It has been a long time since the Green Lantern side of the DC Universe had a proper shakeup. Well, that was the case before Geoffrey Thorne came onto “Green Lantern.” In just a few issues, Thorne has blown up the power battery, scattered the ‘core’ Lanterns across the universe, taken away their rings, and, as seen in today’s #4, killed a whole lot of Lanterns. And I mean a lot.
Last week, I had a chance to pick Thorne’s brain on the book, the big changes, and his approach to writing comics. Be warned, many spoilers for issue #4 follow. Once you’re done reading the interview, there’s an exclusive four-page preview available of the fourth issue directly following the chat.
Written by Geoffrey ThorneCover by Bernard Chang
Illustrated by Tom Raney and Marco Santucci
Colored by Michael Atiyeh
Lettered by Rob LeighImprove. Adapt. Overcome. The same lessons John Stewart learned in the Marine Corps help him begin his quest to find the other lost Lanterns in the dark sectors of space. Meanwhile, back on Oa, one of the Corps’ newest members, Jo Mullein, alongside Young Justice’s Teen Lantern and Simon Baz, tends to the wounded and investigates who or what caused the source of all Green Lanterns’ power to go nuclear and wipe out the Corps.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
If you would ask me, “what’s the most interesting thing about a Green Lantern comic?”, I’d say the ring. The ring is it’s this sort of ‘get out of jail free’ card for any situation because it can translate, and it can make a bomb, and it can make a ship or anything else in the universe. But you took the rings pretty much off the table instantly. Was that always going to be your approach?
Geoffrey Thorne: Okay, there’s an incredibly long version of this that has been told elsewhere. Basically, I came on after the 5G thing and already been decided I pitched them a short, John Stewart focused mini series, which they bought, and through a very long and arcane sequence of events, it ended up that I’m writing the “Green Lantern” ongoing book focused on John Stewart, which was never the original plan. But when I came in, there were certain fixed points at the company because of what their plans were, and they evolved while I was there, but they have stuff going on with ‘Infinite Frontier.’
At the time, the end of the “Death Metal” event that they’ve been doing for like, what, two years at that point, they had nothing to do with me. But they were like, “these things will occur.” Like, regardless of who’s writing the book, any of these books, these four or five things are definitely happening over the next two years here. So one of your things will be the loss of the Power Battery. And I say, “what does that mean?” And they say, “whatever you want it to mean, but the battery is going to go dark or disappear or something. What that actually means is up to you, but the ramifications are what we’re interested in.” And I was like, Okay, great, let’s do that. It doesn’t really hurt what I was trying to say with the John story, he was always going to be sort of off on his own away from the rest of the group anyway, so that changed slightly. The other thing is, because we’re all comic book fans, I guess it got leaked, somehow, even through the whole 5G craziness, or just in general. A lot of the fans were like “they’re gonna blow up the power battery, they’re gonna get rid of the power battery power. Oh, here we go again with that crap,” basically. And I was like, well, traditionally, what you would do in a story like this is you’d sort of writee a book, no power problems, no battery problems for months. And I was like, “Why do that? Let’s just get it out of the way.” If we’re about ramifications, if we’re about the repercussions of the loss of the battery, if that’s what’s interesting, let’s get to it. So that’s why I brought it up in the second issue, and that’s why it’s blown up rather than sort of tying this place or, you know, in some other recoverable way, right, not recoverable. That battery is gone, my friend is absolutely blown to smithereens.
Continued belowWell, that, that sort of leads me into my next question, which is that, you know, obviously, it’s important to give stakes in a comic, because you can make every threat a universe threatening situation, but until you do something that actually connects with the reader, it can feel a bit false. You took a number of Lanterns off the table, and some of which are characteers that I’m sure only the most extreme Green Lantern fans are aware of. But others, you know, folks like me have been reading the book for 30 years, we’re aware of a lot of these characters and they are characters that I’m sure there’s someone out therelike, “Who’s like this bastard?!” There’s a guy out there just had his his Arisia tattoo recolored and then he reads that issue and is like, “what the fuck?”How important was it for you to give this story some serious stakes and and, with that in mind, how were the Lanterns that you were going to take off the table decided upon?
GT: Well, the second party question is easy. There are 7200 Green Lanterns. 5000 of them are are definitely dead. Like 5000 of those people we never met. They’re never coming back. That leaves 2200 roughly unaccounted for, which is a little bit of wiggle room for, I guess, a subsequent writer, but just in my own head more than 6000 Lanterns are dead. I’m not necessarily going to explicitly say that nearly all the Green Lanterns die, there’ll be some rescued, obviously, some will be brought back to or someplace, and they may not wish to come home. But yeah, I guess the philosophy for me is one of the things about adventure, whether it’s Pirates of the Caribbean, or the Avengers, or, you know, James Bond, if death is mentioned as a possibility, when it occurs, it has to have weight. Even the concept of Redshirts sort of devalues what their sacrifice means. And ultimately, like, if you’re watching a TV show, oh, here’s this unnamed character, I guess I know who’s going out if we get into a fight. And I wanted to make it clear that what the Green Lanterns do for quote, unquote, a living is an incredibly, incredibly dangerous. They place all of their faith in this alien technology. And the technology is alien to 100% of them. The only people who understand the Green Lantern technology are the Guardians who built it. Everybody else, like, here’s a magic green ring, do your thing. Have a ball, it’s based on your willpower, whatever the hell that is, and go forth and do good according to what we think is good. And they put their faith in these guys and their tech. But there’s never been any discussion of what if it fails for some reason? Is there a repair kit you guys give me where I get a manual or I can sort of, you know, figure out how to reboot it if I’m in another domain? Tthere’s none of that. There’s none. It’s just here’s a magic ring. go forth and do good works.
