Considering how old these GL comics are, many of them were written in the late 50's, they are actually pretty good for silver age publications. The stories are very simple but still manage to work. One of the reasons they continue to work is that Broome knew his gimmick and stuck to it! I think he decided that the best combination of ingredients he needed to tell a GL story were:
-A random event
-The GL oath
-A complication involving a random yellow object (wow, there are a lot of these! and yes it's incredibly kitsch, but it's also pretty funny when a yellow lamp, and giant yellow space monster are equally dangerous to Hal.)
-A further complication involving Carol or AKA romantic identity crisis.
-Concluded with fun or really really far out power ring solution. (My favorite was the selective brain-damage to destroy a memory)
What's amazing is that all this happens in about 10 pages! So these episodes are fast, compact and make use of a expedited but not unsatisfactory kind of story telling.
I'm all about a story with GL fighting weird yellow space monsters, but what really made this book fun for me was how that in-between flying off, he's off on dates with Carol (as GL!) and going to dances or charity events (as GL!) as if it's the most normal thing in the world. The romance aspect of this comic has that Riverdale vibe that's kind of cute too. Did anyone else not know about February 29th?!?!
Stuff from the Silver Age usually has a heavy dose of cultural cringe and this book doesn't totally get off the hook. Hal has chauvinist body language a couple of fames, but what was really nails on chalkboard to me was, I quote, "Hal's Eskimo mechanic, Pie-face"...
I think they were trying to go for a Green-hornet kind of duo vibe, buuuut. yeah. If it weren't for the cultural ignorance and racism, this one and done story would actually be pretty good.
Ending on a more positive note; Gil Kane's has really nice, classically technical illustrations that make this book visually pretty interesting and didn't fatigue me at all. Kane draws good heroes, monsters, and pretty girls, but special note should also be made of how real his random people in the street looked. No one is just a face in the crowd and those details like receding hair lines, lined faces, double chins, angles of hats etc, really went a long way for me in showing his talent and quality of this 10 cent book! I was also so so so happy to see that Kane was the guy who started to do my absolute favorite GL thing, which is using the power ring for creative solutions. To start it's all pew-pew, blat-zap!, but after a couple of books he's building hammers and cages and other fun stuff to get out of trouble with.
Final result: Enjoyed! Even if I may have MST3K'ed while I read.