Letters to Green Lantern Corps: Brightest Day

I really do love receiving feedback on stuff. Thanks for this, Sue! Let's talk shop!


I really wanted to get away from the cataclysmic cycle of "end" stories. Why can't everybody have a happy ending? When it first started, a lot of the discussions about Ten Years Later involved killing characters, ruining them, ending them, and I hate hate hated that. Why can't these characters just... be?


Hal's actually not been a Green Lantern for a while in the present. With Jess being around, he did the unthinkable... and retired. Now Chloe's flitting about, running the Global Peace Agency, Hal's a stay at home dad and they've gone into "hiding", to keep the family safe-- not from Hal's enemies, but from Chloe's! 2814's current GLs are Guy and John. Events leading up to our next issue have led to Hank and Kyle being MIA, and I've just spoken to DrDread about the three-parter that rectifies the situation for one of them! Exciting times...


I was really interested in taking Guy in a different direction. I loved Charles Soule's "Futures End" issue of "Red Lanterns", with him in the blue, and I know that I wanted to do something similar in the DC2.

We've only seen a couple different colours of rings over here, and we role them out carefully... yellow were rings infested by the Legion virus from the Anti-Matter universe, purple belonged to the love-infused Star Sapphires (or Love Lanterns, as Don likes to call them) and the Red Lanterns were introduced in the run up to the #50 anniversary. So to introduce something blue I went in a different direction... the Star Soul... something that, according to my plotting, we'll be seeing in the present day this time next year, in #75!

With regards to marriage, Hank Henshaw also remarried at some point during the ten year jump, to a Wildstorm character who has a history in space travel. I didn't go all out and reveal her identity here, but I also wanted to give him a happy ending, especially considering the wringer I put him through over the years. 


Don gave me some flack when I told him I was going to do all tihs to John, but I wanted something that would bring the team together, and John seemed like a character that never really had a horror story like this happen to him. But he'd also be the first to dive in and do something for the greater good, it's what he's all about. The fact that the Corps couldn't save him from it would be like a stain on their record, so they'd always do anything to figure out a way to bring him back into the fold... and the quest for the last Red Lantern power battery is a story that could be told over a long period of time.

An interesting thing about the Ten Year break is that I really want to tell stories during that time. I've played with that format in Superwoman, but I considered an ongoing Bat-title during the planning stages of that Ten Years Later story, so I could both tell stories across the timeline, but also continue the adventure I told in that book. I had a great duelling-Batmen story involving Bruce's successor, but we'll see if I can wrap up The Final Knight, first. Oooph, and then I have about 2/3rds of The Last Laugh done too... yikes... but I'm getting off topic!


Jess was going to be one of the main characters in the All-Star Academy book Don, Jamie and I had planned, but as with a lot of the Ten Years Later stuff, that issue has stalled. I'm prioritising Superwoman, because Steve delivered the cover to the next issue and it's so beautiful I could die, but we'll see if the other books come out over the year. I know David and Scott said they'd release their stuff as and when, which would be cool to see! There's a lot of story involved with Jess. Not only does she occasionally appear as a young child in the present day, there's a lot of teasing done in this... a history that concerns her parents, and a powerset that is both exciting and mysterious. I'd love to write more of this Jess!

Thanks again, Susan! I'd love to hear what you think of the ongoing adventures of the Green Lantern Corps, but I understand how busy life can get--!