Share. Morrison is taking a similar approach to how he wrote Batman. Morrison is taking a similar approach to how he wrote Batman.

The Green Lantern Corps has the reputation of being one of the most daunting branches of the DC Universe continuity-wise, a status that certainly isn't helped by the neigh-impenetrable web spun around one of the GLC's most prominent members: Hal Jordan. Worse yet, on top of being pretty dense, Hal is also understood as being pretty… well, boring. However, writer Grant Morrison hopes to help Hal shed some of his stigma with his upcoming ongoing series, The Green Lantern, alongside artist Liam Sharp. But Morrison doesn't want to win Hal new fans by scraping his intimidating history -- he wants to prove that Hal has been worth your time all along.

Hal Jordan's slip in overall GLC popularity is considerably less difficult to understand than his actual in-fiction history. He was the first "modern" Green Lantern, an invention of a time in comics known as the Silver Age where the names and loose concepts of original ‘40s-era heroes were repurposed and reapplied to fresh faces. Hal's adventures epitomized the pulp sci-fi ethos of ‘50s and ‘60s comics by weaving a splashy, ray-gun slinging, alien punching fantasy mythos. However, after 30-some years of space adventures, DC attempted to execute the same move again and replaced whole swaths of its Silver Age heroes with fresher faces. Batman's back was broken, Superman was killed by a monster named Doomsday, Barry Allen sacrificed himself during a cosmic crisis -- you get the idea. Hal was not spared from the cull. This made room for new Green Lanterns like Kyle Rayner, John Stewart and Guy Gardner to step into the spotlight. Hal was eventually resurrected in true comic book fashion in the mid-2000s, but he never managed to root himself a prominent place in the younger generation of Green Lantern fans.

A Look Inside The Green Lantern #1 8 IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 08 Check out this preview of select pages from The Green Lantern #1 from Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp. 01 OF 08 Check out this preview of select pages from The Green Lantern #1 from Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp. A Look Inside The Green Lantern #1 Download Image Captions ESC

Morrison, however, sees Hal's history, and all the associations it comes with, as a feature, rather than a bug. In The Green Lantern, Morrison plans on taking Hal's myriad parts and applying them to the GLC's work on a galactic scale. He cites inspiration from police procedural shows and a desire to explore what an intergalactic peace keeping force would actually have to do to maintain harmony between planets that may have completely different concepts of "justice." Spoiler alert: it's not as easy as applying humanity's idea of right and wrong to every situation. This is where Hal comes in.

"Hal Jordan's been around since the 1950s and he's one of the few characters whose history has gone basically unchanged. But as you can imagine, he's gone through a lot of different writers and his personality has changed quite radically during that time," Morrison explained while speaking with IGN and a small group of reporters at DC's office in Burbank, California. "He's gone through so many iterations and [there's a sense of disconnection] between all of them. But like Batman, he becomes interesting when you combine them all."

Morrison went on to draw comparisons between his vision for Hal and archetypes of the ‘60s and ‘70s -- with a twist.

"We imagine Hal came stumbling in from the sort of The Last Picture Show or East Rider era of cinema. We see him as all New Mexico and Route 66 horizons, but in actual fact, his friends are like these floating jellyfish aliens. He comes back [from space] and he probably can't even tell the difference between humans anymore. He can tell the difference between two crystal creatures, but humans all look the same to him. He's embraced this kind of diversity beyond anything we have on Earth. [People] think he seems closed off and old fashioned but he's actually wide open."

By subverting these expectations, Morrison hopes to sell Hal to a brand new generation of fans, maybe not because he plans to make Hal "relatable," but because he's so unlike anything else the DCU has to offer.

"Kyle Rayner had my dream life," Morrison admits, "He made sense to me. [...] But I'm more interested now in exploring these viewpoints that aren't mine and getting a prismatic view of the world. It's been hard to get inside Hal's head, but that's become the exciting part of this book -- to be in there and to realize 'oh my god, this guy's got so many dimensions.'"

Exit Theatre Mode

The Green Lantern #1 is set to hit shelves on November 7.