Robert Venditti: "This Really Is A Fun Time" To Be Working on Green Lantern

When DC's Rebirth publishing initiative was announced, one of the big questions many fans asked was, where's Ethan Van Sciver?

The superstar artist drew some pages in the DC Universe: Rebirth one-shot back in May, but it's next week when he will return to more regular storytelling, when he illustrates Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps: Rebirth for writer Robert Venditti.

The issue will be a bit of a homecoming for both men; Venditti has been working on Green Lantern since the departure of fan-favorite writer Geoff Johns, and the book has done well enough that DC wanted him to remain on the characters even with the Rebirth initiative throwing most of the line into upheaval.

Van Sciver, meanwhile, worked with Johns on most of his big stories, starting with Green Lantern: Rebirth, the story that restored Hal Jordan as the series lead and kicked off Johns's decade-long run on the title. That miniseries also launched Rebirth as a successful "brand" for DC, followed by Johns and Van Sciver's The Flash: Rebirth.

The twice-monthly book will also bring Venditti back together with Rafa Sandoval, an artist with whom he worked on Valiant's X-O Manowar, which Venditti is currently wrapping up after a fifty-plus issue run during which time he was responsible for many of the publisher's big "event" miniseries as well.

Venditti joined ComicBook.com to talk about the series, which launched with the Rebirth issue on July 6. You can pre-order the issue on ComiXology here.

I asked a big thing, and I asked the same thing of Dan Abnett. The Rebirth initiative is this kind of broad, sweeping thing that bringing these wholesale changes to the line. How does it feel to be one of those guys who got to stay on your title, and how much pressure is there for you to find a cool, creative way to stay the course on a book that's not broken?

I'm obviously thrilled. This is the kind of book that I've been wanting to write for a very long time, and Rebirth is such a great concept that I think really fits with me. Creatively and personality wise. Yeah, to be able to stick with Hal, which a book that I wanted, I wanted to stay on this book. I even liked the idea that its a double-ship, which I know may sound crazy, but I like the idea of writing one thing twice a month, rather than two things once a month. It's something I think I'm just suited for. I'm very much a long term planner in the way I construct stories.

This is certainly going to be one of those types of stories where I'm already ten scripts in, and probably be twelve by the time the first issue even comes out. For me, it was just about creating a new jumping-on point, where if you've never read anything Green Lantern, ever, you'll be able to come in at this point and understand what's going on completely. At the same time if have you been reading Green Lantern, no matter how long you've been doing it, these are going to be fresh concepts, and core aspects of the characters, fun in different ways. It will be unexpected and welcoming to historic readers, and new readers as well.

Now obviously, we've gotten just a tiniest kind of tease of Hal's new status-quo. How are you going to incorporate what you've been doing the last little while, where its kind of a space opera with no core, and the lone, western almost, gunslinger. What do you have in store for essentially re-establishing the status-quo of Hal being the A-number-one badass of this sprawling police force?

Well I don't know that I would call him the number one badass. He certainly is the best at his way of doing the Green Lantern, but I would say a character like John Stewart is just as good as Hal as being his kind of Lantern, if that makes sense. They're two very different characters in the way they approach things, though both highly effective. We're picking up- If you've read that previous Green Lantern, you know at the end that Hal had the experimental gauntlet and it had this unanticipated effect on him. It's almost transforming him into a construct. He's becoming a being of pure will.

We're just picking up our story there. How Hal gets his costume back, how he gets his ring, how that ties into the large issues facing the Corps, are all going to be intregal. As he stands right now, the Green Lantern Corps is gone, he doesn't know where they are. Nobody else does. He wants to go try to find them, but in doing so he's going to reclaim the mantle of Green Lantern, and if he's the last Lantern in the universe, so be it. He's going to try to protect the universe as best as he can, while he's trying to get the Corps to return. That's kind of the conflict where we're opening it up, but how he's attacking that problem, and how John Stewart and the Green Lantern Corps are attacking the same problem. Meanwhile you've got Sinestro, who in the absence of the Corps has moved Warworld into sector zero, and is now the established police force in the universe, he's in the mixing it all up as well.

