Of all the comic book creators to pen the adventures of Green Lantern, none are more influential on the modern canon than Geoff Johns. After resurrecting and redeeming the Silver Age superhero Hal Jordan with Ethan Van Sciver in the 2004 miniseries Green Lantern: Rebirth, Johns wrote the continuing adventures of the character in the DC Universe until 2013, including modern classic storylines like "Sinestro Corps War" and Blackest Night, with a whole host of superstar artistic collaborators -- one of the most prolific being Ivan Reis.
Next month's Green Lantern 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1 reunites Johns with Reis, along with inker Oclair Albert, colorist Alex Sinclair and letterer Rob Leigh, for an all-new short story starring Hal Jordan titled "Last Will." The story has Hal crash-land on a mysterious planet with only enough energy left in his signature power ring to leave messages for three different people in his life. In an exclusive interview with CBR, Johns teased what to expect in the story, reflected on his expansive legacy with the character and shared what exactly Green Lantern means to him personally along with unlettered preview pages from his upcoming short story.
CBR: This is your first solo Green Lantern story in about seven years and your first time working with Ivan Reis again in some time. How does it feel to be back?
Geoff Johns: I love jumping back into this -- I can't believe it's that long when you said it! -- I love jumping back into Green Lantern; it's a huge passion for me, obviously. I love all DC stuff, but between the world of the JSA and Green Lantern, those are my two favorite places to be. And working with Ivan, Oclair, Alex and Rob again, it was great! It felt like just slipping right back into the mode we were in on Green Lantern and writing Hal Jordan was so fun. I could write that character all day long, he's such a fun character, but it was great! And I'm really happy how the story turned out: It's a small, personal story about Hal Jordan but it reveals a couple of fun things.
One of the things in this story is Hal's relationship with Batman and, as far as I can tell, that shared antagonism or rivalry was something you really introduced in Rebirth and was a through-line in your run. What made you want to put these two superheroes a bit more at odds than they had been in the past?
I always saw them, in many ways, as opposites and, yeah, the story is about...this spoils the whole story [laughs.] But if you could leave a message for three people, who would those three people be and what would you say? And I think as much as they are different and go about things differently and operate differently and are motivated by different things, I find that Hal and Bruce...there's a real deep understanding between the two and a respect between the two as different as they are. And I love that Hal would not die without saying something to him about it and wanting to say something about it and wanting to be kind of truthful with Bruce about how he feels about him.
I think there's something extremely profound about that for Hal and it reveals it reveals a lot about Hal: He's got pride and he can be stubborn and he's got his ways but it doesn't mean he doesn't respect other ways or even be honest with himself about why he might have a little bit of resentment towards Batman.
Something else we take for granted is that it's been nearly 20 years since Rebirth: Was there a big push at DC to bring Hal back, even beyond bringing him back as the Spectre in Day of Judgment?
Yeah, I had done Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. and The Flash and JSA and brought back Hawkman, the Rogues and a lot of Golden Age characters and it was [suggested by] Peter Tomasi and Dan Didio. I think Green Lantern was struggling to find its voice, it had fallen down and disappeared a little bit. And I remember they came to me and said "Do you like Hal Jordan? Would you be interested in writing a story where he comes back?" and there were ideas floating around about killing this character or that character and I said "Look, if I do Green Lantern, I want to bring everything back."
It's not just about Hal, but it's about the Corps -- which was gone -- and about Guy Gardner and John Stewart and Kyle Rayner and all that stuff. I wanted to bring back the intergalactic aspect of it and make it bigger and different and unique among the DC books because I think Green Lantern is that. It's not even DC's Star Wars, it's different than that because, to me, it's all about at the core of this great emotional center of overcoming fear and facing fear and chasing our emotions, being honest with yourself and true. It's really a very inspiring universe to live in and these characters are fun and different and diverse. So, Green Lantern: Rebirth wasn't just about Hal Jordan -- although he takes front and center -- it was about the entire canvas and backdrop of Hal Jordan's universe and the Green Lantern universe that I wanted to bring back and look at and explore and expand with so many talented artists on Green Lantern over the years, with Ivan being one of the major ones with "Sinestro Corps War."