I’m not a big fan of realism, but I am a big fan of naturalism and plausibility. And there has to be rules, there have to be restrictions, there have to be costs. So in “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” when they killed Barry Allen, and when they killed Supergirl, that had never happened before. When Supergirl fought the Antimonitor, he just straight up killed her. We’re like, “holy crap!” That was Supergirl. That wasn’t an alternate version, that was it. Not a parallel universe Supergirl, it is our Supergirl. And she died. And it mattered. If there’d been an internet, then it would have blown the hell up on that, that when Barry Allen died. There’s this expectation of, oh, they’ll get better. You know, oh, and then we get to discuss the story. Right? Oh, why did the writer do that? Why did DC let the writer do that?
But then it becomes that kind of discussion. People you care about are going to get maimed, they’re going to get killed. They’re going to switch sides. They’re going to do things that are in their characters, and part of their job description. So yeah, so those that stand as long as I’m on the book, everybody who dies, is that that’s not a cheat. There’s no secret backdoor, they’re just straight up dead. And it sucks. It’s supposed to suck. It hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. You’re supposed to feel it. You’re supposed to feel it.
Continued belowI think that that’s a good way of looking at this stuff. Because you can’t control what will happen in 20 years. When it’s you know, you know, “Final Crisis VI: This Time It’s Real”, or whatever, you can’t control that. But you can control what’s happening in your book right now.
You’ve sort of brought in all the divergent Lanterns under one roof, right? So we hear about the Starheart and we got Teen Lantern, and we got Jo Muellin, and we have this sort of this big tent idea of Green Lantern right now. And obviously, there’s only so much room in a 20 page comic every month to get to those stories. So my question for you is, are you concerned with touching these various parts frequently, or are you cool with letting certain things sit for six months or a year?
GT: Oh, definitely the latter. When I started this, I wasn’t sure. DC is not doing what they used to do with sort of locked down contracts; I’m not exclusive to DC. So my contract would have run out at the end of this arc. Basically, I was contracted for this discrete arc. I had more story, which they knew. But no, no word had been officially given. I ultimately had to ask, do you guys expect me to continue because, you know, I’ve set some things up. So in terms of putting things on the shelf, you know the company’s not going to kill off any of these main Green Lanterns; they’ve got a TV show coming up. You know, they’ve got years invested in some of them, decades invested in some of them. There’s merchandising, you know, it’s just it’s ludicrous to assume that unless it was only for a very short period, that any of these guys are going to get killed. It’s not like I came in bloodthirsty. But like, again, these are adventure stories, and adventure stories require casualties of some kind, they require dexa. Right? It’s not to just repeat issue 36 from 1972, over and over and over again, because you really liked it. Like, you’ve got to push these edges.
So right now, in the middle of this arc, we don’t know what’s happened to Guy. We don’t know what’s happened to Kyle. The Lanterns that are on this side of the Dark Sector barrier have no idea what happened to John and his crew. And from their point of view, all those people are probably dead. Most likely, then they ran off in this construct created starship, and then all the rings died. So the logical inference is, that ship was lost with all hands, since we’re not getting any signals back. There’s no distress calls. We don’t have the manpower to punch through those barriers anyway. So if it were alive, they’re on their own, basically. Like, there’s nothing we can do. And with regard to the seven – Kelli doesn’t count – Kyle, we saw in distress, he continues to be in some version of distress. We saw apparently Simon get wrecked, not killed, but very badly hurt. His ring almost took his arm off. They actually had to tone down the original art of what happened. There’s a thing that’s very subtle that isn’t actually in the text, but basically, if you were in close proximity to the battery’s death, like within a couple of parsecs, your ring actually exploded on whatever appendage was wearing it. Theoretically, if you’re one of those Lanterns who had a big belt that was a ring around it, you’re cut in half. But if you were far far away, your ring just became inert. So most people didn’t have an explosion.
But anyway, so Guy’s fate remains undetermined. I know what it is but isn’t said in the book. Jo’s here. John is presumed dead. Hal’s ring works for whatever magical reason that has occurred. I don’t know who’s left who’s left?
Jessica
GT: Jessica has gone Yellow, because they leaked that already. Jessica has apparently switched sides or at least playing for the other team for her own whatever her reasons were, and we will explore that. So already we’ve we’ve we’ve cut into who was getting to call himself a Green Lantern and who’s surviving this event intact. Part of that is, I wouldn’t say it’s a mandate, but a lot of the things that I said I wanted to do with when it was just a John story, DC editorial at the time, and even through all the subsequent shakeups they’ve been consistent with, were like ‘we like the kind of world building you’re doing with doing with cosmic DC in order to support this story.’
