Green Lantern’s yellow pterodactyls — and my own

In order to get my hands on the story posted in "Green Lantern pterosaur time-tunnel story here!" (from Green Lantern vol. 2 #30, July 1964) I had to download a huge zipped file of more than 200 Green Lantern comic books. Although the alien pterodactyls from that story are obviously not supposed to be recurring villains -- the story ends with them giving up all attempts to interfere on Earth, since any such interference will be impossible for the next 100 million years -- I nevertheless thought I should look through all the other issues I had downloaded to see if they did reappear after all.

They don't, but there's another alien pterodactyl story in vol. 2 #88 (March 1972). Yes, that's number eighty-eight. Like the first pterodactyl story, it's written by John Broome and penciled by Gil Kane, but it's a completely different race of alien pterodactyls this time. Instead of pterodactyls on a distant planet trying to arrange for Earth pterodactyls to take over Earth, we have pterodactyls on Venus menacing cavemen on Venus, and Green Lantern is sent to save his fellow humans. Apparently humans and pterodactyls just sort of spontaneously evolve on lots of different planets.

In #30, Green Lantern can't use his Power Ring against the pterodactyls because of the "energo-shield" their leader has created using his "super-mentality." In #88, he can't use his Power Ring against the pterodactyls because they're yellow. The color yellow, as you may know, is Green Lantern's kryptonite. His power is basically unlimited unless it involves anything yellow.

In #30, Green Lantern defeats the pterodactyls by scaring them -- taking them back to the Mesozoic, where they see a very scary T. rex that weakens the "super-mentality" enough to allow Green Lantern to strike. In #88, he also defeats the pterodactyls by scaring them.-- conjuring up a giant illusory hawk which chases them into a cave, and then collapsing the entrance to the cave.

In #30, the pterodactyls are referred to as pteros -- and I noted that ptero has the same S:E:G: value as Tarot, namely 74. In #88, they are called bird-raiders or just raiders, and raiders also has an S:E:G: value of 74. (The longer name, bird-raiders, has an S:E:G: value of 107 -- which is the value of The Tarot, and of each of the three parts of the Tarot: the trumps, the Minor Arcana, and the the Fool card.)

Just hours before discovering this Green Lantern story, I read H. G. Wells's 1896 short story "The Sea Raiders," which also uses the word raiders to refer to monstrous animals (man-eating cephalopods in Wells's case). Wells came up in the last Green Lantern pterodactyl post, too.

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The main thing that got me, though, was the fact that the story is about yellow pterodactyls. I mentioned in my last post that "pterosaurs have at times been a sort of personal totem animal for me." Well, it's specifically yellow pterosaurs -- even more specifically, quite small yellow pterosaurs, possibly juveniles of Pterodactylus or some closely related genus (not the giant Pteranodon-type animals of the Green Lantern stories).

"Ghosts of pterosaurs" -- for lack of any better way of describing a sort of experience I am really at a loss to classify -- have been an occasional feature of my life for a long time, especially when I lived in Maryland, although I've had two experiences of this type in Taiwan as well (one of which I have blogged about), but my big "pterodactyl experience" took place around 2002 or 2003 at Ohio State University, when touching a fossil caused me to have a very brief but extremely vivid vision of a living pterodactylus, bright yellow in color, in its natural habitat, with a few others flying about in the background. The sheer alienness of the scene -- the color of the sky, the quality of the light, the humming of the insects, the feeling of goodness -- overwhelmed me. It lasted a second or two and was gone, and I was left with an intense feeling of grief -- that that world was gone, that all the pterodactyls were dead, that the universe would go on forever without them. (I was an atheist at the time.)

That little yellow pterodactylus has been there in the back of my mind ever since. I think about it every time I read Isaiah's vision of the seraphim, imagining resurrected and glorified pterodactyls singing "Holy, holy, holy" around the Throne. I have sometimes used Flavius Pterodactylus as a username, the etymological meaning of Flavius being "yellow." I don't know why this particular creature is resurfacing now -- particularly through the goofy medium of a Green Lantern comic book! -- but it's got to mean something. A yellow pterodactyl can never be for me anything other than a good omen. Teros, not Deros.

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Here's the story. I'm only posting the part that takes place on Venus, not the frame story about Green Lantern's love life.