Well, I Didn't Love Lanterns.
It's not the blackest night or anything, but it isn't what I was hoping for.
Lanterns debuted tonight on HBO Max, and while I didn’t receive an advance screener, I did fire up my Roku box right at 9 p.m. ET to get a look at the thing. The trailers hadn’t wowed me, but I was hopeful, particularly in light of the show’s pedigree (it’s executive produced by Watchmen and Lost’s Damon Lindelof, True Detective’s Chris Mundy, and DC Comics standout Tom King).
The show is…good. HBO and Warner Bros. have been pitching it as “True Detective, with power rings,” and you can certainly see the vision there.
“We kept getting these notes saying they want True Detective with power rings,” Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow chief Marc Guggenheim told The Ankler recently. “Ultimately, that wasn’t the show that we were interested in giving them.”
If I had to guess, I imagine the version that Guggenheim, Greg Berlanti (The Flash, Doom Patrol) and Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) had in the hopper would be more my speed. But these things are a matter of taste, and I don’t want to become one of those insufferable Star Wars fans complaining about the prequels or the sequels or the TV shows or The Last Jedi or…whatever. There are plenty of people who think a show is bad because it doesn’t suit their exact tastes. I won’t say Lanterns is bad.
But I’m a big Green Lantern fan. And I didn’t love it.
The story plays out over the course of 30 years, starting in 1996 and ending in 2026. Both of those dates get a token few minutes of screen time, though, with the meat of the show taking place in 2016, as Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) trains his eventual successor, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre).
The two clash, and I think the inspiration is supposed to be Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams’s classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow: Hard-Traveling Heroes stories from the 1970s. Ultimately, though, the ideological battle between the two heroes isn’t there. Hal is an older, more free-wheeling cop, and John is a cop who was raised as an Army brat. It’s not liberal versus conservative, it’s conservative (weird uncle) versus conservative (former Marine).
The end result is that the series feels like like “Hard-Traveling Heroes” and more like Gerard Jones’s The Road Back, with artist Pat Broderick and a handful of inkers and colorists. But don’t go looking for a recent reprint of The Road Back — you won’t find it. DC nominally parted ways with Jones for good after he was arrested in 2018 for possession of child sexual abuse material. Nevertheless, even beyond the “vibes” and setting of Lanterns, Warner Bros. used The Detachable Kid, a fairly transparent knock-off of a Jones-created character called Arm Fall-Off Boy, in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. That felt a little off, and so does this. Must we be confronted with the choice of watching a major corporation ripping a writer off or watching them pay a predator? Why not just avoid his relatively minor contributions to the DC Universe entirely?
Also, just so it’s said out loud, Gerard Jones’s run on Green Lantern was never that good. Even before he was exposed as a pedophile, it was not beloved. To say that something is more evocative of The Road Back than it is Hard-Traveling Heroes is not a compliment in any way, shape, or form.
The decision to make the show True Detective was likely motivated by a significant push in the last couple of decades to play up the “space cop” aspect of Green Lantern in the comics. Geoff Johns, who had a long and celebrated run on the character starting in the mid-2000s, heavily emphasized the “galactic beat cop” aspect of the character, which leaned into the inherently conservative way that Hal had traditionally been depicted. John Stewart, originally depicted as a political firebrand who embraced Black Power and refused to cover his face with the traditional superhero mask, has slowly morphed into a guy whose whole personality is defined by his pre-superhero life as a soldier. It’s politically cowardly, but it also flattens the Green Lantern personality type. It will certainly be interesting to see how Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner fits into this story.
Zach D. Roberts of Visu.News will join me soon for our first podcast about Lanterns, and we’ll have much more to say. Keep your eyes on this space (cop).