We're going to be picking up from what was happening in The New 52, but it's a complete new entry point. If you've never read any of that stuff you don't need to have. You'll know everything that's going on.

Obviously with this you've got another Green Lantern book that's already kicked off with Simon and Jess, how much are you talking with Sam Humphries to guarantee that everybody is on the same page. Again you're kind of starting off, presumably, half-way through your first arc is where Hal has to be in order to put them- He may need to be in that first issue.

Yeah I would say that's true. Where you see Hal in the Green Lanterns Rebirth issue is going to be a few more issues into my run. My issue will start before those events, yeah. I know where it fits but I can't really say without spoiling something.

Makes sense, yes. This might be a spoiler, or this might be a way for you to say, "No, no, don't worry about this." Are we going to be seeing Parallax anytime soon? Following Convergence, he showed up in our universe, beat up on Telos a little, beat up on Hal a little, then ran with his tail between his legs.

There are plans for that. It's not going to be in the immediate future, but you will see other Parallax very soon. There's more than one thing called Parallax. And we're going to deal with that issue right of the bat. If you're talking about the Hal Jordan version, there is a longer plan there in place. I've already written some of it, but it's not something we're going to see immediately.

One of the things I think is really interesting about Green Lantern, the ones we've seen, is that it's toying with a lot of Geoff's mythology again. Obviously for a while now you've been building a bit of your own mythology. Is this title marrying those a little bit more closely than they've necessarily been up to now?

I would say a lot of the mythology that I've built came off of what Geoff did. I think that's, again, baked into the Rebirth notion. Not just for this book, but the DCU as a whole. It's about new jumping-off points, but also incorporating the long storied histories, and all great characters and locations. I've got the entire DC Universe, and I don't just mean the DCU, I mean the universe.

The space universe, the cosmos of the DC. This is out of the focal here, that's an enormous sandbox. You've got so many planets, and so many characters, and so many villains, and so many things you can build on. Yeah, I would say that what I'm trying to do, is not necessarily build new mythology, but maybe tell the next chapter in those mythologies, and contribute to them in some way. In a way that the next writer that comes along after me will be tasked with doing the same.

Obviously Hal's name is in the title of this book, but it does kind of feel like you're getting to be a little bit more hands on with most of the Lanterns. Is that fun, to bounce those characters off each other, and to have the supporting cast that just grew to basically infinity?

Yeah, I would say if you're using the term supporting cast I would classify that to a lot of your non-Earth Lanterns. Your Salaaks and your Kilowogs all those sorts of things. In terms of leads, you've got Hal but you've also got John, and Guy, and we'll see Kyle as well. There are going to be A plots and B plots, and if Hal is the A plot, and John is the B plot. That will shift and John will become the A plot, and Hal will become the B plot, and then we'll go back and forth. John is a character I have a lot of personal like of. He's the first Green Lantern that I ever really experienced stories of through the cartoons.

From the day that I took over Green Lantern, I always wanted [John] to be the leader of the Corps, and to build himself to that position where, not just the rest of the Lanterns, but we as readers understood who he was as a character, and how he would be the best person for that role. You look at him, and you look at Hal, and they're both highly competent Lanterns, but also completely different in their approaches to conflict and how they resolve them. I think they're both phenomenal characters and to be able to write them, and somebody like Guy who has his own things that make him unique, and Kyle as well.

There's just so much to be able to play with here. They are 20 page issues, and sometimes it does feel like a lot, but I think that when readers see how we're able to incorporate all these sorts of things, in ways that make sense, and never feel forced. When everybody has their moment, it's important to that character, and there's a story arc behind it. Hopefully they'll enjoy what they're reading.

