Martin Nodell

In 1940, comic-book artist Martin Nodell was awaiting the subway home to Brooklyn when he saw a trainman waving a lantern. It was a common sight, but to an artist desperate for fresh ideas, it was inspiration.

"It was green, which meant things were safe," said Nodell, then 25. "I wrote down `Green Lantern.' I added elements of everything I liked - Chinese folklore, Greek mythology, Wagner's opera (The Ring of the Nibelungen)." Nodell, who soon created the legendary superhero Green Lantern and later helped create the Pillsbury Doughboy, died in Wisconsin Saturday. The West Palm Beach resident was 91.

Hours before he saw the lantern in the subway, Nodell had been challenged to create a new comic book hero - with hope of employment with a fledgling comics publisher. Days later, he brought some art and story lines to National Periodicals, which later became DC Comics.

"I thought the publisher would let me down easy," Nodell said. "He said, `We like it. Get to work.' " In his Aladdin's Lamp fable, Nodell describes a young engineer who is the sole survivor of a train crash. Staggering from the wreckage, Alan Scott discovers the eerie light of an ancient lantern forged from a green meteor. The lantern is a conscious entity that tells Scott to construct a ring from the lamp itself.

The ring makes Scott nearly omnipotent, bestowing the power to fly, materialize through walls, and make him impervious to bullets. Donning a vivid costume of green, red, purple, brown, black and gold, the hero recharges his superpowers by touching the ring to the lantern every 24 hours and reciting a special oath.

Nodell drew the superhero until 1947. At first, he didn't sign his real name to the product because comic books were then "a forbidden literature, culturally unacceptable," he said. Instead, he signed it Mart Dellon, transposing the letters of his last name.

In 1950, after seven years with DC Comics and four with rival Marvel Comics(where he did penciling work on Captain America, Human Torch and Sub-Mariner), Nodell left the industry and turned to advertising.

Using his Chicago art-school training as an art director at Leo Burnett Agency in 1965, he was a member of the design team that created the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Nodell later moved to newspaper advertising, working in Chicago from 1970-78, and for The Palm Beach Post from 1979-83.

Nodell is survived by sons Spencer and Mitchell; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Caroline, died in 2004.