It was pretty unreal, we had amazing artists [including] Dough Mahnke, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan, Carlos Pacheco -- they all contributed -- Peter Tomasi, Dave Gibbons; there were so many wonderful, talented people that put the passion into it. We all brought it back but, I'll never forget, it started with that conversation: Hawkman had just come back and then "Okay, what if we brought Hal Jordan back?" And it turned into an almost 10-year run on Green Lantern, and I had a great time. I've said this before but people [ask] "What are your favorite books?" and it's really about the people I worked with on the books. With Green Lantern, Peter Tomasi was my editor and then he did Green Lantern Corps, he's an amazing writer; if Green Lanterns are partners, he was my partner on it. I just look on that whole era and that whole experience with a lot of fondness.
Speaking of "Sinestro Corps War," was it always the plan to make it a more expansive universe by adding all those different Lantern Corps?
Yeah, it came from a lot of conversations with all my collaborators but it started with the idea. When I was working on Rebirth, looking at the mythology, I always assumed Sinestro wielded yellow energy because yellow is the color of fear, and it was tangible fear. And then I got into the idea that he would create his own Corps, eventually, and it just kind of fell together because it was about the theme of fear. We planted a lot of seeds way back in Green Lantern: Rebirth, and some stuff obviously grows organically, some stuff you have planned out. I always love doing long-term planning when I'm doing a monthly book for a while, but it was both, It was planted but it also grew. I try to do it on all the books I work on, add to the mythology and expand the mythology and that happens in a variety of ways. It's not an afterthought, it's there at the beginning and sometimes it grows over the course of the run.
As a quick tangent, are we seeing a similarly expansive approach in your Shazam! run with the different lands added?
Yeah, that's it! Creating more things, more worlds, more places to explore, more characters. There's always something about adding to a book and trying to carve out its own space. Every character is so unique, no matter who it is, by the way, whether you're writing a Metamorpho monthly -- which would be freaking amazing and fun -- or Shazam or Aquaman or the Justice Society of America, whatever it is. I think part of the fun is going back to the core and then building on top of that core. You're really honing in on that creative and emotional center of the book or team or world and build out from there and stay true to your North Star and true to your emotional focus.
I'm actually going to a class at the Joe Kubert School and Anthony Marques, who bought it from the Kuberts and runs it now; he is an editor I worked with a long time ago when he was at DC. He and I have been talking about doing something, and the cool thing is there's not a lot of opportunities I can talk about stuff like this. Like, we can talk about it in the interview for a few minutes, but it's going to be fun to sit down and talk to some up-and-coming writers and students and the Joe Kubert School is so awesome, it's got such an amazing legacy and it's kind of stuff that's really fun to talk about.
I went back to Michigan State University and did a one-hour class on comic book writing, and it was so much fun. We actually talked about Shazam! and breaking it down. It's interesting, there's not a ton of schools or places you can go learn about the craft of writing or construct of a comic book, specifically if you're working on someone else's characters, what do you do, what what do you look at and what do you want to achieve personally and it's always fun to talk about that. I don't tend to think about it too hard when I'm working on it because that's your job, you're inside it, but it's always fun to look back and looking back at Green Lantern like this. It was fun to do this eight-page story and, I won't lie, it made me want to do more.
Was there a character or story you maybe didn't have the chance to explore, for whatever reason, during your Green Lantern run?
No, I don't think so. There's probably certain corners or characters that I would've liked to get to; maybe some of the more obscure villains would've been fun to get to. I feel like I really had a great time with introducing characters like Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz, Saint Walker, Atrocitus, Larfleeze, all of the Indigo Tribe, bringing back Black Hand, that was all fun stuff. I don't think there's too many... I had some story ideas for old Hal Jordan villains, but there wasn't anything specific that I felt like I didn't touch upon. I was really happy with what we all got to do.
You mentioned Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz and I'm really happy they exist beyond the New 52 era, especially with Jessica being very prominent now. I was wondering what your inspiration was creating these two new Green Lanterns.
With Simon, my dad's Lebanese, my family is Lebanese, and there's a huge Arabic and Lebanese population in Detroit. I grew up with that; our Thanksgiving we had kibbeh and hummus and spinach pie and baklava. It's just what we did, and I really wanted to create a character that harkened back to that with Simon. And there was a lot of interesting, especially post-9/11, cultural fears that could be dealt with through that character and so Simon was born from that. And I like the character, he's a little rough-and-tumble; he's not perfect. He's got a lot of flaws, but he has a great heart.
And then, on Jessica's side, it's about fear; a lot of emotional fears and someone that was dealing with crippling anxiety and depression and worry. That was a totally different type of fear to tackle, and Jessica Cruz embodied that by first having the ring be a curse -- from [Earth-3's] Power Ring-- and her overcoming that and overcoming her own fears and her own personal issues to earn a Green Lantern ring. I felt it was a compelling story and a very different one than the other Lanterns. So both Simon and Jessica, in particular, was about exploring different types of fears, I think overcoming that is what makes Green Lantern great.