What's the high concept for Rebirth? What distinguishes this as the next chapter?

it does tie in with what the larger mission statement is of Rebirth, and that's to get back to the core of these characters, who they've been historically, to embrace the long histories of these characters. There's so much great material there, and I don't want to make that sound continuity-heavy, because it's not.

These'll be completely new, reader-friendly stories, but just to embrace everything that's come before, and then tell new stories with it. I think one of the benefits of Green Lantern is that I don't share my space with all the other heroes. It's all in the Green Lantern Corps in space, and that's all for us. That's something really wonderful to be able to play with.

When you look at some of the villains that we're going to be bringing in, we're going to lead with Sinestro, which is one of the real heavy hitters of the DCU. Following that up, we're going to have some real surprises here in terms of who they're facing. Ethan Van Sciver's somebody who's a huge fan of classic concepts, and so we're going to be working those sorts of things in. Rafa Sandoval is amazing at design.

We're going to be creating some new stuff as well, so by the time this book launches, we'll have 12 scripts in, we'll have 5 issues completely in the can. We know where all the pieces are going on the chessboard, and it's going to be a really fun ride.

Now, I got to say, for me personally, the one and only thing that really pains me about this conversation is the end of X-O Manowar. I've enjoyed the hell out of your work on that book. That's one of those things where I look at Green Lantern and I see the building blocks in there for a similar, giant, interwoven mythology. I'm going to really enjoy looking back at this in a year and being like, "Okay, so how crazy have we gotten?"

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. The two things aren't related. I'm not leaving X-O Manowar because I'm relaunching this. I loved writing that character, just like I love doing Hal Jordan stories. It's just 50 issues. 56, actually, is a really long run by today's standards, and so it's just time to go, I guess.

Yeah, in terms of the way I tell stories, very much so, each arc will be a completely new jumping on point. You won't need to have read anything else to know what's going on, but if you've read everything, when you get to the end of these first 24 issues or whatever have you, you're going to see that all these threads are going to go all the way back to this very first Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps: Rebirth #1 shot.

We're laying down a ton of threads in that issue, and when we get there, 24 issues from now, you're going to see how literally this one action rippled through and created all these other things. It's very much the style of story that I'm trying to do. DC has given us as writers that kind of open road to be able to do that. Like I say, by the time the first issue comes out, we'll already be 12 issues in, and so this isn't theoretical. It's all on my laptop. A lot of these threads are already being pulled on, and executed in scripts, and drawn by artists. It's all in motion.

I look at the long-form big picture storytelling of X-O, andI feel like that storytelling you have really meshes really with Rebirth, because you have this ability to have each story be compounding. Each time you would start a new arc in X-O, it would build very organically off the previous thing, and it would feel bigger, and bigger, and bigger, but typically, the first part of every story is a really good jumping-on point. I tend to hand people a trade paperback, and be like, "Yeah. You're safe." I feel like the idea of reintroducing history, and legacy, and all of these things that can be a little bit daunting sometimes, actually suits the way that you tell these stories.

Yeah, I believe so as well. Hopefully we're both right. We still have to execute it, and have it come out well, but I do have that kind of mindset, where I am good at making the pieces fit. I think if you give me this open road, where I can get this far ahead, it really frees me up. Again, it's a testament to what Rebirth is in concept, not just in terms of the stories, but structurally what's going on at DC, and what we're being freed up to be able to do. It's all part of the same thing.

When I heard what Rebirth was, I remember going to Burbank in January. They explained to me what Rebirth was as a concept. This was my first face-to-face meeting. We'd talked it before, but this was where we really started to get into it now. When the told me what exactly they were going for, as a line-wide type of thing, three days later I turned in the first issue of the Rebirth issue of Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps. I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew that they were giving me the freedom to do it. I couldn't be more excited about the team we've got, Ethan and Rafa on art, Jason Wright and Tomeu Morey on colors. The books are looking beautiful. We've got almost 80 pages of content already in the can. This really is a fun time to be working on the book.