First comes the teaser, now comes the details. Green Lantern writer Robert Venditti briefly spoke with ComicVine about the upcoming lantern family crossover, “Lights Out”. Find out how long the crossover is, what books are involved and a bit more below.

“Lights Out” will run through the month of October only but kickstarts in September:

The primary villain, Relic, will be a feature of one of the Villains Month issues in September, but the crossover itself will run during October. The entire “Lights Out” story will take only one month.

What titles will be involved in “Lights Out”?

It starts in GREEN LANTERN #24 and runs through GREEN LANTERN CORPS, NEW GUARDIANS, and RED LANTERNS. No other titles will be taking part (aside from the aforementioned Villains Month issue and GREEN LANTERN ANNUAL #2, which will also be hitting this October).

Ramifications of the crossover?

“Lights Out” will tie together every Lantern of every Corps that has ever appeared in any comic book. Ever. It’s an ambitious story, and we’re going to take some risks. All the Corps will leave the crossover differently than when they went in.

 

There will be plenty of action. In one way or another, each Corps is going to pay a price

Is “Lights Out” an Earth based story?

In space, on Oa, and on some other familiar planets as well. But there will also be locations that haven’t been seen in the New 52 yet, and some new locations that have never been seen before.

We saw the “Rise of the Third Army” and the “Wrath of the First Lantern” and we just received word of yet another Green Lantern crossover coming in October. But this? This is completely unexpected. Coming soon, a Green Lantern Corps and Batman crossover. Check out everything we know so far below.

The DC Retailer Roadshow in New York has just wrapped up and among other things discussed, is the aforementioned GLC and Batman crossover. According to one retailer report of the show, DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio addressed retailer concerns before they started. This crossover(which features other books just as random as GLC) are not “manufactured”.

Didio informed retailers that these stories were not manufactured as crossover titles just for the sake of crossing over and spreading out the success of Batman, but that these writers and creators had expressed a genuine interest in writing a story that occurs at the same time as Zero Year.

Those other titles include Action Comics, Flash, Green Arrow, Batgirl, Nightwing, Batwing, Catwoman, Detective Comics, and Birds of Prey.
I guess Van Jensen and Bernard Chang have some brooding in their future.

CBR has the exclusive news that we all saw coming. Once Legion of Superheroes was cancelled, many speculated that DC would simply add to its ‘Justice League’ books by doing just what we have now. Justice League 3000 is a new ongoing series from Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire. The book will feature versions of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and the Flash as redesigned by artist Howard Porter(DC Universe Online: Legends).

With Green Lantern: New Guardians #21 coming out this week it is of no surprise that writer Justin Jordan and artist Brad Walker have another interview pop up. Find out what they had to say about Kyle Rayner, long term plans, Sci-Fi elements and more below.

How the two got the New Guardians gig:

Justin Jordan: Um, they asked me if I wanted to do it. [laughs] That’s the short version of it. Matt Idelson and Chris Conway, the group editor and editor respectively, came to me and had an idea about where they wanted to take New Guardians. They knew the old creative team would be leaving and there’d be kind of a clean break with Geoff [Johns] leaving the Green Lantern title.

They e-mailed me and asked me if I thought it was something I could have fun with and do something cool with, which I thought it was. I also thought it would be interesting and difficult, which is sort of the appeal of it, just because I’ve never written anything cosmic or space related, so I wanted to give that a shot. I wanted to try and do something sci-fi, so this was the opportunity.

 

Brad Walker: I started working for Idelson on Action Comics because I was trying to start inking myself, so I was doing a couple of different projects at a time that were not full issues of anything. Just to try and get deadline leeway, so I could have time to play around with inking myself. And that ended up being a nightmare; I ended up with less time. Action kind of needed two people to go back and forth, and it was kind of fun but I said to Ideslon, “I would like to get back to telling complete stories, a beginning, middle, and end.” He kept saying, “I totally get it! Just hang on and we’ll find you something!”

Action went on and other projects kept coming up and falling through, but at some point he started saying that the Green Lantern books were going to change creative teams. He said, “I’d like to get you on one of those.” And I’m a huge Green Lantern fan, so that sounded really appealing. Without playing my hand too heavily, I was just sort of like, “Okay… that’d be a good assignment!” I just kind of held on and they came back [with the job] and I was thrilled about it.

