Mosaic Comics

  I’m happy to say that after four months, my video claiming to contain EVERYTHING we know about the Gold Lantern is finally outdated.   We just got a whole lot of new information to chew on in the pages of Legion of Super-Heroes number ten, and a little bit in number nine, and it may not seem like much, but our understanding of who and what the Gold Lantern is has actually increased dramatically since the last time I did a video on it. The first bit comes in Legion of Super-Heroes number nine, where we find out that they’re not called the Gold Lantern Corps, they’re the Lantern Order of the Gold, and the way the Gold Lantern talks to the leader of the United Planets makes it sound like the two organizations have some sort of understanding that lets them both operate without getting in each other’s way. Then in Legion number ten we go to Oa, and there’s a lot going on here.  So the Gold Lantern explains that he’s come to Oa to deliver the villain of the previous arc, ...

  It’s Halloween, and that means I get to dig through Green Lantern’s 80 year history and pull out one of the many, many examples of this franchise telling a pretty cool horror story.   And this time around, I decided to pick a fairly recent one, since I’m confidant not a lot of people read it when it came out.   The comic in question is “Secrets of Sinister House #1”, a horror anthology published in 2019.   And I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t even know there was a Green Lantern story in this until about a month ago.   Not many people talk about these holiday anthologies, and a lot of good stuff ends up going unnoticed and getting buried. The story in question is titled Fear 101, written by Che Grayson, with art by Miguel Mendonca, colors by Bill Crabtree, and letters by Dave Sharpe. The story centers on Jessica Cruz, a character who suffers from crippling anxiety and agoraphobia.  She has her good days, but her bad days can leave her struggling just t...

  So we’ve finally got some solid details about the live action Green Lantern series coming to HBO MAX. And there’s really two big things to take away from this announcement.   The first is the format…according to Variety, the season will consist of 10 episodes, each an hour long.   That’s a good size, not too long, not too short. I’m happy with that. The second is the cast of characters we can expect to be following.  Because that’s been the big question on everyone’s mind: who will be the protagonists of the Green Lantern tv show when there’s so many characters to choose from?  And I never would’ve guessed that they’d go this far.  Taken from Deadline: “The drama will depict the adventures of a multitude of Lanterns, including Guy Gardner, Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz and Alan Scott — Earth’s first Green Lantern, who, true to the comics, is a gay man — and many more. The series will also include fan favorites such as Sinestro...

  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...