But by 1996, Hal’s villain journey came to an end. In that year’s company-wide crossover The Final Night, Earth’s heroes must work together to prevent a Sun-Eater from consuming our sun. In a final desperate move, Hal expels all of his power to reignite the sun, reciting his oath as he sacrifices himself. Despite all that he had done wrong, that one act of selflessness was enough to earn Hal Jordan a chance at redemption by becoming the Spectre.
Although not an A-list character, the Spectre actually goes back further than Hal Jordan and the entire Green Lantern concept. Created by Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily for 1940’s More Fun Comics #52, the Spectre came to be when tough cop Jim Corrigan is murdered by thugs, but he is revived by a divine force to enforce justice on Earth. In his earliest stories, the Spectre played like a standard superhero, with Corrigan transforming into a white-skinned figure in a green cloak and underpants to punch bad guys and save the innocent. Fighting alongside the Justice Society of America, the Spectre wasn’t above killing a goon by aging them to a skeleton in a matter of seconds, but he was more or less heroic.
However, throughout the Silver Age and Bronze Age, the Spectre became more macabre, something like a heroic Freddy Krueger. He manifested a giant pair of scissors to cut down a baddie, turned killers into candles to let them melt to death, or transformed heroin addicts into the tips of his fingers so he could inject them with fire. These stories explicitly identified the Spectre as the living manifestation of God’s wrath, giving justification for the cruelty he inflicted upon baddies.
In fact, that cruelty drove the narrative of the Hal Jordan Spectre stories. After his sacrifice to reignite the sun, Jordan still deserved punishment in the eyes of God. However, Jim Corrigan, who had previously been retconned into a crooked cop before becoming the Spectre, had earned his atonement, and thus was free from the Spectre. The Spectre needed a new human spirit as a host, and the guilty, but not unredeemable, Hal Jordan was perfect.
Across the excellent Spectre series by J.M. DeMatteis and Ryan Sook, which ran for 27 issues between 2001 and 2003, Jordan wrestled with the Spectre entity, trying to inject it with more kindness while also dealing with his own guilt over his actions as Parallax. DeMatteis and Sook presented Jordan as a man who had fallen far from his once great heights, but who still had the heart of a hero, to say nothing of his impressive will. As Hal tried to harness the power of the Spectre like he once did with the power of the Green Lantern, he did so from a new place of humility, without sacrificing any of the charm or bravery that made him a great hero.
Which sure sounds like the Hal we saw at the end of Lanterns. Obviously, Hal had grown bitter and suspicious by the time of the 2016 storyline. The events of Rushville and the prison sentence that followed left him broken, as demonstrated by the way he sat chastened by citizens at a restaurant in the finale. But the good works he did to try to make things right, as well as the goodness still apparent in the Hal-o-Gram reminds us that there’s still a hero in Hal.
