Emerald Twilight
Gerard Jones ne garde pas un bon souvenir de son run sur Green lantern. Il a relancé la série mais dés le 18, Kevin Dooley passa du statut d'assistant Editor à Editor.
Un manque de communication entre eux et le changement de modèle de l'industrie vers un modèle d’événements et de violence dans le contexte du lancement d'Image comics, entraîna réécritures, plots lancés par l’éditorial... et la série s'enlisa.
A l'approche du 50, ils se réunirent et tentèrent de secouer la série. L'idée était un conflit entre gardiens de l'Univers et donc entre divers factions de Green Lantern.
La faction de Jordan aurait perdu et Hal aurait été remplacé pour un moment par un nouveau GL.
DC aurait finit par trouver que l'idée n'allait pas assez loin dans le contexte post Knightfall et Death Of Superman et surtout qu'il fallait changer d'équipe créative. Jones vexé démissionna et DC dut trouver un remplaçant en la personne de Marz. Il semble (je n'ai toujours pas lu l'arc qui est dans ma pile de lecture) que jusqu'au 47 Jordan avait fait le deuil de Coast City et que au 48.. il change d'état d'esprit.
Mais les sollicitations étaient déjà parue.
Jones révéla à Fanzing en 20011
Kevin and I had gotten off on the wrong foot from the time I finally finished the initial two-year arc and was ready to make the character “mine” at last. We basically just didn’t define our relationship early. We didn’t talk about the marriage before we went to the altar, we just went up there with these romantic dreams. When Kevin was Andy’s assistant he had said he wanted me to make the character mine, but I think he saw himself as still being very involved with the material, where I thought he was really going to cut me loose. I also don’t think I ever clearly articulated what I wanted to do with the series, and I think he anticipated something different. Meanwhile, he was getting a crapload of pressure from above, being a new editor at a time when Image was coming on strong and DC’s market position was slipping quickly. The more I ran with the character, the more nervous Kevin became and the more he got involved in asking for plots and rewriting, and the more I resented his hands-on involvement, and we started fighting about every damn little thing.
Basically it became a bad marriage. It was all about power and control, not making the product good. If I did something because Kevin insisted, I’d do it reluctantly, dully. If I did something because I wanted to do it, I’d fall the other way, into the worst kind of self-indulgence. And as it got worse, Kevin started rewriting more, and then things got really schizophrenic. In the last several months of my run I don’t think there was a single issue I liked, felt was mine, felt was what I’d wanted to do. And Kevin felt the same! It’s not so bad if the writer is frustrated and pissed at his editor but the finished product holds together. Writing company-owned superhero comics isn’t about anybody’s self-expression, it’s about entertaining the fans. But neither Kevin nor I were very experienced with this kind of situation, and we just couldn’t get out of the swamp. We both learned a lot from it. Neither of us would do anything like it again. Unfortunately we’d nearly killed the series by then.
Anyway. It was obvious we needed something radically different to happen. Even before Paul, Mike and others said so, Kevin and I were talking about using issue 50 to turn everything upside down, bring in a new Green Lantern, give Hal an indefinite break, and get back to basic, exciting stories. Which meant pulling together all the subplots we’d both tossed into the soup, making sense of them and getting them out of the way. And I really, really worked on it, making it not just make sense but making it as lean and exciting as I could. And emotionally involving. Unfortunately, Denny, who was Kevin’s boss, and Paul and Mike, didn’t feel it was big enough to turn around readers’ perceptions of what by then had been a lousy comic for about a year. Particularly if the writer stayed the same. As Denny said to me later, sometimes the market has to see that a complete creative shift is occurring, including the creative team. Which makes total sense, although at the time I was very angry and frustrated. This whole series was my frustration, the series I really wanted to make great but that for four years had never felt like mine, and here I saw a chance to start over and make it good at last, and I just couldn’t get there.
What I feel worst about in retrospect is that Kevin was apparently going to bat for me again and again with his bosses, but because he wasn’t free to tell me what was going on behind the scenes, and because I was mad at him about other petty crap, I blamed him. I criticized him to his bosses, wrote a nasty fax, really puerile ways to blow off my frustration. I apologized later, and I think everyone understood that I was just a clueless freelancer, 3000 miles away. But it was an ugly finish. I quit so they didn’t have to fire me. Then they had an emergency plotting session, Paul, Mike, Denny, Archie, and Kevin, and they handed that plot to Ron Marz, who was coming up at the time, had worked with Starlin, had a cosmic resume going. And I think sales went up sharply and stayed up for quite a while. Certainly the character generated more interest after that. So you can’t criticize the decision.
https://www.cbr.com/green-lantern-emerald-twilight-original/http://www.fanzing.com/mag/fanzing39/iview.shtml
