Newsarama spoke with the new writer for Green Lantern: New Guardians Justin Jordan about his plans for the series and the star of his series, Kyle Rayner. If you haven’t read GL and GLNG #20 you probably should do so now before you read any further. Also, our first fully colored look at artist Brad Walker’s pages!

 

Jordan on using Kyle as the White Lantern:

It’s one of the things that I was interested in exploring when they first asked me about the book. And so we’re working out what the White Lantern can do.

 

It’s interesting to me to look at how you’re going to use the various ring powers, because they an do more things than just create constructs. And it kind of doesn’t matter whether a construct is green or red, necessarily, in terms of the construct itself. But you know, what it says about the person’s emotional state is interesting to me.

And the other powers that the rings have, exploring what you can do with those and how you can combine those things, is actually one of the more nerdy, interesting things to me, about the book. So I was glad they left us in that place.

Jordan on how Kyle will use each color:

Kyle started as a Green Lantern, and that’s where he was trained to use a ring. So when it comes down to crunch time, he’s going to find himself defaulting to green quite a lot.

But if he gets sufficiently angry about something, it’s going to be pretty difficult not to use red when he has access to that.

 

So there’s going to be a mix of colors. The fact that these things kind of reflect his emotional state is something I want to play with. And honestly, it’s not always going to be ways that Kyle consciously would have expected of himself, which is kind of how it goes. You know? You can sort of predict how you will react emotionally to something, but we don’t always know ourselves as well as we’d like to.

 

Kyle is asked to do a specific mission:

Kyle is asked to do something in New Guardians which will form what New Guardians, under my run, is about. Something that he is really, really ambivalent about. And ambivalent might be putting it mildly.

He’s asked to do something that hurts him a lot because of the stuff that happened to him during “First Lantern,” because of the betrayals that he feels that he suffered.

 

And since his powers are related to his emotions, mastering that is one of the things he has to do. And it’s an ongoing problem, doing what he’s been asked to do while trying to keep his emotions and feelings about that in check.

 

…It’s the Templar Guardians and Hal. They ask Kyle to undertake a mission for them.

Is Kyle Rayner still apart of the Green Lantern Corps?

Kyle is outside the Green Lantern Corps. He is a separate entity.

 

So as you were talking about earlier, Hal has absolutely no authority over Kyle. So if he wants Kyle to help him do something, he’s got to appeal to Kyle in a reasonable way, not in a command hierarchy kind of way.

 

And that’s actually going to relate to the book as we go on. One of the things Kyle is going to be figuring out within the book is, what is his role relative to the Green Lantern Corps? What should he be doing? What can he do? What is the best use of the abilities that he has?

 

And it won’t necessarily always be working with the Corps. That might not be how things shake out for Kyle.

Jordan on the cast of the book:

Kyle is still the main character. We’ll see Carol Ferris from time to time, and possibly more than that from time to time. And we will get to learn a lot more about the Templar Guardians than we’ve probably learned about most of the Guardians thus far.

Will the Templar Guardians play a major role?

I will tell you that there is a very good reason it is called “New Guardians.”

 

…Yes.

Jordan on separating New Guardians from other Green Lantern books:

Initially, there’s going to be some overlap. After we get through the first few issues, we’re going to be a lot more separate, just because of the nature of what Kyle’s trying to do won’t overlap with what the other Corps do as often.

Plans on using Ganthet & Sayd?

Not in the near future.

How he’s meshing with artist Brad Walker:

A high level of awesome! I have to say, I’ve been looking at the pages as they come in and Brad’s just really kicking ass. And it’s one of those things you don’t necessarily get with all artists. When you’re going into it, you don’t know how well your scripts are going to click with their styles.

 

But thus far, Brad and I seem to be working together really well. He’s really getting what I was going for, and in many cases even doing something that was even cooler than what I had in my head, which is generally what I’m looking for in an artist, you know? Someone who can actually make me look, you know, competent.

Justin Jordan pitches to new readers:

What they’re going to see during the first six months is a cancer on the face of space-time, which I realize sounds really cryptic, but you’ll understand when you read the first issue.

One of the things we want to do with New Guardians is explore the DC Universe away from earth. And so we will look at some of the pre-existing races, and we’ll be looking at new new alien races. So we’ll see some really new and old faces appearing as we look at what the DC Universe is like, outside of what we generally see.

For Kyle in particular, he’s going to be trying to solve the question of, “I’ve got all this power. I’ve got these abilities. What is the best way for me to use them? What does it mean for me to be the White Lantern? Where can I do the greatest good?” And that answer’s not always going to be obvious.