Mosaic Comics

  Just as a heads up, this is going to involve spoilers for series like Blackest Night, Brightest Day, and DCeased.   So if you want to go into any of those spoiler-free, I’d suggest coming back to this after you’ve read them. So I recently did a video running down all of the Lanterns from Earth, and I specifically left out any existing characters who were already established heroes and villains that briefly became Lanterns later.  And I wanted to talk about them separately, because when enough thought is put into it, giving a Lantern ring to a character who doesn’t normally have one can be a turning point in that character’s life.  It can reinforce what’s always been true about that character, while also giving them a new perspective that’ll inform who they are going forward.  So I put together a list of what I feel to be the ten best examples of characters being profoundly impacted by gaining rings late in their careers. 10 - Superman Now I’m not talking...

In May of 2012, DC Comics’ co-publisher Dan DiDio attended Kapow! Comic Con in London, where he teased that an established DC character would be reimagined as gay in the New 52.  A few weeks later, DC confirmed in a blog post that the character in question was the New 52 version of Green Lantern Alan Scott, who had already been introduced in Earth 2 #1, and who’s relationship with his boyfriend would receive the spotlight in issue #2, due to come out the following week. This decision sparked a lot of controversy, but it also caused a lot of confusion.  Why this character?  Why not make a new character?  Why right now?  When I lay it all out, it looks to me like the decision to reimagine Alan Scott as gay came as a reaction to a number of similar events that, while not necessarily related directly to each other, still added up into something that DC couldn’t ignore. Same-sex relationships in comics were starting to get the spotlight in 2012.  In Jan...