Legendary comic creator Grant Morrison is taking the Green Lantern comic book and turning it into a police procedural series set in space. Morrison will be joined on the new series by artist Liam Sharp, whose work was most recently seen on Wonder Woman. The new series will focus on Earthman Hal Jordan and his job as a police officer patrolling alien worlds.
Established by the mystic Guardians of the Universe, The Green Lantern Corps is one of the oldest peace-keeping forces in the DC Comics’ universe and usually the most well-trusted. Recruited from those noble-hearted beings most capable of overcoming great fear, each Corpsman is given a ring and a power battery. These allows the wearer of the ring to tap into the collective willpower of the universe, manifesting green energy through sheer force of their own will and channeling it into various powers, such as flight, protective force-fields and the creation of energy constructs.
DC Comics’ Publisher Dan Didio spoke with Screen Rant’s Andrew Dyce about his efforts to recruit Morrison for the series. He claims to have pitched the idea to Morrison early on in a lunch meeting and that Morrison had ideas for the first dozen issues by the time they were done eating.
The main thrust of Morrison’s plan is to take the Green Lanterns back to their roots as cops in a science-fiction setting. The new series will also explore the divide between Hal Jordan’s American ideals and the peace he is expected to keep as a Green Lantern. Readers can expect to see Hal having to confront the differences between his own idea of justice and the laws he will be called upon to enforce while dealing with alien cultures with their own rules.
The degree to which the Green Lantern Corps has been portrayed as a police department or a military organization has varied from writer to writer over the years. The past decade of Green Lantern Corps stories have largely been devoted to epic battles between the Green Lanterns and other groups devoted to the powers of Fear and Rage rather than Willpower. These clashes have been the stuff of classic Space Opera rather than Law & Order with aliens, and they’ve also been generally well-received. Nevertheless, things have moved far afield from the original concept for the Green Lantern Corps, which was heavily inspired by the Lensman series by Elmer E. Smith, PhD.
That said, if there is any writer who can put a unique spin on the Green Lantern mythology by taking it back to basics, it is Grant Morrison. He built his reputation as a writer on unique ideas, such as his version of Doom Patrol which introduced such characters as Crazy Jane and Danny The Street. He also wrote a legendary run on Justice League of America based around the simple concept of treating the book like Super Friends, with all the big name superheroes dealing with end-of-the-world crises every month.
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The Green Lantern #1 is expected to be released sometime in fall 2018.
