IGN Comics: This question is for Charles. In the first part of Lights Out in Green Lantern #24, the characters from Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, and Green Lantern: New Guardians are all present, but your Red Lanterns book is the odd man out. What will the nature of their involvement be in Lights Out? Guy Gardner can’t help out the way he could if he were still a Green Lantern.
Charles Soule: That’s true. I would say the Red Lanterns aren’t “joiners.” They don’t generally help out unless there’s a real reason to do that. The other side of it is that there are things about the Red Lanterns that make them unique -- their abilities, their rings. The way they work is a little bit different than the other Corps. Some of that is going to be playing into Lights Out in a way that I think is very interesting and will make a lot of sense, but will also be surprising and cool.
IGN: Guy is cut off and doesn’t know what’s happening and doesn’t know about Relic. What’s it going to be like for him to react to what’s happening in Lights Out by himself?
Soule: He is off by himself. The fact that he’s isolated in many ways -- emotionally, physically, geographically -- from the rest of the people he’s been working with for so many years plays a big role in Lights Out. It’s kinda cool, I think.
IGN: Next question is for Justin. Not too long ago when Tony Bedard was writing Green Lantern: New Guardians, the Blue Lanterns were invaded and they lost their battery and their planet. Now in your prelude to Lights Out in New Guardians, the Blue Lanterns are invaded and they lose their battery and their planet. What gives? Why are the Blues such a big target?
Justin Jordan: In this particular case, it’s because the Blue Lanterns are arguably the most powerful of the Lanterns. As it said in issue #23 of New Guardians, if you’re doing what Relic is doing, which is stopping people from using the light, going after the people that, A.) there are only a handful of, B.) are kind of vulnerable on their own, and C.) can supercharge other Lanterns’ abilities, that would have been my first thought, too. It’s definitely one of those things that, yeah, it kinda sucks that the Blue Lanterns keep getting run out of each of their home planets. On the other hand, they need something to be hopeful against. I think it kind of worked out. In an ideal world, it would have been nice to have them not lose their planet twice in a year, but that’s just bad luck for the Blue Lanterns, man.
IGN: Yeah, and Relic took out “hope” first, so that also has symbolic and emotional resonance.
Jordan: Indeed.
IGN: That leaves Saint Walker as the lone survivor of the Blue Lanterns, right?
Jordan: Yes.
IGN: Will he be a main part of the cast again?
Jordan: In New Guardians? No.
IGN: Oh. Will he be elsewhere?
Jordan: There are plans for Saint Walker, but I can’t disclose them right now. You will see more of what happens to him after what happened to him in New Guardians #23.
IGN: Alright, fair enough. As the other Lantern Corps lose their power, what effect will that have on Kyle's White Lantern power?
Jordan: His white power is an amalgam of all the spectrums, so as the other Lanterns go out, he loses those parts of his spectrum. Actually, you see that happening in issue #23 when he fails to heal Walker because he needs to tap into the blue spectrum and it is gone. It isn’t accessible to him. Kyle is finding that his powers are becoming diminished as the other Lanterns fall.
IGN: That makes total sense. Now let’s switch to Van. First off, I just want to know who created Jruk? He’s been a standout character, but I was unsure who to credit him to since Green Lantern Corps is co-written by you and Rob.
Van Jensen: I think Jruk was all my idea. Rob and I worked on the plot together and talked through things, but all of the new recruits were all pretty much from me. A lot of credit has to go to [Green Lantern Corps artist] Bernard Chang, who gave him an awesome design. Without Bernard making him look like such a badass, I don’t think fans would have responded to him the way that they have.
Jensen: Start the letter writing campaign!
IGN: [laughs] Done! With John Stewart being the lead character of Green Lantern Corps, how is he going to step up during Lights Out?
Jensen: In Green Lantern Corps #24, we’re going to see it pick up with the Green Lanterns in as dire a situation they’ve been in for a while [after the events of Green Lantern #24]. So John, having experience as a marine, he really brings that training and his knowledge of military tactics to bear. They’re facing a foe who is perfectly prepared to stop any light-based attack that they throw at him. John is bringing his knowledge and his experience and also his willingness to fight into that issue. I think it’s one of my favorite issues as far as John’s development and him having a lot to bring to the table.
