There was something wonderfully excessive about American cars in the 1970s. Big engines, long hoods, aggressive grilles, wild paint jobs, enormous tires, and interiors that could feel more like living rooms than places to sit behind the wheel. Street machines were built to be seen, heard, and enjoyed, often with modifications that made each car feel like a reflection of its owner. The photographs from the era capture a particular kind of car culture that is difficult to recreate today, when these machines were still relatively new and their owners were turning parking lots, streets, and driveways into personal showcases. These rides are snapshots of a very different automotive world.
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This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.
The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only making a few constructs with his ring.
Those fans had a suspicion of whom to blame, a guy who had many times before taken DC Comics characters and reimagined them in wildly different ways in service of an unusual narrative. Those suspicions were confirmed this morning, when showrunner Chris Mundy told The Hollywood Reporter, that Tom King came up with the initial hook. “Tom basically had the 30,000-foot view: ‘What if you did Green Lanterns True Detective-ish?,’” he revealed. While some may hate the thought of turning intergalactic space cops into gritty sleuths, King’s unconventional, canon-defying approach may be exactly what the DCU needs to survive.
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As we’ve talked about a lot here at Den of Geek recently, Green Lantern is a weird franchise. It’s a series about people across the galaxy chosen to wield powerful rings that allow them to create whatever they can imagine. It’s a strange concept, and one that asks the reader to suspend disbelief. But for those who buy in, Green Lantern is one of the most compelling hero concepts in the DC Universe, one that lends itself to straightforward superhero action, or mind-bending, high-strangeness storytelling, as Al Ewing is demonstrating in the current Absolute Green Lantern series.
Those who buy in are extremely passionate about the concept in the characters. So when Hal Jordan shows up in a panel of the 2018 miniseries Heroes in Crisis and admits, “I don’t even know what the hell ‘will’ is,” fans were furious.
Furious, but unsurprised. Because Heroes in Crisis came from Tom King, a writer who has made his name with audacious stories that often treat canon and prior characterization as optional. His Batman run killed off Alfred, temporarily turned Nightwing into an amnesiac called Ric Grayson, and famously built to a marriage between Catwoman and Batman that never happened. In Strange Adventures, King turned Silver Age adventurer Adam Strange into a lying war criminal, forever hen-pecked by his Lady MacBeth-like wife. Heroes in Crisis may be the worst offender of all, in which the Flash Wally West gets so distraught about losing his family through the latest multiversal reboot that he kills a bunch of his friends, including fellow Teen Titan Arsenal (they got better).
Yet, for all that King angers some fans, he constantly gains the respect of others, largely because he disregards canon in search of big storytelling hooks. King first got widespread attention for his 2015 series Vision at Marvel, in which he reimagined the titular Avenger as a would-be suburbanite trying to live the American Dream. That series downplayed Vision’s heroism and previous connections, including his marriage to Wanda Maximoff, and instead saw him create his own nuclear family of androids. He followed it up with Mister Miracle in 2017, in which the super-escape artist created by Jack Kirby finds himself trapped in depression. The rest of the New Gods made appearances in the story, and although the title character and his wife Big Barda were multifaceted in their portrayal, others—such as the warrior Orion—were one-note and exaggerated.
For the most part, it worked with Vision and Mister Miracle. Not only were they very effective stories, but they took place out of continuity, in their own little world. But when King made the Flash into a madman in Heroes in Crisis or turns Wonder Girl into a glorified babysitter in his current Wonder Woman series, then people get mad. He’s messing with the “real” world.
Which is why King’s participation with Lanterns has been so distressing for some. Lanterns is fully part of the DCU. Not only does it introduce a character John Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, but it may be the way that James Gunn sets up the DCU beyond Earth and perhaps even the origin of evil. It is setting the canon of this new universe, and that’s the last place that some people want Tom King to be in.
And yet, we need look no further than the last major Green Lantern project to see how wrong things can go when adherence to the comics is paramount. Green Lantern (2011) had a script co-written by Geoff Johns, one of the architects of DC Comics at the time, and it included important Lantern characters like Hector Hammond, Parallax, and Sinestro. And yet, it absolutely sucked because it didn’t know how to tell a good story.
Tom King knows how to tell a good story. Or, if he doesn’t, he knows how to borrow from a good story. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow earned accolades by putting the Maid of Might into the Rooster Cogburn role of True Grit. Rorschach had little to say about the grittiest member of the Watchmen, but instead told a compelling meta conspiracy story, complete with shocking cameos by real-world creators like Frank Miller. The very next year, Human Target took the goofy Justice League International and puts them into a hard-boiled detective story, transforming the demure Ice into a proper femme fatale.
To put it another way, Tom King excels at finding recognizable narratives and placing DC Comics characters within them. That’s sometimes tough for those who love the characters (Mike Grell never made Travis Morgan into the dirtbag we saw in Danger Street), but it allows other people to get to know those same characters.
And that’s exactly what the DCU needs right now. Lanterns is grabbing fans because they understand how a True Detective story works, and they’re growing more interested in the Green Lantern lore that exists on the periphery. Supergirl failed, in part, because it abandoned the True Grit structure for a basic superhero story, the type that Gunn had done before and had done better.
As the DCU grows, it needs to take more pages out of Tom King’s book and embrace the experimentation his approach affords. Will we lose some nuances in the process? Absolutely. This writer isn’t ready to reform H.E.A.T., but I’m an old Hal Jordan fan who really wanted to see him do more than just die. But I still have all my old Green Lantern comics and I can read them anytime. By opening the form and worrying less about canon, more people can access the characters and get involved in the stories. And maybe they’ll come to love dearly departed Hal Jordan as much as I do.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.
The post Lanterns Is a Gamble That DC Needs to Make Again in the Future appeared first on Den of Geek.
