This is just literary fun, not to be taken seriously, Wold Newton or Baker Street Irregular-type speculation on the family tree of a comic book super-hero for a mailing list I participate in. No, I don't believe it, but it makes for a great game. Read it in that light, okay?)

Continuing my series of looking at the family trees of the members of the Justice League...we now turn to the second Green Lantern, the test pilot Hal Jordan, one of the few people in the world that have a claim to be utterly fearless.

Hal Jordan, the second Green Lantern, was unusual long before Abin Sur crashlanded on our world. The ring found in him one of two men in the world completely fearless, and honest. (Actually there are two others who fit the bill, but one was too young, and one was disabled. Sort of.) Many of Hal's excellencies are reflected in his family tree.

The first Jordan we know of was the son of French immigrants who were distantly related to Cyrano De Bergerec. (A fearless swordsmen, and composer of several romances about travel to other worlds, he is a fitting collaterol ancestor for the star-stepping Hal Jordan.) There was also some Norman blood in the Jordans, and the Jordans were descended from the dimunitive Sir Nigel Loring, who fearlessly strode up to a maddened bear in THE WHITE COMPANY and with the simple admonition, "Saucy! Saucy!" and a blow to its nose, bemused it. The Jordans are also descended from a sibling of his French counterpart, Bertrand du Guesclin, one of the greatest of all French knights, and one of the most fearless, if one of the ugliest. (A very real knight, one of the greatest of the Middle Ages.)

The French immigrants had ties to the US. A Jordan had been a pirate under Laffite. The pirate's son, Henri Jordan, settled as a toy maker here in the USA, with his wife and older son, and their last son was an American citizen, born in 1836. Their youngest son, Charles Jordan, however, decided to go into the military and became a calvalry commander during the Cival War, reknowned for his fearlessness on the Union side. Before the Cival War, he had married a niece of Robert E. Lee, so like many American families, there were torn loyalties during that strife.

His older brother, Jean-Marc Jordan, born in Paris, returned to France and became the ancestor of the sleuth Marc Jordan and his son, the secret agent Nick Jordan.

Charles Jordan settled in Montana and had two sons, Henry Lee Jordan (b. 1861) and Ernest Jordan(b. 1869). Henry Lee Jordan became an Arizona marshall, and may have had his own close encounter with Abin Sur, if one of the stories is to be believed, in 1881. He married an Anne Morris, brother of Quincey P. Morris, the fearless Texan who helped Van Helsing and others finally stop Count Dracula's rampage. (See Bram Stoker's DRACULA for his life and tragic death.) Quincey Morris carried a Bowie knife, and that was fitting, for his mother was a Bowie, the niece of famed fighter James Bowie who died under extremely courageous conditions in the Alamo.

Interestingly, from the brave Morrises actually sprung three members of the Green Lantern Corps...and one blind adventurer. Quincey, before he went to England, lived with a widow of an African-American sharecropper, named Jane Stewart. She got pregnant, and moved to Michigan, when Quincey visited England, without telling him. Her name was Faith Stewart. She was almost surely the great-grandmother of John Stewart, born 1947, who like Hal, was born without fear and was totally honest. He became one of Hal's back-ups as Green Lantern, and an architect. If Hal and John knew they were distantly related, they didn't show it.

Another sister, Kate Morris, married a man named Tracy. The Tracys had three children and were grandparents (through one son) to Grace Tracy (the wife of Jack Murdock and mother to Matt Murdock, or Daredevil, "The Man Without Fear"), and through a second son to Dick Tracy and Mary Tracy Grayson (of the Flying Graysons), and through a daughter who married a Gardner to Roland (or Rollo) Gardner, an alchoholic who married a woman named Mary Louise, of American Indian descent. They had two sons, Mace and Guy Gardner. Mace became a police officer, Guy became a social worker and gym teacher. Guy Gardner was the first man chosen as Hal Jordan's possible replacement and the only reason Guy was not chosen first was because he worked in Baltimore, further away from Abin Sur's crash. Guy later suffered brain damage, but still remained fearless and honest---if bull-headed, insensitive, and sleazy.

Roland had one brother, Grant Gardner, a successful district attorney. In the mid-forties, Grant's admiration for Captain America/Steve Rogers developed into madness and he donned a Captain America costume....minus the shield---and tried to fight evil. His crazed fight was chronicled in a Republic Serial called Captain America. Guy's admiration for "General Glory"---perhaps Captain America joined the Justice League for a short while---?---is very similar, if not quite so insane.

Supposedly Guy Gardner was descended from Vuldarians, an ancient alien race that mixed with American Indians. Although there are shape-changing aliens like Skrulls and Durlans, there is no hint that they could crossbreed with humans. I wonder if instead the changes were subconsciously fed into Guy's body by his power ring in case he ever did lose the ring---the same way he admitted he used the ring to keep him youthful and at the top of his physical form. Some changes the ring makes are temporary, but others seem permanent. However, his mother was of American Indian descent, at any rate...

Matt Murdock, no less than the others mentioned above, was totally honest and completely without fear. Yet his blindness would have made him a poor candidate for the ring, hyper-senses or no.