IGN: We’ve known John to have two main attributes: being an architect, and, as you said, being a marine. Without any power in his ring, those are what he is. Will those aspects be fleshed out during Lights Out?
Jensen: In issue #24, we’ll see both of those aspects of his character. Those will play a big part of his character going forward. That’s who he is and that’s the special knowledge that he brings to the Corps and what makes him unique. So yes, specifically in #24 will be seeing John utilizing all of his experience in launching this kind of counter-attack against Relic. And then for the foreseeable future, as long as John is the star of Green Lantern Corps, we’ll be seeing more and more of that.
IGN: Excellent. In #24, we learn that the Central Power Battery is tied to the very structure of Oa, so the planet has become unstable now that the battery has been destroyed. That sounds like a job for an architect.
Jensen: That's kind of the big question. Will they be able to save Oa?
IGN: Moving on to Rob, I wanted to clear something up about Relic. He debuted in New Guardians written by Justin Jordan, but didn’t you create him?
Robert Venditti: Relic was a character who was a large part of my pitch that I guess you could say helped me get the job writing Green Lantern. He was a character whose motivations I put together and put into my pitch. [Green Lantern artist] Billy Tan was the one who came up with the design and worked on it a really long time. There were a lot of iterations of Relic before we finally settled on what it was.
Actually, the Green Lantern #23.1 Villains Month issue is the first or second Green Lantern issue that I completed. I think I was working on them both at the same time and I turned them in a week apart from each other. I wrote #21 and then I wrote #23.1 knowing that Lights Out was going to be coming down in October. I wanted everyone to have a really good idea who the character was.
Justin did such a great job introducing him in in New Guardians. I think it’s one of those things where, as a group, we always want to try to keep the readers on their toes and give them the unexpected. So while I was out there doing interviews about Relic and Lights Out, suddenly the character shows up in New Guardians. Nobody expected that at all. It was a really great cliffhanger for New Guardians #21. I think that as a group of writers, all of us working together is a big part of what we’re trying to do. Do whatever makes the story best and surprise people wherever we can.
IGN: Yeah, totally. Since you all took over the books as the new creative teams, the Green Lantern titles have been linked in a way that they haven’t been in a while. And now Lights Out goes through all four of the books, right?
Venditti: Yeah, it goes through all the #24s of Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, New Guardians, Red Lanterns, and then it ends in Green Lantern Annual #2, which is at the end of October. So five issues total.
IGN: I’ve enjoyed how you can read all of the books separately, yet if you read them all then you can see how they link in subtle and some not-so-subtle ways. After Lights Out, will they still maintain that interconnectivity?
Venditti: I think that they’re always going to have that linkage. I think that’s part of being in the Green Lantern group. That’s what the Green Lantern group is. But all the books, as you said, we’ve worked really hard to make them stand on their own. If you read only New Guardians, then you know completely who Relic is. If you’ve only read Green Lantern, then you’ll still know who Relic is. But if you read them both together, then you get a deeper understanding and you see these threads that enrich the reading experience across all the books. That’s definitely something that we’re going for.
Coming out of Lights Out, we tried really hard to make this an event that wasn’t going to affect just one of the leads of the four books, or two of them, but each of them in very significant, very lasting ways. There’s going to be a big legacy coming out of Lights Out for all of these four books that are involved. They are going to go in their own directions but still have a common thread that links them all together.
Some great things are going to be happening in New Guardians. Justin is -- without hopefully offending anybody else -- the most scientifically minded of us in the group and he’s got some really great high concepts, some hard science type stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing that in New Guardians.
Charles has some really exciting storylines coming up in Red Lanterns that’s really going to redefine what that book is and what it means, not just in terms for the Green Lantern group but for the entire DCU as a whole.
There’s going to be some conflicts coming up between John and Hal that are really going to highlight their two leadership styles. That doesn’t even speak to the Zero Year issue Van has coming up that I read the script for yesterday which he just knocked out of the park on. It’s the issue #0 that John never got to get because when they did the #0 issues last September, the Green Lantern Corps one was focused primarily on Guy Gardner. This is going to be John’s opportunity to get that same sort of origin story. He did a great job with it.
