The DCU‘s rollout has gone better than expected, as fans have opened up to the new version of the cinematic DC Universe. Numerous projects are coming down the pipe, with the most exciting one for a lot of DC fans being Lanterns, a show that will bring the Green Lantern mythos to audiences the world over. The show will follow John Stewart and his mentor/partner Hal Jordan, and looks to be a superhero sci-fi police procedural. Over the decades, there have been multiple great depictions of Stewart and Jordan, as well as brilliant stories that should inform Lanterns, but there’s one Green Lantern run that the show should definitely take inspiration from: The Green Lantern and The Green Lantern: Season Two from Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp.
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These two 12 issues series left behind the Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum that had become the focus of Green Lantern stories since the mid ’00s, taking readers on a trip through the weirder sides of the DC Universe. Morrison and Sharp set out to do the same sort of thing that it seems like Lanterns is about to do, focusing on the Green Lanterns more as intergalactic police than as superheroes out to save the universe. It’s exactly the kind of run that Lanterns should pattern itself after.
Morrison/Sharp’s The Green Lantern Went Old School
Green Lantern became the most popular solo DC comic of the ’00s thanks to Geoff Johns’s amazing run. Johns brought back Hal Jordan, resurrected the Green Lantern Corps, made Sinestro important again, and introduced readers to the new Lantern Corps. It was big sci-fi superhero spectacle, but as good as it could be, there wasn’t really much soul to it. Jordan got boring as the book went on, with the character staying mostly static. He was the best Green Lantern ever, and that was the extent of his characterization. In the years after Johns stopped writing Green Lantern, this became the primary characterization for Hal and it didn’t do much for the character.
Morrison loves old school DC and they dug deep into Green Lantern history to make their Hal different from what he had been before. Hal is still an amazing Green Lantern, but there’s a wildness to him, an unpredictability, that is missing from other versions of the character. He’s someone who isn’t good at anything but being a Green Lantern, who is bored with the mundanity of life on Earth and prefers the stars. At times, he’s a bit reckless, but he gets the job done. The Guardians of the Universe trust him with the most dangerous missions, because they know his wild streak allows him to think outside the box in ways that other Green Lanterns don’t.
Of course, this being Morrison, the book takes Hal to some truly mindblowing places. He ends battling the Blackstars, an evil anti-Lantern Corps out to conquer the universe, the Anti-Matter Lanterns of the Anti-Matter Universe, alien superheroes that broke bad, a team up with Barry Allen and Oliver Queen, being trapped within his own ring, visiting his favorite vacation spot — a planet out of a D&D campaign, the Ultrawar, and more wild cosmic DC stories. The art by Sharp is gorgeous and brings all Morrison’s bizarre ideas to life beautifully, giving the book the perfect artistic tone. Their run was the total package, jumping to the top of the greatest Green Lantern stories of all time.
Morrison and Sharp took the idea of Green Lantern back to its roots — a human in the wilds of the universe trying to do the best he could — and it was such a breath of fresh air. Green Lantern stories had lost their luster, circling the same ideas over and over again, and Morrison and Sharp broke the concept out of that holding pattern. It played up the intergalactic police force aspect of the Green Lantern, and did it with a version of Hal Jordan that fit perfectly into the wilds of outer space. It was perfect Green Lantern, and it’s exactly the direction that the DCU should take Lanterns.
Lanterns Needs to Get as Wild as the Morrison/Sharp’s Green Lantern
2011’s Green Lantern tried its best to capture the feel of ’00s Green Lantern comics, and it didn’t really appeal to anyone, not even fans of Green Lantern. Lanterns has an uphill battle ahead of it, and honestly, the best thing that DC Studios can do is take things in the wildest directions possible. Most fans have never seen a sci-fi police procedural, and they have the chance to take things to some weird places. Luckily, they have a guiding light for that sort of thing — Morrison and Sharp’s Green Lantern run.
The book embraced the police procedural and sci-fi aspects of the Green Lantern mythos, and that’s the same thing that Lanterns seems like it wants to do. Lanterns is going to focus on John Stewart, but that doesn’t mean it can’t give us a great Hal, one that embraces the wilder aspects of the character that Morrison brought to the fore. Lanterns needs to show new fans what Green Lantern stories can be at their weirdest, and I sincerely hope that James Gunn had the creatives behind the show check out the Morrison/Sharp run.
What do you think about the Morrison/Sharp Green Lantern run? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
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