making this transition to serve as a superhero, he doesn't need his powers, he just has to be here.
The method we came up with is for him to have used the Starheart to save an entire populated planet, basically sacrificing himself, but with Abin Sur able to suspend his remains and bring them to Oa to be rebuilt, Commander Shepard style. This can take as long as it needs to take, and in the end he's able to return, powerless, to Earth. We wanted to make sure that this happens long before Hal was selected as a new Green Lantern... and in fact, while we didn't include it in the timeline, we imagine that part of the reason Abin Sur steered to Earth as his ship was crashing was because he knew Alan Scott was there... knowing that he could no longer wield a power ring, but still thinking of him as a hero. |
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