So there’s a lot of things coming out of Lights Out that I hope fans and readers are going to enjoy. Like I said, the books stand on their own but they will all be linked together, as well.
Venditti: It was an effort setting up all four of the books. I remember when I met you at A Comic Shop the day that Green Lantern #21 released, you asked me a question about Larfleeze and his involvement in the book and I couldn’t tell you at the time that it wasn’t so much as who Larfleeze was than what he represents. So now I’ll tell you in retrospect, what I really tried to do with the first few issues of Green Lantern leading into Lights Out was really make them all about light. The Lanterns are fighting with light in a really big, over-the-top way. Larfleeze is the guy who consumes the most light in terms of his Corps itself is nothing but constructs, and Lanterns have to create so many constructs that then combat these constructs.
So those first three issues are constructs upon constructs upon constructs because I really wanted people to have that in their mind so that when they came to Green Lantern #23.1 and they read it and they found out that all this light is coming from this reservoir that fuels all of creation, and what happens when that reservoir runs out? They realize just how badly this light has been used to up this point. I don’t think if the Green Lanterns had been fighting somebody that fought with ships or laser guns or whatever that it would have that same sort of effect.
That was one of the things that I was trying to do in the early issues of Green Lantern, while at the same time, also establish Hal as a leader. What his positives are, what his negatives are as new leader of the Corps. And also these new recruits that are coming in. As Van was saying before with Jruk and the other ones that he’s created that he’s done such a great job with, establishing the idea that the Corps has been through a lot and they’re really trying to rebuild and in the midst of this villain that they have to go up against who has spent his whole life learning how to combat the light. Now they have to go up against this guy amidst all this rebuilding and learn this realization about where their power comes from that is really going to potentially change their mindsets. That’s kinda what I was trying to do.
IGN: I do remember that! Very cool, that you planned it out like that. I have a question about the Green Lantern Villains Month issues. We got issues about Mongul, Black Hand, Relic, and Sinestro. Disregarding Relic, are any of those villains going to play into Lights Out or are we going to see them anytime soon after Lights Out? Charles, I know you wrote the Black Hand issue.
Soule: I did. The point of it, first, is that Black Hand is one of Green Lantern’s signature villains and so the idea was to certainly include him in the event because he’s a big deal in the universe. As far as Lights Out goes, that is Relic’s show, so we’re not going to see him there. But where we do see Black Hand, as I understand it, is in Forever Evil, either in a large or a small way. The idea of the Villains issue was to make it so he could pop up where he needs to in the DCU after being destroyed in the Dead Zone. So now he’s back. That issue was a lot of fun because you have Black Hand and you have zombies, so it was my chance to write an issue of The Walking Dead almost without getting in trouble with Robert Kirkman. It was a lot of fun. I hope people enjoyed it.
IGN: Cool. I’m going to just throw this question out for whoever wants to take it: Where is Green Lantern Simon Baz?
Venditti: There are plans for Simon Baz. He’ll be showing up relatively soon. But obviously he was a part of Trinity War and all those types of things, so he is mixed up in another crisis of his own. But in long term thinking about the Green Lantern group in general, there has been talk of Simon Baz and we do have ideas for him.
Venditti: I think if you read all of the books, if you read Larfleeze, Keith [Giffen] is so great at writing the comedic style of the story he’s doing, I have the utmost appreciation for because that’s one thing I don’t think I could write at all, so I really prefer to read those kinds of stories because there’s so much to admire about them that I don’t see in my own writing. He’s very much doing his own thing with his Larfleeze story and it’s kind of in its own vein for right now, so it just wasn’t a book, at this juncture, that felt like it fit in with Lights Out as well. Not in the sense that we couldn’t use it, but in the sense that it would have hurt what he was trying to do over there.
And also in the sense that it is a brand new book, whereas New Guardians and Red Lanterns have been around for 24 issues now, Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps obviously much longer. Larfleeze is just starting up, so lets let his book get its own legs under itself first and establish some identity before you start pulling it away and having it do other things.
IGN: Understood. I had been wondering about that. That was my last question, so to close things out, I’d like for everyone to go around and just throw out whatever you’d like readers to know about your book going into Lights Out.
