Today I have the first in a series of long-awaited and much requested DC guides for ALL Patrons of Crushing Krisis…
Green Lantern Corps – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide
I made my first serious try at creating a Green Lantern guide almost exactly a year ago this week.
It took me over three hours just to make an outline.
Green Lantern doesn’t have the most comic titles or comic appearances of the many major stars of the Big Two. What it does have is the most characters we could be referring to when we simply say “Green Lantern.”
Spider-Man? It’s Peter, Miles, or maybe Ben Reilly. Batman? Usually Bruce, unless it’s Azreal or Dick. Wolverine? Laura or Logan, because none of us seriously called Daken that. There are a lot of Flashes, but “Flash” almost always means Barry or Wally. Even Robin usually refers to Dick, Jason, Tim, or Damian – four isn’t that many. It’s probably Captain Marvel who creates the most confusion, but these days it almost certainly means Carol Danvers with little room for ambiguity unless we’re in a flashback.
But who do we mean when we say Green Lantern? Do we mean the Golden Age Alan Scott? The classic space cop Hal Jordan? Upstart Guy Gardner? The cool, collected Jon Stewart? The sudden hero Kyle Rayner? Jessica Cruz? Simon Baz? Jo Mullein? Tai Pham? Kilowog? Sinestro?!
The problem I was having was that a guide simply titled “Green Lantern” had to mean all of them, or else it wouldn’t be useful.
I chipped away at it month after month, each time hoping I’d have a new guide to deliver and each time barely making a dent. While I gradually put in enough work hours to make my way through all of the many Green Lanterns and their titles, the guide just became more and more gargantuan in the process.
This weekend, I decided that one way or another this Green Lantern guide was going to get done before a new week began. I researched. I linked. I found images. After a full 12hrs of nothing but Green Lantern, I finally finished. And the guide was unreadable. It wasn’t quite the mess of my legendary Spider-Man guide, but it was close. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: Guide to The Green Lantern Corps