What was your gateway into Green Lantern and Hal Jordan?
I grew up on Challenge of the Super Friends, Green Lantern was in that, and when I read the book, John Stewart and Hal Jordan were Green Lanterns, and then Guy Gardner was Green Lantern. It was all about the Corps, it was all about the variety of characters that had the rings. My introduction was during Crisis on Infinite Earths, I remember Guy Gardner got the ring, and it's a really amazing scene, and then he was in the Justice League and he was completely arrogant and a jerk. And John Stewart had taken over and Hal Jordan had come back to the Green Lantern Corps leading into Millennium. That was kind of my first introduction during the comic books, that mid to late '80s era.
Going back to "Sinestro Corps War," some of my favorite stuff was seeing the four of them working together.
Oh, it was great, I would call them the Four Musketeers. I think those initial four characters are so fun to write together because they all have a different perspective, a different personality, from Hal to John and Guy to Kyle. It's a very cool group of Lanterns and having them work together is my favorite, it's super fun. I think Green Lantern is one of the very few superhero worlds where it's way cooler to have more than one person have the ring, in my opinion. It's just more fun, there's more story potential and the characters are just fun to work with. It's fun to write John Stewart and Kyle Rayner and Guy Gardner and Hal Jordan, I had a blast doing it.
I know he's not part of the Corps, but you had written Alan Scott for years with the JSA. In Doomsday Clock, he was the one Doctor Manhattan targeted to make the JSA no longer exist. What made him the logical choice for Manhattan to eliminate?
Well, he's the spark, the light. To me, Alan Scott is the big gun of the JSA, he's the powerhouse, and a lot of that I take as a nod to James Robinson's work in The Golden Age where he was that; it just felt right to me. And writing that character, I love Alan Scott, I love the elder statesmen of the JSA, and he also comes from different places of overcoming fear and that's evolved over the years. But Alan Scott just felt like the right character, he was the spark, the light that Doctor Manhattan was drawn to and Alan Scott felt like the lynchpin, to me, of the JSA.
One last tangent while speaking of adding things to characters that redefined them for years: You and I have spoken about the Flash before, but what made the death of Nora Allen make sense when bringing back Barry Allen? Was the plan always to set up Flashpoint that early on?
Yeah, I'd always envisioned Flashpoint, from The Flash: Rebirth to The Road to Flashpoint to Flashpoint, I kind of had this two-year storyline for Barry that I wanted to tell and that's how the storyline was built. I think that the time-travel and all the emotional fallout of that; it was a really interesting thing to explore for Barry and put him through. I grew up with Wally West -- he and Conner Kent were my favorite characters growing up -- but I love Barry too. I saw the Flash like Green Lantern, in many ways, because it's about legacy, and I love that there's a legacy between Jay Garrick and Barry and Wally and all these other speedsters.
It makes both Flash and Green Lantern unique in their relative worlds, as the Lanterns explore space, I think the Flash legacy stretches across time. So, for me, the build-up from The Flash: Rebirth was always to Flashpoint.
One last question to close it all out, in talking about legacy, what was one character or moment you are the most proud of creating to continue to reverberate throughout the Green Lantern mythology?
Saint Walker and the Blue Lanterns. I met a fellow fan at San Diego Comic-Con that came up to me after one of the panels, and we talked for awhile and he said Green Lantern: Rebirth really got him through a dark time, it helped overcome his own fears and his own struggles and he found light on the other side. And so when I was creating the Blue Lanterns and [their power from] hope, I named Saint Walker after him, his last name is Walker. I was really struck by that and am grateful he shared that story with me and very indebted that he would open up like that and tell me that the book helped him through it. It meant a lot to me and I'll never forget it, it's stuck with me even now.
I met him years later, and he knew the character was named after him and he was really excited about that, as was I. And I think the [Blue Lantern mantra] "All will be well," you need that, you need hope, you need to reach for that [mantra] because you've got to have that faith and attitude to help drive yourself into a better place. It's not going to be easy sometimes, nothing's perfect and sometimes it's a real struggle. But my favorite character that we created, and that Saint Walker has survived and flourished in the mythology is definitely because of that very personal reason.
Written and illustrated by a host of all-star comic book creators, Green Lantern 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1 goes on sale June 23 from DC Comics. Included in the oversized anniversary special issue is the short story, "Last Will" by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Oclair Albert, Alex Sinclair and Rob Leigh.