The Green Lantern Is the Strangest Hal Jordan Book in Years

Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp's The Green Lantern ran 24 issues across two 12-issue seasons, from 2018 into 2020. It is the first Green Lantern book in a long time that fully commits to how strange this concept is. A man gets a ring that makes anything he imagines real, and the Corps he joins is run by blue immortals who police the universe. Most modern takes sand that down. Morrison and Sharp lean in.

Spoiler note: this piece discusses plot points through the Season One finale, issue #12.

A space cop procedural in a Silver Age universe

Morrison has described the book as a space police procedural, and it is one. In issue #1 the Guardians make Hal chief investigator on a case involving an escaped antimatter being and a traitor inside the Corps. Later Hal goes deep undercover, and the book follows him through alien cultures that feel properly alien instead of Americanized with extra eyes. In issue #3, Earth gets put up for auction on the alien black market, and Hal ends up in a philosophical argument about law and authority with a being that looks a lot like classical depictions of God.

The procedural part is real. Morrison said that underneath it all is "a very simple police procedural." What makes the book special is that the cops are working in a universe that runs on Silver Age cosmic logic, so a routine investigation can turn into a wizard living inside your ring.

Silver Age lore as a feature, not a problem

The book never apologizes for the old stuff and never tries to grimdark it. Issue #1 name-drops X-Ray, Radio, Gamma and Microwave Lanterns without stopping to explain them, and Morrison later invents new ones, like Zappl, the Radio Lantern from the first Annual. Issue #7 puts Hal inside his own ring with Myrwhydden, one of his oldest foes. Issue #8 brings back Xeen Arrow, a giant from Dimension Zero who dates to a 1958 Adventure Comics story. By Season One's late issues, a giant named Zundernell, who first appeared in The Flash in 1961, is menacing a crowd of trapped Lanterns.

Xeen Arrow and Glorigold are the kind of wild invention Liam Sharp has pointed to when talking about the book. Morrison dug up deep-cut DC history instead of avoiding it. The result reads like someone who loves the weirdest corners of the character's past and trusts the reader to keep up, or at least to enjoy being a little lost.

The team-ups are homages with teeth

Issue #8, "Space Junkies," brings in Green Arrow. It is a very deliberate nod to the O'Neil and Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow era. The opening pages riff on the first pages of Green Lantern #76, Ollie's apartment is decorated like it was in the early 70s, and Sharp channels Neal Adams without imitating him line for line.

So it isn't a subtle homage, and I'd be overselling it to say it avoids copying that era. What it does is run the template through the book's own weirdness. Instead of a street-level drug story, Hal and Ollie take on a cosmic drug cartel that uses Earth as its distribution base, complete with a giant Xeen Arrow and a dealer named Glorigold.

Season Two does the same trick with the Flash in issue #4. Hal and Barry get pulled into an artificial world by a juvenile giant who treats them like toys, with callbacks to John Broome-era Flash lore and Hal's old flame Olivia Reynolds. Same approach: take a classic pairing, then let the book's strangeness take over.

One-and-done issues, then a very big finale

Most issues work as self-contained stories. The approach echoes All-Star Superman, where each issue is its own odd little tale rather than one slice of a six-part arc. Under that, a larger story builds.

It pays off at the end of Season One. Hal teams up with Green Lanterns of the multiverse, including a Bat-Lantern from Earth-32, to confront Antimatter Hal Jordan, and a Miracle Machine ends up rewriting reality. Then Morrison deflates it on purpose. He has said the joke was setting up a huge multiversal story with thousands of characters, only to have the last issue come down to a crazed old man with a bunch of Green Lanterns stuffed in jars. That mix of cosmic scale and absurd intimacy is exactly what the book does best.

Season Two picks up in the aftermath, with the antimatter Lanterns coming back in force, Hal dying in the line of duty and then facing the judgment of the Young Guardians in an afterlife that gets stranger from there.

The art does half the work

Liam Sharp has said he and Morrison deliberately looked at older material: 1950s science fiction and pulp covers, the 1970s comics they grew up on, and science fiction and black-and-white anthologies. Jim Starlin's Warlock was a particular influence, and Sharp has said that is part of why he wanted Tom Orzechowski, who lettered Starlin's run, on the book. The older influences were a conscious choice, partly to avoid competing with the huge Green Lantern epics of the previous decade.

Then there are the layouts. Issue #7 takes place inside the ring, and Sharp builds the pages from pieces of the Green Lantern insignia. The Season One finale has a splash page with panels flowing along the symbol, and a two-page spread of Hal flying fist-first at his antimatter counterpart. Steve Oliff's colors tie it all together.

It isn't for everyone

Even reviewers who liked the book admitted it can be dense. Some found issue #8 convoluted, and Season Two #4 gets hard to read in places. A little Silver Age knowledge helps, and the book is happy to leave you behind. If you want a streamlined, emotionally grounded Hal Jordan story, this isn't it.

But it deserves more love and attention than it gets. Because most issues stand alone, it is also an easy book to sample.

Where to start

If you want a quick test, read #3 (the black market auction), #7 (inside the ring) and #8 (the Green Arrow team-up). If those click, go back to the start.

• Vol. 1, Intergalactic Lawman: issues #1 to #6
• Vol. 2, The Day the Stars Fell: issues #7 to #12, including the Green Arrow issue and the finale
• Season Two Vol. 2, Ultrawar: Season Two issues #7 to #12

Morrison's Green Lantern: Blackstars miniseries sits between the two seasons.