Artist Brad Walker on what interests him about space stories:

Walker: There’s a lot of liberty that you don’t really get when you’re working within the confines of something that people can automatically recognize. This probably makes me sounds slightly lazy, but if you draw a car, and you draw a car even slightly wrong, somebody that can’t draw their way out of a paper bag can look at that and go, “That’s not a car!” With cosmic stuff there’s an added luxury there. You still have to fall within a general realm of physics, but really the sky is the limit as far as what you image and what Justin asks for. If I go beyond that, he’s only going to come back and go, “I love that you went beyond that!” In that sense, it’s so much fun to just let loose and go as big as possible.

Kyle Rayner’s Difference from Hal, John and Guy:

Jordan: He doesn’t have one. And I don’t mean that as a negative; he’s the White Lantern now, and so the Green Lanterns don’t really have any authority over him. They don’t really have the power to make him do anything, which is fine with Hal as well. But it does set up an interesting situation where Kyle needs to figure out what he needs to do. What it means to be the White Lantern and what he’s meant to do with that power, and that won’t always necessarily be what Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps would like him to do with it.

 

Walker: From my perspective, it’s kind of nice that you’ve got these four Earth Green Lanterns, and he’s the one that, at a glance, has the most purpose outside of Hal. Not to talk down about John or Guy, but they’re definitely going to be secondary to Hal. Kyle has a whole different ring and a whole different set of powers. As far as a purpose, after that, you can go anywhere you want.

Justin Jordan explains changing the dynamic of the series from Tony Bedard’s:

There will be a reason for it to actually be called “New Guardians” because it literally will feature new Guardians, so we’ve got that going for us. It’s going to be a much more Kyle-focused book. Which it has been to a certain extent, anyhow. The various Corps have problems of their own, but we’ll be focusing on Kyle and his chunk of the universe.

Brad Walker turned down Red Lanterns for Kyle’s New Guardians:

I worked on a lot of team books and I love them as a reader, but they can be really exhausting as an artist. The one thing I said to Matt Idelson when he mentioned this to me was that I didn’t want to draw the Red Lanterns book. [laughs] My thinking was just I imagined myself sitting in a room every day for 12-15 hours just drawing people spewing blood and I couldn’t think of anything more depressing, on top of just sitting in a room all day.

Then he talked to me a little bit about the direction of what that one was going to be and I kind of thought to myself, “Well, that sounds pretty good too!” But yeah, I liked those last couple of issues of Tony Bedard’s run where they started focusing more on Kyle and his character base, I thought that was where New Guardians really kind of took off. I liked that was the direction Justin wanted to continue, and have it be more of a direct Kyle book where we can examine the character a little bit more than you can in a team book.

How does Kyle view the new Guardians?

Jordan: With a lot of skepticism. Ganthet was basically his best friend and Ganthet betrayed him. Which wasn’t entirely Ganthet’s fault, but still, it kind of took it out of Kyle. That is what we get into almost immediately in the first issue, how the Templar Guardians are sort of appalled at what their brothers and sisters had done. They came out of the temple and realized that the old Guardians had completely lost the plot. But they also recognize that they don’t want to do that and make the same mistakes, but at the same time, they don’t know anything about the universe outside. They’ve had billions of years for the universe to go on without them and they need to learn about that.

 

So Hal asks Kyle to watch them, basically, while they take this tour of the universe, with the idea that there’s probably nobody better suited than Kyle to both recognize if they’re becoming a threat and then do something about it. That’s Kyle’s impetus for taking it, he doesn’t like the new Guardians. He doesn’t want to do the job, but he doesn’t really feel like there’s anybody else for it. He feels obligated to do it, so he takes it.

Justin Jordan on new characters:

Jordan: I mean, the Guardians in and of themselves are new characters. They’re not strictly new as in created, but we haven’t seen a lot of the personality of the Templar Guardians. There will be new characters cropping up; there’s a new character right in issue #21, for instance, that we’ll see for a couple of issues and maybe beyond. So yeah, I like creating new characters, that’s fun, but this is still very much Kyle’s book. It’s Kyle’s journey and where he’s going with things, so everybody else will be supporting that.

MTV has the latest breaking news today about Earth 2, the ongoing series starring Green Lantern Alan Scott. The series made headlines early, and even more recently when James Robinson surprisingly stepped away from the book and DC Comics. Now, we have a new writer to help bring Nicola Scott’s art to life and he’s got critical and commercial success to his name. Tom Taylor, writer of the ‘Injustice: Gods Among Us’ tie-in comic will be taking over the writing duties with issue #17 in October.

