Does she keep a stripper pole around? – The Green Lantern Corps #212

I had this comic as a kid, and I seem to recall that it was one of few Green Lantern books that I owned.  In fact, it may have been the only one.  There’s a cool cliffhanger ending, as Hal is duped into thinking he has a power battery with him in space, but when he needs to recharge his ring it turns out that it was just an illusion.  He promptly explodes, or so we’re led to believe.

A lot of times I’d have an issue that ended like this, and I’d miss out on what the resolution to the story would be.  My childhood comics were kind of spread out — trips to stores that sold them must have been intermittent.  It’s only in recent years, as I’ve plunged head first into buying back issues, that I’ve finally learned the endings of many a dangling plot thread.

A fly on the wall at my place would often hear me saying “So that’s how he made it out of that!  Huh…”

But it wasn’t just the “How did Hal survive?” factor that made this issue memorable.  It was the following sequence:

Looking at the cover date, I was a whopping nine years old when this came out.  And I’m not going to claim that this comic book brought out a sudden *ahem* awareness of the opposite sex.  I’ll simply say this — over two decades have passed, and I can still remember that page.  So it must have flipped some sort of switch.

So thank you, Steve Englehart and Joe Staton, for having Star Sapphire peel her clothes off in front of a sweaty, wide-eyed Hector Hammond like some common strumpet.

And no, I won’t make a ribald double entendre about the size of Hector’s head.  Or maybe I just did.