Jensen: I think I can say for Green Lantern Corps, just that issue #24 is such a momentous issue that I feel honored to have gotten the chance to work on it. It’s a very huge, epic story in general. I think it’s a really ambitious story, Lights Out, overall. It’s a great team of people who are working on it. I’ve said this a lot, but as I was writing that issue, I kept having to stop myself and shake my head in disbelief seeing that I had written what I had just written because of the nature of the story and how much it changes. It’s just a really cool thing to be a part of this paradigm shift in a giant franchise like Green Lantern.
IGN: Sounds awesome, man. How about Justin goes next?
Jordan: This will change things kind of hugely for Kyle. In the aftermath of Lights Out, we’ll see Kyle examining not just what he can do as a White Lantern, which he has a pretty big grasp on, but what he should be doing with that power. I think that’s one of the defining questions. He’s got all this power but it’s not an infinite supply, so what’s the best way to use it? What’s the best way to make a real difference in the universe when you’re gifted with these abilities? What should you be doing with them?
IGN: Kyle formerly possessed the Ion power, another massive source of power, which was one of his most popular stories. He always seems to wind up playing host to these huge universal powers. And yeah, what do you do with power like that?
Jordan: Indeed. I mentioned this before, but just the ability to do things physically isn’t enough. You can go to an alien planet controlled by an alien dictator and you can use the White Lantern to take out the dictator, but that doesn’t fix all the other stuff that’s wrong. You’ve got this thing where no matter how much power you have -- even when Kyle was Ion and close to omnipotent -- you’ve got an issue of, yeah I can fix all this stuff but then I’m pretty much running everyone’s life for them. It’s the same thing where you want to do good in the universe, but how do you do it? How do you make this tool work the way you want it to work, more than just hitting someone with a boxing glove construct?
IGN: [laughs] True, true. And Charles?
Dex-Starr
Dex-Starr
Soule: The great thing about Lights Out as far as the current continuity of the Green Lanterns goes, in respect to Red Lanterns, the book that I’m working on, it allows us to really cut the strings between Guy and the Green Lantern Corps. When this is done, Guy’s allegiance is going to be pretty clear and it changes things for him and I think it frees him and frees the storylines a little bit so we can see what it’s like with Guy Gardner as a Red Lantern, what that is going to mean for him, for the Reds. An event like Lights Out is great because it lets those significant changes happen. Also, issue #24 has one of the best Dex-Starr lines I think I have yet written, so I guess watch out, I love Dex-Starr. He’s a cat!
Venditti: The often forgotten sixth Earth Lantern. No one ever seems to remember.
IGN: I had been wondering about that! The cat was Earth’s Red Lantern and then they got a human, Rankorr, on top of that. Are the Reds not organized enough to have a rule about how many Lanterns can patrol each sector like the Greens do?
Soule: The Reds could care less. If you’re mad enough, you can get in. And Dex-Starr was very, very angry, so he made the cut.
IGN: [laughs] Okay, and Rob to close us out.
Venditti: I hope the main thing that people take out of Lights Out after they read this storyline across all the books is if you’re a fan of Green Lantern, you need to be reading all of the Green Lantern titles. There’s a lot of really good stuff.
Jordan: You know, in preparation for this I was rereading Green Lantern #24 again, which, as Joshua knows, is where everyone else gets to meet Relic for the first time. I was thinking, if you’ve only been reading Green Lantern, that’s a way different issue than if you had only been reading New Guardians. It works, but what you’re going to take from that first issue of Lights Out is going to be affected by what books you’ve actually been reading.
Venditti: Yeah, and I think with all the new creative teams -- Justin, Charles, and Van -- they’re all doing such great work on all the titles, and that’s beyond them just being tied together, but just being good stories. The artists -- Brad Walker is doing such a phenomenal job on [New Guardians]. And Bernard Chang, who I worked with on Demon Knights, it’s great to have him as part of the group. And [Red Lanterns #24 artist] Alessandro Vitti -- all these guys, all the creative teams are putting all of their heart and soul into the books.
Again, if you’re a fan of Green Lantern, whether one specific Green Lantern character or you’re a fan of Green Lantern as a hero or the concept or whatever, I think there’s something for you to find in all the titles.
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