Continued belowAnd with that in mind, the Lantern decks get aggressively shuffled, and at the end of the arc, things are not going to be anything like they were at the beginning of the arc. I’m not saying that’s going to be widely accepted or a good or bad thing, but I was brought in to be somewhat an agent of change, and part of my mandate is to do that. So that includes the seven main Green Lanterns who are already having their decks aggressively shuffled, which they will continue to be shuffled. Just because Simon is sporting a cyborg arm right now, doesn’t mean he’s always going to be doing that. We don’t know what’s going on with Kelli. What is the glove/gauntlet? We’ve asked that question multiple times; some version of an answer is going to be given while I’m writing this book. Where did it come from? Who made it that is? I wouldn’t say it’s central [to the plot], but it is definitely a thread that’s going to get explored.
What is Jessica doing with the Yellow Lanterns? I have a big notion about character uniqueness, which Green Lantern at its core is sort of automatically in opposition to. As a fan, I’m a person who thinks there should only be one Green Lantern during any period, and that doesn’t have to be John Stewart. But there should only be one at a time. If we ever see more than one Green Lantern in the same sector, that is some apocalyptic craziness going on. Like, Oh, dear god, there’s two?!? It’s like the Silver Surfer arriving on Earth would be the second Green Lantern showing up, like, okay, some big shit is happening, it’s gonna take two of us to handle, right?
And so my idea is to reshape the Corps in a way, I guess, that is more personal. Something happened to the Guardians and nobody got out of it. I keep saying no one is safe. No one is safe.
All seven of the ‘core’ Lanterns are going to go through some changes, with the possible exceptions of Jo and Hal; those two may come out the least modified.
So I cannot reveal the name of this creator, because that would be a break confidence, but one told me they got they got hired to do five issues of a book at one of the big two publishers, and their mandate was ‘break shit’. And so they did; they broke shit. But the problem was they were then contracted for 25 more issues. They had to fix what they broke. And they thought, Oh no, I didn’t do this with the intention of rebuilding what I broke.’ So do you ever worry that what you have done here is going to paint you into a corner where it’s going to be hard to fight your way out of that?
GT: No, I’m mindful of two things. One, like I said, I didn’t know how far they were gonna let me run with this. I was mindful of the fact that I was not brought in to just break stuff and walk away. But also there’s got to be another writer of this book after me. I’m not a big fan of ignoring what came before, or saying, ‘Oh, that was just a dream.’ Like, I can’t stand that as a reader. And as a writer, I think it’s rude. So, I go by “Moore’s Law,” – I coined this, you have to give me credit- which is when Alan Moore took over Swamp Thing, he basically said, “Everything you’ve read in “Swamp Thing” is still true. Everything happened just as you read it. And I’m not gonna say that any of that was a lie, or anything like that wasn’t a trick. Except in this issue, ‘The Anatomy Lesson,’ I’m going to shift where the lens is to explain one little detail that nobody knew about, including the main character until now. So you guys get to keep your original Swamp Thing, and now we’re going to go over here. But it seems plausible and logical within the context of the story.”
Continued belowI thought that was considerate and also made for a better story, ultimately, because it meant that anyone who came on the book after him could draw from that previous iteration, anything they wanted, just as much as they could draw from Alan Moore’s version of it. And everything was in play. So yeah, there’s a lot made of my dislike of Hal Jordan. I think Hal Jordan was a Silver Age cardboard character, who many gifted writers have tried to make interesting and as a fan, they didn’t make it from my point of view. But as a writer, it isn’t my job to make editorial decisions about the quality of the character. I have to use what is put in front of me; the character has been established as being a particular way. Basically, isn’t Alan Scott celebrating his 80th anniversary? John Stewart celebrating his 50th? These guys have been who they are for literally my entire life or longer. Well, I would just think it would be rude [to mess with them too much]. But it would also be extremely unprofessional for me to come in and turn them into a joke, or to kill him.
So if they give you the Legos to put together, you have some leeway in how you assemble the house, but not much. So I’m not here to break stuff. I was here to expand the status quo. What they wanted was, let’s really look at cosmic DC. I hope at the end of the first arc, people will still go back to issues 1, 2, 3, maybe four and go, “Oh my God, he was talking about this the whole time.”. And they really wanted cosmic DC to become more cohesive. So that’s part of my mandate. And I said, my little philosophy about superheroes and their uniqueness.
I think a lot of doors will open to interesting storytelling for other writers and myself [from these issues]. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’m going to lay out that I don’t expect to pick up thta writer X, Y, and Z can now come in and take. And that’s part of my mandate. So as long as the sales stay good, and I don’t know what the hell the sales are, but I presume they’re okay or they would have asked me to go by now. I would like to stay as long as I can, but I didn’t expect that either. I wanted to just sort of do my little story and go home. For a while, that was fun. But the more I write, the more I’m of the opinion that as long as DC wants me to stay, and as long as my day job doesn’t become too cumbersome, I will stay on the book to finish this stuff out and leave lots of cool stuff for the next writer.
