Tim Sheridan’s Alan Scott: The Green Lantern is an excellent comic book. In addition to being a fine reimagining of Alan’s origins, with the acknowledgment of Alan as a closeted gay man in the 1930s and 1940s, it is also impeccably written, with cliffhangers at the end of most chapters that left me wanting more. But that continues through to the end, and Alan Scott (and Alan Scott) feels vaguely unfinished, or rather that Sheridan’s got material for a sequel that I wonder if we’ll ever see, given that JSA continues but not the exact Geoff Johns “Golden Age” vision that Alan Scott spins off from.

Too there are places that Sheridan zigs where I might have preferred he zagged, small controversies here and there. It’s sometimes messy, is what I’m trying to say, and I felt myself wanting less mess if only so that one of the better in DC’s small library of queer biographies had queer love less tainted by lies and betrayal. But I’ve no such aversion to Catwoman kissing Batman and then scratching him with her claws, and it speaks all the better for Alan Scott that Sheridan tells this tale complications and all.

[Review contains spoilers]

It is the perfect intersection of the DC Universe and the real world at the end of Alan Scott’s first full chapter, after a harrowing sequence that cross-cuts Alan encountering the mysterious crimson flame in two time periods, depicted well by Cian Tormey, that it screeches to a halt with an image of Alan undergoing shock therapy at Arkham. Because of course, if we take it all to its logical conclusion, then Arkham Asylum in 1936 would have had a “deviancy wing,” a place where those outside the accepted societal norm would be committed. Sheridan uncovers one of those things never before considered, but in retrospect feels like it was obvious all along.

That sense is prevalent throughout, in what reads at times like a typical Justice Society flashback story, but through the lens of our increased understanding of Green Lantern. There’s the familiar scene of Alan Scott and Jay Garrick breaking down the clues together, but with newfound tension now in the early days of their partnership, Jay tolerant but not quite ready to see police misconduct in their failure to investigate the deaths of gay men the way Alan is. (“The world will always see things in a new light, Lantern.” “Never fast enough, Flash” is a fantastic sequence.)

Further, that Alan should be able to ask the very question of whether the divine cares who loves whom during a team-up with the Spectre; that Sheridan is still able to work in the Guardians and the Starheart into his revised origin of red and green lanterns; that it is Alan’s heroism in the face of the very people who shun him that makes him worthy of the lantern power. In certain respects, Sheridan adds very little that’s effectively different to this Alan story (aside from a new power set), but what Sheridan’s able to work in between what’s already established is vast.

Still, this book’s fourth chapter is tough, even as it is also brilliant. Sheridan recasts many of the scenes from the first chapter, now through the eyes of Alan’s boyfriend John Ladd, whom we come to understand as being a Russian spy using Alan to get to the crimson flame.

In the first telling, it seems a tale of true love found and lost — Alan and Johnny both in the military, having to hide who they are, and when the flame seemingly kills Johnny, it leads Alan to fear he’s being punished for his supposed “sins.” But the second telling is hard because it takes the romantic recounting of Alan’s first relationship and instead makes it a tale of someone ostensibly using Alan’s sexuality to steal national secrets. There are ways to read it in which Johnny — Vladimir — does indeed love Alan, but equally I feared the story played into stereotypes of gay men as both predator and easy prey.

Still again, that’s a discomfort that I realize is counterproductive; fair representation isn’t fair representation when Alan Scott gets a love story and Roy Harper gets Cheshire, but when Alan Scott is gay and his true love is a villain, too. Though still, Sheridan's Green Lantern feels too foundational for betrayal; in Elliott Kalan’s DC All In Harley Quinn, Harley’s got the hots for a villain, but that comes after a long arc that sees Harley in a committed, open relationship with Poison Ivy. That Alan has become in a sense DC’s “original” gay hero, in his first miniseries as such, and that his origin involves him essentially being catfished, doesn’t wholly sit right with me.

As well, it seems to me that Sheridan signals to the audience that Alan hasn’t reconciled all of this, either. Between his children and the Justice Society, Alan supposedly comes around to the understanding that he is loved, even going so far as to clue in his past self that things turn out all right. But equally, we’re almost immediately introduced to Alan as “Alan Ladd-Scott,” reestablishing his past-continuity middle name as Johnny’s last name; though Alan and Johnny discuss marriage in vague terms, it’s not like they’re together very long, plus Johnny turning out to be a Russian spy. This — and Alan adopting Vladimir’s beard — suggest in Alan a certain denial (or sci-fi supernatural possession) that this book doesn’t deal with, and that’s at worst unfinished and at best great grounds for a sequel.

I cheated and looked ahead and I see that Vladimir’s daughter Ruby appears in Jeff Lemire’s JSA, so we have our answer at least there — all of this won’t be ignored because Ruby’s still around. And that’s good because, again, Tim Sheridan’s Alan Scott: The Green Lantern feels like a foundational text — uncomfortable in what happens to Alan but not in its presentation of Alan, and making the DC Universe itself feel more real in hewing closer to people’s real lives and experiences. I’d be happy to read more about Alan from Sheridan, and not limited just to the DC Pride specials.

[Includes original and variant covers]