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...

If I were to ask you how many Lanterns are from Earth, what would you say?  There’s a surprising amount of variety to the way people will answer that question.  Some people will tell you six (Hal, John, Guy, Kyle, Simon, Jessica), and maybe half of those will up it to seven when they realize they forgot about Alan.  Every now and then you’ll find someone who remembers to count Teen Lantern in Young Justice, and Jo in Far Sector, bringing the total to nine.  And then there’s those who’ll tell you that, for them, there’s really only four, because who needs all the rest when you’ve got the four corpsmen right here?  I’ve seen it argued a lot that five, six, nine Lanterns from Earth is too many, and it’s all gotten way out of hand, and DC doesn’t know what it’s doing…and that’s kind of funny, because there’s way more than nine of them. So first off, a few guidelines.  I’m not counting alternate versions of anybody.  I’m only interested in seeing how m...