Mart Nodell; Independent obit (Green Lantern comic artist)
Hyfler/Rosner
Creator of the Green Lantern
The Independent
19 December 2006
Alan Woollcombe
A stirring - if long-winded - incantation belonged to the
1940s superhero Green Lantern, the creation of the much
loved comics artist Mart Nodell:
In brightest day, in darkest night
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil's might
Beware my power . . .
GREEN LANTERN'S LIGHT!
Green Lantern never quite made the premier league of
American superheroes occupied by Superman, Batman and Wonder
Woman: he wasn't the strongest (that was either Superman or
Captain Marvel, depending on which small boy you asked), the
fastest (the Flash or the Whizzer), the smartest (Batman or,
well, Batman) or the most patriotic (Captain America or the
Shield, both of whom wore variations of the Stars and
Stripes as their outfits).
But Green Lantern did possess a super-powered ring, cast
from part of a magic lantern he had stumbled across in his
civilian guise as Alan Scott, a construction engineer, which
endowed him with a range of abilities including flight and
near-invulnerability to anything except wood.
(Unfortunately, every 24 hours - and at inconveniently
critical moments - the ring would run out of oomph,
requiring him to recharge it from the lantern.) Plus, he had
all the customary accoutrements of the masked mystery
man-about-town - a theatrical cape and cowl, a domino mask,
a sidekick (Doiby Dickles, a cabbie based on the film funny
man Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello) and the obligatory
secret identity.
He was just what Sheldon Mayer, editor at All-American
Comics (half of what was to become DC Comics), was looking
for to cash in on the new superhero craze, when Nodell
walked into his office with the concept and design in late
1939. Nodell claimed he had been inspired by Wagner's
operatic Ring cycle and the sight of a subway train worker
waving his green railway lantern. Fine-tuned by the
experienced writer (and Batman co-creator) Bill Finger, the
gaudily clad vigilante first saw print in All-American
Comics #16, dated July 1940, in an eight-page origin story
co-written by Finger and Nodell and drawn by Nodell (under
the pseudonym Mart Dellon).
The Lantern hit the spotlight immediately, gaining his own
series the following year and co-starring in two others:
All-American, which lasted until 1948 and issue 102, Green
Lantern, which ran for 38 issues until 1949, the compilation
Comic Cavalcade, and the team-up All Star Comics, until it
too ceased in 1951. Thereafter the hero was put out to
pasture, a victim of falling sales. (In 1959, the name was
revived and successfully applied to a different character,
and to date there have been several heroes of that name in
what has become one of American comicdom's most enduring
franchises.)
Nodell, born in 1915 and raised in Philadelphia, had taken
the route followed by many comics artists of the era:
training at the Art Institute of Chicago and the famed Pratt
Institute of New York, followed by one-off cartoons in
papers and pulp magazines from 1935 onwards. When the
Superman-led superhero comics boom took off in 1938, he
freelanced for many of the fly-by-night independent comics
publishers that briefly flourished, before he struck it
"lucky" (as he always put it) at All-American.
He stayed with the publisher till 1947, when he moved across
town to work in-house at Timely Comics, the forerunner to
Marvel Comics. However, poor pay and fewer prospects led him
to abandon comics in 1950 in favour of better paid
advertising studio work, in which he was to spend the rest
of his career. It was while he was working for the Leo
Burnett advertising agency in Chicago that he drew the
storyboards for the original Pillsbury Doughboy advertising
campaign in 1965.
After retirement to Florida, Nodell and his wife Carrie were
rediscovered by the comics fraternity and became highly
popular fixtures on the comics convention circuit. He had
one final, fitting reunion with his old creation: to mark
Green Lantern's 50th anniversary, Alan Scott was
reintroduced in the landmark issue Green Lantern #19,
December 1991, for which Nodell was invited to draw a new
nine-page story.
Alan Woollcombe
Martin Nodell, comics artist: born Philadelphia 15 November
1915; married (two sons); died Muskego, Wisconsin 9 December
2006.
Brad Ferguson
<rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
> Mart Nodell
> Creator of the Green Lantern
>
> The Independent
> 19 December 2006
> Alan Woollcombe
>
>
> A stirring - if long-winded - incantation belonged to the
> 1940s superhero Green Lantern, the creation of the much
> loved comics artist Mart Nodell:
>
> In brightest day, in darkest night
> No evil shall escape my sight.
> Let those who worship evil's might
> Beware my power . . .
> GREEN LANTERN'S LIGHT!
This, of course, is the oath of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, who was
not the creation of Martin Nodell. I think Hal's version of the oath
was written by John Broome.
Alan Scott's oath (probably written by Bill Finger):
And I shall shed my light over dark evil,
For the dark things cannot stand the light,
The light of the Green Lantern.
> After retirement to Florida, Nodell and his wife Carrie were
> rediscovered by the comics fraternity and became highly
> popular fixtures on the comics convention circuit. He had
> one final, fitting reunion with his old creation: to mark
> Green Lantern's 50th anniversary, Alan Scott was
> reintroduced in the landmark issue Green Lantern #19,
> December 1991, for which Nodell was invited to draw a new
> nine-page story.
Alan Scott had been reintroduced more than 25 years earlier, in Green
Lantern (v2) #40 (Oct 1965). The 1991 issue was from volume 3 and is
the start of a story arc in which Alan Scott is rescued from some sort
of limbo where he'd been trapped for years.
Nodell's was not a separate story. He and other artists drew
individual sections of a single, book-length feature.