No one ever accused Grant Morrison of running out of ideas or not thinking one through all the way and the writer has overturned a major stone on something they had planned in the pages of their Green Lantern run that didn’t come to pass. As noticed by Bleeding Cool, Morrison’s latest newsletter/annotations of The Green Lantern Season Two offered their feelings on Hal Jordan’s sexuality with the writer adding: “Nurse Leylo Olaqua was introduced in Season 1 #2 but here we learn she and Jordan have romantic history. I wanted to suggest that a boho Lothario like Hal Jordan with a whole universe of worlds at his disposal would tend towards a pansexual persuasion…”
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Continuing that thought, Morrison added that this would have been explored in the series had the poor sales and planned 5G event (itself cancelled later by DC) didn’t force the series into a shorter run. They added: “This was one of a few stories I had planned from the outset for a potential Season 2 and as the title suggests it started as a vague Assault on Precinct 13 riff. Arriving here felt like a major milestone on the way to getting through what now felt more like a war of attrition, what with disappointing sales and a shocking lack of serious engagement from the general comics readership.”
Morrison went into detail in their newsletter about how plans for The Green Lantern were truncated due to events beyond their control, but also revealed that this ended up feeling like “a demoralising vote of no confidence for the work” that he and artist collaborator Liam Sharp were working on. They wrote: “5G suffered a terminal setback when DC publisher Dan DiDio left the company in 2020 but plans were very much in place to retire Hal Jordan in favour of a more diverse human member of the Green Lantern Corps. I was all in favour of the update – but wished it could have waited until we were done…..We’d done our best to give the character some dignity and authority. Now it appeared we might be writing his swan song.”
In the end they were correct. The conclusion of The Green Lantern Season Two marked the end of The Green Lantern as a solo comic with DC relaunching the title as simply “Green Lantern” and making it a team title. Though Hal Jordan does appear, it’s unclear if the potential for his sexuality being explored has been touched upon, but he’s not the lead in the title any longer as fellow lanterns John Stewart, Simon Baz, Jo Mullein, and Keli Quintela (Teen Lantern).