Ernest, the younger brother of Henry Lee Jordan, became a doctor, but when he found he had an incurable illness, killed himself, leaving behind his domineering wife and his single child, Robert Jordan, born in 1899. In a family that has prided itself on its emphasis of courage, there was a feeling of shame attached to Ernest Jordan's suicide. Tall, lanky, and fair, Robert would reflect on his father's suicide years later, after he became an American Spanish professor, and as he met his own heroic death, in the events chronicled by Ernest Hemingway in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, during the Spanish Cival War of the thirties.

Henry Lee's son, Harold Jordan, followed his father's interest in the law, but instead of becoming a police officer, became a lawyer and later a judge. He married a woman whose surname was Martin. She was the sister of Glenn L. Martin, (1886-1955), an early aviation pioneer, born in Mackelburg Iowa but who moved to Liberal, Kansas, at the age of two. After experimenting with gliders, Glenn Martin started constructing his first airplane in 1908 at Santa Clara, California. He rented a vacant church as a factory, and aided by his mother, "Minta" Martin, laboured a year on a biplane in which he fitted a ford Model 'T' engine of 12 h.p. This low power only permitted straightaway flights but when a 30 h.p. Eldridge engine was installed his machine was very successful. (Their father ran a wheat farm and hardware shop.) He became the youngest airplane manufacturer in the world, building the first twin-engine American bomber. He had several other siblings, including Della Martin, who collected his papers, and an older brother...

Who, at an early age, eighteen, became the father of "Bull" Martin, World War I pilot, football player, and spy. The well-muscled pilot worked under G-8, as chronicled in the G-8 pulp series. "Bull"'s younger brother, Smilin' Jack Martin, was the hero of a popular comic strip, and was also an aviator. It's easy to see from what branch of his family Hal got his piloting skills from.

"Bull" was first cousin to the many Jordan siblings, for the next generation included Martin H. Jordan, Elsie Jordan, Titus Jordan, Jeremiah Jordan, Larry Jordan and Daniel Jordan. Titus Jordan became wealthy, Jeremiah Jordan became a respected jurist. Martin became a pilot, and later died right in front of his son, Harold (Hal)'s eyes. Daniel Jordan married a woman in Tennessee and became a lawbreaker, interested in moonshining, and was one of the two "black sheep" of the family. (His son, Douglas Jordan, was similarly dishonest. There was another older son of Daniel's, by a St. Louis woman, Rockford Jordan, who became a hero of the radio shows A MAN NAMED JORDAN and ROCKY JORDAN. Daniel actually committed bigamy in marrying the Tennessee woman. Daniel's St. Louis wife, Jane Rockford, was the great-aunt of Jim Rockford of the ROCKFORD FILES. Rocky Jordan sought his father and half-brother, and in trying to "bond" with them, got involved in a crime. He fled the country, setting up shop in Instanbul and Cairo instead, not wanting to return to the States where he might be arrested.)

Their sister, Elsie Jordan, was also considered a "black sheep", for she ran away and married Daniel Grimm, a poor New Yorker. Their son, Benjamin Grimm, became a famous pilot during World War II and a test pilot afterwards. However, he is most famous for his transformation after a test-flight with three others, in becoming the Thing of the Fantastic Four. Ben is a little older than than his first cousin Hal Jordan, but he and Hal shared many similar qualities.

Larry Jordan, interestingly enough, became a crusading district attorney (as his nephew Jim would become) and a "mystery-man" in his own right, Air Wave. His son, also named Harold "Hal" Jordan, became Air Wave II.

Martin H. Jordan married Jacqueline Vincent, of Chilocothe, Ohio, sister to the Harry Vincent who was the Shadow's agent. The oftentimes unquestioning obedience Harry showed the Shadow is mirrored in his nephew Hal's unquestioning obedience to the Guardians---at least during most of his life. (See my family tree for Bruce Banner---"Banner Years or a Monstrous Family Tree" to see who else is related to the Vincents, and for this side of Hal's family.) They had three sons---Jack, who like his grandfather and two uncles, went into the law, the middle son, Harold "Hal" Jordan, who became a Air Force pilot during the Korean War and later a test pilot for Ferris Aircraft, and the youngest, Jim Jordan, a reporter and publicity agent married Sue Williams a reporter. Both Jack and Jim had children of their own..

Hal, as many know, was tapped by the dying Abin Sur to join the Green Lantern Corps. He became one of the finest ringbearers to ever grace that organization, and a fictionalized version of his adventures were initially conveyed by John Broome and Gil Kane. Their contact was Thomas Kalmaku, who chronicled Hal's doings but only gave them fictionalized names for the protagonists and exagerrated accounts. Kane and Broome were constrained by their editor, Julie Schwartz, to do even further exagerrations in the actual comics. This went on for years, but when he was convinced that the city he had spent his life defending had died, he went insane. (Actually, in my opinion he went insane a little before that. Mongul, a yellow-skinned alien with strength in Superman's class, fought him and gave Hal extreme blows. Though his ring would protect him from mortal injury, I'm convinced that Hal suffered brain damage, hence his conviction that a major US city vanished...something that never happened in real life....and his homicidal actions afterwards.)

Hal gave his life, though, to save the sun from the sun-eater, a nebula-like being who would have sapped the energy from our star and rendered our planet lifeless. (The FINAL NIGHT was a fictionalization of what life would be like if the beast even partially succeeded. Actually Hal and the others stopped it before it could reach our sun, although he gave his life in the process.)