The Golden Age Green Lantern's co-creator gets no true respect today

The Vidette recently wrote about the late artist/writer Martin Nodell, who co-created Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott with the late Bill Finger (who also co-created Batman with Bob Kane), and is still a topic at some modern conventions:

Although renowned comic creator Martin Nodell died, his presence is still felt at comic conventions.

The Green Lantern has gone through many iterations in the decades since its inception. The first version, created by Nodell in 1940, was Alan Scott. When he died in 2006 at the age of 91, his son, Spencer Nodell, and great-grandson, Quinn Nodell, took it upon themselves to continue sharing his work.

According to Spencer Nodell, Martin Nodell spent many years renouncing the comic industry due to a lack of stability. By the time Spencer Nodell was born in 1947, he was trying not to associate himself too closely with the Green Lantern character. It was not until the 1980s that Martin Nodell began to embrace his connection to the character.

Although Martin Nodell renounced the Green Lantern legacy in his early years, Spencer Nodell said that the family was friends with Stan Lee, a renowned creator at Marvel Comics. According to Spencer Nodell, Lee offered Martin Nodell an illustrator position at the company that would become Marvel Comics.

Spencer Nodell explained how his father came to accept his place in the comic book community.

"In the 1980s, when Gary Colabuono, who ran the Chicago show and also owned several comic book shops in the Chicago area, said, 'Oh, you gotta come out to the shows. People wanna see you. They think you're dead,’” Spencer Nodell said.

Martin Nodell spent several decades late in his life attending conventions, leaning into his association with the Green Lantern. Spencer Nodell said that as Martin Nodell grew older, it became harder for him to sign items, so he began signing and stockpiling Green Lantern books in advance to sell to fans.

While it's great the senior Nodell re-embraced his connections as a co-creator with what he first conceived in the Golden Age, one can only wonder what he'd think today if he knew that 6 years after his passing, DC would corrupt his hard work by changing Alan Scott into a gay man, something they unshockingly still stick by till this day, much like how the disgraced Gerard Jones did something similar with Roy Thomas' creation of Obsidian from Infinity Inc? And let's not forget Marvel went a similar route with Iceman, undoubtably encouraged by where DC was going with their stable of characters. When they speak of "many iterations", it's sad but unshocking they won't bring up any of the PC pandering that's brought down charaters like Alan Scott any more than the rest of the comics industry.

In fact, do Nodell's children realize what's happened, and does it sit well with them the retcons by James Robinson tarnish the legacy of their dad's creation even more? If they do, yet choose to remain quiet lest they offend the leftist cultural hijackers, they've only failed their dad's legacy in the long run. Come to think of it, even Thomas, who created the 2 children of Scott in the pages of All-Star Squadron/Infinity Inc, is failing his own legacy if he never spoke out against the harm Jones led to over 3 decades ago when he forced his woke beliefs upon somebody else's creations, effectively encouraging abuse and exploitation of past veterans' creations for the sake of politicized agendas.

I highly appreciate Nodell for his contributions to comicdom, but it's regrettable nobody's willing to admit the GL comics themselves have been largely destroyed as reading material, due to all the bad storytelling decisions and editorial mandates that came down the lane after mid-1988. And Alan Scott, much like Hal Jordan, was one of the biggest victims of all the abuse. Anybody who continues to make a shambles of past writers' work is not respecting Nodell's memory.