11 Comments

1. 

   !SIX! (count them 6) panels?!

   For what is a 1 optimal; 2 absolute maximal panel joke?

2. 

   I had no idea the Green Lantern was powerless against anything colored yellow. This was a CIDU for me until I looked it up.

   I would think MOST comics could be distilled down to 1 or 2 panels. It certainly didn’t need 8 panels to show someone hitting a garbage can with a golf club.

3. 

   I believe that Green Lantern’s ring’s weakness against anything yellow has been explained away or simply dropped in most modern incarnations of the character, but it was a moderately famous and frequently mocked aspect of the character for many years.

   There is a wonderfully dumb episode of the Challenge Of The Superfriends cartoon where aliens from Venus are looking to invade Earth and needing to make the Earth’s climate more like Venus in order to invade, they strike a deal with the Legion Of Doom to help make this happen. Green Lantern’s arch enemy Sinestro uses his yellow power ring to create several yellow comets aimed at Earth, which Green Lantern insists on dealing with even though Superman is sitting RIGHT THERE! Green Lantern flies up to space only to then realize that he cannot do anything about the yellow comets, so he uses his ring to move the entire Earth out of the way of the comets… and then doesn’t put it back where it was. This was Sinestro’s and the Venusian’s aim all along, and now the Earth’s new position pushes the climate to be more like Venus.

4. 

   Here for comparison is the comic from that linked previous CIDU thread. Note it does the work in a single panel, and the important color is not yellow but green.

   

5. 

   pushes the climate to be more like Venus

   Was that currently understood climate, or pre-1960s SF climate of steamy jungles and such?

6. 

   @Brian in STL

   You are spot on with the steamy jungles assumption. Other parts of the Legion Of Doom’s plan to make Earth more like Venus included freezing the Eastern seaboard for the Flash to defrost and setting oil on fire in the ocean for Aquaman to put out, both contributing to a hotter and more humid Earth where tropical vegetation is overrunning cities by mid-episode. Dumb, but fun.

7. 

   Also, GL’s ring is powerless against anything yellow, but GL himself, a pretty fit-looked guy, is not, so he should jump right in and take a swing at the perps anyway. It is What A Hero Does.

8. 

   “so he should jump right in and take a swing at the perps anyway.”

   Or wait till they get cold and wrinkled and eventually give up.

   But seriously, are any of the first five panels necessary? In particular isn’t 5 really way too talky.

   …..

   We the golden age Green Laterns ring powerless against wood? Or am I thinking of something else? (The Nome King’s magic belt didn’t work on the Sawhorse). And was that actually part of the golden age Green Lantern or did they retroactively write that to correspond with the silver age yellow weakness.

   (Hmm, …. my childhood best friend still owes me fifty cents on the bet I made that Superman got his powers from the yellow sun… he thought that was crazy and I couldn’t be right… but to prove it in those days before the internet I would have to get a copy of a comic and have it physically in his presence and … the timing never worked out.)

9. 

   Yes, the olden days Green Lantern’s ring didn’t work on wood. Another weakness that is typically overlooked is that Superman is vulnerable to magic. So Dr. Fate or The Spectre, prominent DC magic users could possibly defeat him.

10. 

    Superman is vulnerable to card tricks and things being made to disappear?

    🙂

11. 

    There was a miniseries, “Cosmic Odyssey”, in which there were several planets targeted for destruction by the big bad (Darkseid, I think), for complicated reasons. Another Green Lantern, John Stewart, and the Martian Manhunter, J’onn J’onzz were paired up to stop one of the bombs from going off. Stewart got cocky, told J’onn that it was out of his league, that Lanterns were better trained to handle this sort of thing, and J’onn needed to stay out of the way. He ring-bubbled J’onn to keep him “safe”, and went in to dismantle the bomb, which had a smirking villain next to it, as it had been painted yellow. The planet blew up, and Stewart’s story lines for years after all were based on his guilt.

    Other writers have had Lanterns use “secondary matter” to deal with yellow threats, i.e. pick up something large and not yellow with the ring, and smack yellow object with it. Hal Jordan did that to Mongol (yellow skinned villain) in the Return of Superman saga. One story that Larry Niven coauthored had Lanterns gone rogue, whom Hal Jordan defeated by flying away from them at a significant fraction of light speed, and firing green energy backwards. The green beam redshifted to yellow, and destroyed the rings of the bad guys.

    And finally, to paraphrase Ron White in reference to the original CIDU, “I can see their heads! Aim at their heads!”

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