Watters and Hotz Take Hal Jordan to War in Green Lantern: Doomed Cosmos

DC has announced Green Lantern: Doomed Cosmos, a six-issue Elseworlds miniseries where the Green Lantern Corps is the universe's last line of defense against humanity. Dan Watters writes and Kyle Hotz draws, with Dan Brown on colors and Steve Wands on letters. It hits stores and digital on Wednesday, January 20, 2027.

The setup is bleak. For centuries, the Empire of Humanity has rolled across the cosmos, taking planet after planet until everyone kneels. The heavily militarized Corps is the only force still standing against it, and no human has ever fought on their side. Until Hal Jordan.

Hal started as a soldier for the Empire. His battle-brother Oliver Queen betrayed him and left him for dead on an alien world, and the Corps found him and deprogrammed him. Now he's their only human warrior and their most valuable strategic weapon against his own species.

DC says his path cuts through the burning ruins of a DC Universe unlike anything readers have seen, ending with Hal taking the fight to the shores of Hell itself. It's a world with no joy and no peace, just a crusade and the few heroes still willing to oppose it. Over six issues, Watters and Hotz will reimagine familiar heroes, villains, worlds, and alliances as the war gets harder to predict.

I'll say it: Ollie as the guy who sold Hal out is the detail I'm most curious about.

Hotz says his approach to the Corps came from a very specific place:

"Visually, I am trying to walk the line between over-the-top space opera and the emotional beats of the story. Apart from being a Green Lantern fan from when I was just a little kid, my prep for this was really spending time studying some of the best war films. I want to get the feeling across that the Lanterns are beat up, tired, and certainly the underdogs. Their armor is cracked and broken, and their weapons are held together with tape and wire. These are soldiers nearing the end of their fight."

Watters is coming in hot. He's the ongoing writer on Nightwing and has written Batman: Dark Patterns with Hayden Sherman and Arkham City: The Order of the World with DaNi. Doomed Cosmos is Hotz's first longer project at DC. He drew 2024's Lobo Cancellation Special with Kyle Starks, plus a run of short stories and fill-ins over the years.

The preview pages back up Hotz's pitch. The Lanterns wear bulky, battered black armor with green trim and visored helmets, closer to trench infantry than space cops. Dan Brown's colors push the skies purple and blue against a lot of orange fire. One panel even shows a Lantern with a skull grinning through the visor.

Put that armor next to an Empire of Humanity on a centuries-long crusade and you get Green Lantern meets 40k-lite.

The opposition gets the same treatment. One page shows a wave of cloaked soldiers in red and gold armor, flames spitting from their gauntlets, that looks a lot like Order of St. Dumas gear from Azrael's corner of the Bat-books. Another has winged, mace-wielding Thanagarian soldiers in Hawkman-style armor.

The centerpiece is a two-page spread of the red-and-gold knights on the left and the Corps firing back from the right.

Issue #1 carries a main cover by Hotz. The variants run from Björn Barends' packed, rendered mob of Lanterns and cloaked knights to Steve Beach's painted, rust-streaked portrait of a hulking Lantern, and Ashley Wood's loose, smeared take on a Lantern charging out of the haze. The 32-page issue is $4.99, with card stock variants at $5.99 and a Barends foil variant at $7.99.

Green Lantern Watch will have more as the series gets closer.