“I’ve had so much fun working on Earth 2 with James Robinson over the last year. While I’m sad to see him go, I’m really looking forward to exploring the ever expanding mysteries of the title. I’m even more excited about moving forward on this journey with my great friend and fellow countryman Tom Taylor! Not only a charming guy but a great talent to boot. She continued, I can’t wait for everyone to see what we have lined up!”
–EARTH 2 series artist Nicola Scott.

 

“I’m a big fan of what James and Nicola have created so far with Earth 2, and I’m honored to be adding to this world, with its rich characters and its many mysteries. Earth 2 is entering a new age, and I’m thrilled to usher in this new age with my good friend, and fellow Australian, Nicola Scott. It was good of DC Comics to give Australia our own Earth to play with. We’ll try not to wreck the joint.”

Going to keep this short and sweet since everyone seems to be talking about the future of DC Comics films lately. Here’s what Warner Brother’s President of Domestic Distribution Dan Fellman had to say about what the success of “Man of Steel” means for our future.

“It’s more than just a franchise for us, it really opens up the door to do combinations of the DC Comics characters,” said Dan Fellman, Warner’s president of domestic distribution. “We can build them up like Marvel did and benefit from the history of DC.”

Fresh out of E3 is another gameplay demo for Scribblenauts Unmasked. The demo features Maxwell (The game’s protagonist) on the Planet Oa home of The Green Lanterns with the job of quelling the conflicts. Check out the demo below.

Here we are once again with the second Green Lantern title in the post Geoff Johns era. Now while last weeks Green Lantern proper book was average at best, we have now the beloved sister title, Green Lantern Corps, that takes center stage. Will this book continue to be the darling favorite or has it taken a turn for the worse? Let’s dive in and find out shall we?

This time new writer Van Jensen takes scripting duties while Robert Venditti plotted the book, however once this issue is over it shall be known who is truly behind the reason for this books success. We open up with John Stewart teaming up with his apparent on again off again girlfriend in Fatality or Yrra as she wishes to be called. This all leads into John and Yrra into a exciting action sequences against new aliens attempting to steal a dangerous reactor for unknown purposes. These first three pages are a great way to introduce one of our main characters, a bit of his back story and a bit of a fun off world battle. It is admirable that Jensen chose to just drop the reader into a already moving the story and forces the reader to catch up, which is executed perfectly.

Since the Green Lantern Corps title implies focus on more than one Green Lantern, we soon meet our monitor Salek who is feeling remorse for the recent Third Army and First Lantern storyline. Now while the first three pages did a great job of dropping the reader in without boring exposition, the page between Salek and the new Guardians comes off as clunky and kills the momentum from the first few pages. It should be appreciated that this page does give the mission statement for the book in a ongoing basis, a sign that Van Jensen has a long term plan, which should be considered a good thing. Add the introduction of new unique aliens and Jensen piles on even more things to keep the readers interested.

However the middle issue is where the John Stewart’s chapter in the story takes a turn for the cliche, in which Stewart is given the choice of saving a planet or going after the threat, if the reader has never read a Green Lantern story in the past 9 years then this is a non issue, yet delivers a nice character moment between John and Yrra, but if the reader has read Green Lantern within the past 9 years then John and planet destruction is now turning into a horrible trope that doesn’t need to brought up again.

Van Jensen closes the issue with how the perception of the Green Lantern Corps is within the 3600 sectors and the Corps itself. This not only brings something new to old readers but it can and most likely should entice readers to stick around to see how the heroes of the book deal with perceptions while training to maintain peace across the sectors, add into those unique aliens introduced near the middle of the issue now joining the corps itself and you have a perfect recipe for coming back in 30 days.

Bernard Chang is the perfect artist for this title, Bernard brings great action sequences and great character renderings. Chang breathes life into a script already beaming with personality. Bernard also brings great facial expressions to his characters, the best example would be the two pages of interaction between Salek and Soranik and if you were to remove the word ballons you can simply look at Saleks face and instantly become aware of his sense of betray, loss, and resolve. Fans should want Bernard Chang to stay on the book for the long haul.

Overall, Green Lantern Corps is an excellent issue for long time readers and especially great for new readers, add in some fantastic art by Bernard Chang and the reader is given a nice starting point.

Green Lantern Corps #21 receives a 4/5

Review by Ben Castruita

At the edge of the universe, there lays something called The Anomaly. Even before they were locked away for millennia, the Templar Guardians have feared that something terrible can be found there. And low and behold, they might have been right. As the self-appointed guardian of The Anomaly, it’ll be up to new character Exeter to make sure that whatever threats it contains won’t be released. So naturally, when Kyle Rayner comes to check out The Anomaly for himself, the tensions will be high between these two.