The DC universe has changed a lot in the last few months. First, the Absolute Power event saw heroes imprisoned and robbed of their abilities. Then the death of Darkseid led to a split in reality that created the Absolute Universe on one side and the regular DC continuity on the other. With the Emotional Spectrum in trouble, the United Planets in disarray, and Sector 2814 – where our own planet Earth resides – back open for business, there’s a lot going on for the space cops of the Green Lantern Corps to handle.
Writers Jeremy Adams and Morgan Hampton, alongside artist Fernando Pasarin, inker Oclair Albert, and colorist Arif Prianto, are charting the course of the Corps’ adventures in a new ongoing series launching this February. The comic brings together different characters from across the Green Lantern mythology, including the likes of John Stewart, Jo Mullein, Guy Gardner, and many more to tackle both everyday cop problems like trafficking, and the larger threats posed by the villainous likes of the Sorrow. Newsarama caught up with Adams and Hampton to find out more about the new series and how the increasingly troubled John Stewart is doing right now…
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Newsarama: Hi Jeremy and Morgan! To start us off, what can you say about where we find the members of the Green Lantern Corps at the start of this new series?
Jeremy Adams: So… what happened a while ago was that all the central power batteries for the other Emotional Spectrum colors have been destroyed, and there was one source Lantern on Oa. A big fight happened and that was destroyed, so there’s only one battery left, which is the Green Lantern power battery. So the Green Lantern Corps is reinstated and kind of self-governing with the same mission statement, which is, go into the universe and be cops. But you have a little quirk, which is that some people in the universe are going to start manifesting randomly, a part of the Emotional Spectrum, which can be overwhelmingly dangerous. There’s not as many [Lanterns] as there used to be, so there’s a recruitment drive happening and they’re trying to get the mechanisms of the Corps back in place.
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We see a bit of the recruitment drive you just mentioned in #1. Will that be a big focus of the comic going forward?
Adams: We have some newer characters that will get introduced, but we’ll mainly be focusing on some of the fan favorite characters. Our philosophy is that we wanted to do a couple of issues focused on one character in the A plot and another character in the B plot, and then we’ll move on to the next characters. We won’t stop talking about the others, we just want to give enough focus so that people are excited to see their favorites.
Morgan Hampton: Think of it like Star Trek, where the bridge crew is in every episode, but the focus kind of shifts depending on what the episode is.
Adams: Yes! Trek is exactly right, yeah, except there’s no Prime Directive.
John Stewart is the lead in this first issue and he’s in a strange space at the moment, with some turbulent emotional stuff going on. What can you tell us about that?
Hampton: He’s in an interesting spot, yeah. Just coming out of Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s run, there were some interesting things from a philosophical standpoint that John did that we kind of want to wrestle with a little bit. He’s very much presenting like everything is okay, but internally, he’s working through some stuff.
Adams: He’s done some really wild stuff! He has a construct of his dead sister, and that’s… I don’t know, that seems strange to me! [laughs] I think that we could hide it and have everybody be like, “Oh, it’s OK!” But I think that realistically, people are going to go, “Should you do that?” There’s certain things that are going to be really interesting to explore.
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It’s already out there that Hawkwoman is going to play a part in this book. How does she fit in?
Adams: That’s a good question! Well, first of all, the redesign by Fernando is great. If you’ve been reading the Green Lantern book, Mogo took a giant chunk out of Thanagar – like, it’s basically destroyed. There’s very few Thanagarians left, so I think that Hawkwoman has a lot of grief and anger – and Thanagarians aren’t really known for therapy, so there’s lots [to explore] there. We’re also playing off our love of [animated series] Justice League Unlimited. There’s this kind of undercurrent of feeling between John and her, even if that hasn’t been in the main continuity, and that’s going to be interesting see play out.
Hampton: It’s been a lot of fun to figure out and flesh out what exactly we’re going to do there, because we know that, even if it’s maybe not in continuity, fans are clamoring for there to be something. So how do we play with that, you know?
Adams: My first credit on television was Green Lantern: The Animated series. And so there’s things that we’re pulling into the main continuity now. Razer’s in the Green Lantern Corps now. Also in the world of the Thanagarians, Nth Metal has a really big part to play in the ongoing arc.
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Jeremy, you’ve a long history with Green Lantern, but how about you Morgan? Are you a longtime fan?
Hampton: Yeah. I was maybe high school age when the Geoff Johns run was coming out and my mind was blown. I’ve always been a big fan of Green Lantern. I also grew up on the Justice League cartoon where John Stewart was my Green Lantern, so I’ve always had that special relationship with him. So yeah, getting the call to do this was like, “Oh wow!” Now I get to really put my spin on some of these characters that are some of the coolest in the DC universe.
How did your collaboration come about?
Hampton: I just happened to be emailing Paul [Kaminski, DC editor] being like, “Hey, I’ve got a Green Lantern pitch. Would you like to read it?” And he hit me up maybe a month later, and was like, “We’re doing this book and we’d like you to write it with Jeremy.” Me and Jeremy had already been in contact about other stuff, so it just felt like a natural progression of that relationship.
Was that pitch anything like the Green Lantern Corps book that the two of you have made?
Hampton: No, not at all. It’s something that maybe down the road I want to do, because I really liked the idea.
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How different is it for you both as writers penning a team book like this compared to, say, what Morgan was doing on Cyborg?
Hampton: I just came off of a Star Trek book. It’s not as big a cast as this, but it was the most characters that I’ve ever written. This is a bigger scale than even that was, but I think I’m coming off of something that really helped me as a writer to kind of be able to facilitate that process in this book.
Adams: When I’ve started other books, I’ve always kind of focused on the main character, but then it gets a little out of hand and I add in a lot of characters! I want to make sure that every one of these characters gets a moment, you know, that we can concentrate on them and that we’re not giving anybody short shrift. I think what’s cool about this is that if you like Green Lantern, and maybe you dip in and out, this is going to be the place that you get to know everybody very quickly. I hope this will generate a lot of fandom around each character.
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You’re working with Fernando Pasarin on this book. What do you enjoy about Fernando’s work?
Hampton: Getting pages from Fernando every couple days, it’s like, “How did you do this?” There’s so much stuff going on even in the background. It really does feel like this is a world that exists. And you can tell how much passion that he has for the project, because it shows on the page.
Adams: The amount of detail that Fernando puts into any individual panel is bananas. It’s not like, we go, “Hey, populate the background with all this stuff.” We’re mindful of time and energy, but then he comes out, and he shows us something.
Hampton: He’s doing the type of stuff that if you wrote this in a script, your artist would be pissed off at you!
Green Lantern Corps #1 is published by DC on February 12.
Check out our previous interview with Jeremy Adams about Green Lantern and the future of Hal Jordan and Sinestro.