DC has unveiled five pages from Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp’s The Green Lantern #1, doing so via an exclusive today with Entertainment Weekly.

The book, out Nov. 7, is billed as a look at Hal Jordan’s day-to-day life as a hardworking space cop. Whereas past Green Lantern runs have involved universe-shattering threats that necessitate a corps of militant space soldiers, this one instead aims to filter DC’s far-flung cosmic corners through the lens of a police procedural.

Here’s how Morrison explains it to EW, referencing Geoff Johns’ 2004 – 2010-ish defining GL run:

Geoff was always raising the stakes, the universe was kind of ending every week, the dead were rising and falling and dying. One of the things we thought was, we can never compete with that. So we wanted to dial it back a little and look at, what’s day-to-day life like for a space cop when he’s not dealing with the end of the universe, when he’s not dealing with the First Army or these other universe-altering threats? What’s it like when he’s called into a domestic dispute, but the domestic dispute is between two intelligent clouds? What’s a police interrogation like when the person you’re interrogating is a giant intellectual spider? It was taking a lot of things that in normal cop shows would be seen as kind of mundane, and then elevating it to these cosmic proportions and gigantic scale. Things naturally become funny and surreal and weird when you take them up to that level. So yeah, the basic thing was let’s get back to the cosmic cop aspect rather than the army aspect, where the Green Lanterns are constantly on the defensive, constantly fighting to preserve their values. Let’s go down to the day-to-day business of policing the universe.

Based on the preview art, the book certainly seems to do all that, making excellent use of both sci-fi high adventure and cop genre tropes. At one point in the preview (more art below), Hal tells a wounded fellow GL, Tell’em yourself. You’re not dying. I’m getting you out of here. Which, perfect. You can almost here him adding, I’m getting too old for this—. Elsewhere, a group of space ne’er-do-wells presumably lands on Earth, spewing fire and yelling, One false move and the financial district gets it! (It’s nice to give villains a relatable ethos.) Before Lanterns arrive and someone screams, Space police!

It’s equal parts hammy and high concept, and Liam Sharp’s art (fresh off the Celtic grandiosity of The Brave and the Bold) is as detailed and imaginative as all get out. You can find more insights from Morrison over at EW, and you can take a look at more art below:

   

3 COMMENTS

  1. Filling the hole that was left for that interplanetary and dimension hopping police procedural of Top 10 that I’ve been missing.

Comments are closed.