NO flaming jokes please.

Comic websites have outed the Green Lantern as DC's first gay superhero.

Ever since the comic publisher announced that one of its top-tier characters would be revealed as gay, fanboys and girls have been in a frenzy over the sexual orientations of their favourite heroes.

Would it be Superman? Or Batman? Or Robin? The stakes were high - these characters are multi-million-dollar franchises.

DC's rival, Marvel, fired the first pink shot, when it announced that one of its heroes, Northstar, would be marrying his boyfriend in the pages of Astonishing X-Men.

Yesterday Bleeding cool reported with confidence that the hero DC would be reintroducing to its newly revised universe as gay was the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because the Green Lantern Ryan Reynolds played on the big screen last year is a different Green Lantern to the Scott Green Lantern.

That Green Lantern was Hal Jordan and is the most popular version of the character. Scott, who made his first appearance in 1940, didn't even wear the all-over green body suit and was never part of an intergalactic peace keeping corps. He wore green pants and a green cloak and wielded a strange lamp that housed mystical green flame. He was also vulnerable to wood (no sniggering).

The Green Lantern's crime-fighting adventures were well received to begin with but by the end of the 1940s he was reduced to the role of a sidekick to Streak the Wonder Dog. After that, he drifted into obscurity and was eventually replaced by a new and improved Green Lantern that fans know today.

Scott isn't DC's first gay superhero - Batwoman came out as a lesbian years ago - but the Green Lantern is DC's first major gay character. However, by choosing the original Green Lantern, not the one that most comic fans love, DC is playing a cynical game: it can proudly wave its pink credentials without risking comic and toy sales or its movie franchise.

Last month Batman writer Grant Morrison told Playboy magazine that he thought the caped crusader was "very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay". If DC had guts, it would let Morrison write Batman as gay, and not just for a couple of issues.