After an unplanned hiatus due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp's acclaimed comic book series The Green Lantern: Season Two returns for this week. At the start of their run with the first volume in 2018, the creative team, with colorist Steve Oliff, had reaffirmed Hal Jordan as the greatest Green Lantern of them all and put him on one of his deadliest assignments ever on the fringes of the DC Universe. After an interlude miniseries -- The Green Lantern: Blackstars -- illustrated by Xermanico, the new volume of the main series has brought Hal back down to Earth for assignments close to home.
Here's a refresher on the story leading up to The Green Lantern Season Two #3, by Grant Morrison, Liam Sharp, Tom Orzechowski, which goes on sale May 5.
The Controllers, the longtime antagonists of the Guardians of the Universe and Green Lantern Corps, resurfaced led by a new sinister figure known as Controller Mu. Mu formed his own space-faring force of peacekeepers known as the Blackstars who subjugated worlds to Mu's iron will. By the conclusion of the first volume, Mu had assembled various cosmic artifacts across the DCU fueled by willpower, with even an assembly of Green Lanterns across the DC Multiverse unable to stop him. Using Hal himself as a living component to complete his prototype Miracle Machine, Mu seemingly rewrote reality with himself and the Blackstars as the dominant force in the universe.
This new reality was explored in the three-issue The Green Lantern: Blackstars miniseries, with Hal awakening to the new universe as one of the Blackstars' greatest enforcers. Without the Guardians or Green Lanterns to stop them, the Blackstars steadily conquered the universe, with only Earth and its familiar superheroes left to oppose them. After turning Superboy against his father, even Earth fell, and Batman and the villains of the DCU entered a desperate alliance to form a resistance movement against the Blackstars' rule.
By the end of the miniseries, the Blackstars staged their own bloody civil war within their ranks for supremacy, leading to the deaths of many familiar characters. When the dust had settled, Hal revealed the truth: From his position at the heart of Mu's Miracle Machine, Hal used the device not to rewrite the main DCU but instead a long-since dead alternate universe to appear like Mu's intended reality. Reactivating the Miracle Machine, Hal trapped the remaining Blackstars in the alternate universe though they swore to find a way out and gain their twisted revenge.
At the start of Morrison and Sharp's new volume, Hal was welcomed back on Oa as a decorated hero for his actions against the Blackstars. Hal's return coincided with the Guardians announcing that they were traveling to a different dimension on their own top-secret conflict they refer to only as the Ultrawar. To replace them, Hal travels to their homeworld on Maltus, where he recruited younger members of their race to become the new Guardians of the Universe. Upon their arrival on Oa, the new Guardians were less than impressed by how things were run and tasked Hal to return home for a new set of assignments on Earth, to his visible chagrin.
In an interview with CBR, Morrison since hinted that much of the second volume of The Green Lantern will take place on Earth, leading Hal to encounter several familiar faces over the course of his homecoming. With Hal having already reunited with an old paramour while defeating bird-like temporal invaders based out of a quarry, Hal's time back on Earth will be much more deadly than the Green Lantern could have ever anticipated.