Well, people still appear to be pouring in from the John Haley column at 411, so the bit on Eugene you're looking for ran two days ago. If you like what you see, stick around, there'll be more of it. I have so much hate to share, and there's enough for everybody.
Like nerds. Fanboy nerds. Oh, the hate I have for fanboy nerds. I can hate them more because I understand them. I think we can all identify with a time in our lives when we were slavishly devoted to something unworthy; a TV show, a game, an actor, a series of movies... something that, while good, was not perfect, and really didn't deserve the kind of unconditional love and rabid defense against imagined threats that we would strive to provide.
But we get over it. We realize that while, say, "The Empire Strikes Back" may be a wonderful movie, Lucasfilm does not actually need me to do unpaid, undirected volunteer advocacy for them in order to keep George Lucas' supply of hookers and lobster going strong. And then we realize that the last 2.3 Star Wars movies were shit. And we realize that this doesn't mean we can't still love Empire in a filthy and unclean manner. The two states can coexist.
WE realize this, because WE are not emotionally stunted obsessives with a completely fucked set of priorities. WE are not fanboy nerds. THEY are, however, and they're some scary motherfuckers. Especially the Green Lantern ones.
Here's your official You Are Dumb backgrounder. Green Lantern. Superhero. Ordinary guy with magic ring. Ordinary guy was Alan Scott at first, then was Hal Jordan for a very very long time. Somewhere in that very very long time, the ordinary guy was also Guy Gardner and John Stewart *, but that's not important. Ten years ago, in some comic books, Hal Jordan went crazy, called himself Parallax, killed all the other ordinary blobs on all the other planets who had magic rings, and got knocked off himself. And then the ordinary guy was Kyle Rayner.
That's fine. I mean, it's dumb, but as THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE learned from the Eugene article, it's not particularly dumb within its own context, which is DC making money by retelling about half a dozen stories for about half a dozen decades. Until the fanboy nerds got involved. And when I say involved, I mean deeply, personally, pathologically involved. They formed HEAT.
"Hal's Emerald Advancement Team", as it's now known, is a group of fanboy nerds who have spent the past ten years very, very upset that DC took their favoritest fake person ever and made him turn naughty and kill people. I say "now known", because the original name was "Hal's Emerald Attack Team". They changed it in an attempt to improve their image. Their image had to be improved, you see, because the writer and editor of the new Green Lantern were receiving death threats.
Pause, for a moment, to absorb that.
Of course, that was ten years ago. So much can change about a person in ten years. We've rolled the odometer over into a new millennium. We're living in the future. We've learned from our mistakes. There's really no need for DC to make the ordinary guy "Hal Jordan" again, and if they decided to anyway, there can't be more than a couple of the original HEAT members who would even notice, right?
Well, we all know what happens when I ask a leading question like that, don't we? The news just broke that Hal Jordan was gonna be the dude with the ring again. Which is fine. What is NOT fine, is that on the talk-back message board at Newsarama where the story broke, people were talking about this so much that there would be two new pages of messages posted in the time it took me to read one page this morning. And I'm a REALLY FAST READER.
Hold on. Let me check my watch. I believe it's half-past ACTUAL QUOTE TIME! - "Daredevil Father comes out tomorrow, and I find out Hal's back today. There is a God." - "Now I can read Green Lantern Again!!!!!"." - "Halleluiah! praise the lord! our prayers have been answered!" - AND THE TOPPER - "This, probabaly, is the most single best news EVER!!!!!!! Finally, after all these years of suffering with that GL wannabe placeholder, we are getting the REAL GL back!!!! Excellent excellent news and here's a tissue for all you Kyle whiners who have to eat crow now. Onwards and upwards!"
These people have been nursing a grudge for a DECADE. How is it that, for ten years, someone can care so much about a guy in green underwear that they treat his return with religious fervor? Oh, right. They're fanboy nerds. Their inexplicable passions defy space, time, and enlightenment in much the same way that their clothes defy Tide, Clorox, and Febreze. Because they are DUMB.
* That's the guy on the Justice League cartoon, in case you were wondering.