At the beginning of James Gunn’s Superman movie last summer, a title card appears on screen that offers some hints about the timeline of the newly formed DCU. It revealed that for three centuries, metahumans have been running around Earth in some form or another, with no clear examples of who or what that meant. The film also confirmed that Superman has only been operating in public as the Man of Steel for three years. With these brief bits of info, Gunn was not only able to cement the status of heroes, villains, and superpowered freaks in this new universe, but also put his movie in a place where it would make sense for a fresh start.
Since then, things have gotten a little confusing. An example being the Batman villain Clayface, who appeared in the animated series Creature Commandos, but whose origin will be told in the upcoming feature film. Now, the new Lanterns TV show is poised to reveal even more details of the larger DCU timeline, not only getting into detail about the status of Green Lanterns in this new shared universe, but also how long they’ve been around. Earlier today, HBO Max released the first five minutes of Lanterns‘ first episode, which confirmed that Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan has been wearing the ring, reciting the oath, and constructing green weapons for a long, long time.
The opening scene of Lanterns begins even earlier in the timeline than Superman, starting in 1996 with a special report about Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern, revealing that he’s been involved with the Green Lantern Corps for at least a decade. By that math, Jordan came into possession of the ring and was made the Green Lantern of Sector 2814 in at least 1986, meaning that he predates Superman as one of the DCU’s superheroes by at least thirty-six years.
This not only marks a pretty stark point in the sand for the DCU’s larger history, but one that works as a major difference from the source material. In the pages of DC Comics, Hal Jordan arrived on the scene in the pages of Showcase #22 in July of 1959, the same month that they published Action Comics #257, over twenty years after Superman’s debut. To that end, an inverse on the big screen is a pretty distinct development for the DCU, and one that makes the untold corners of history in the universe pretty ripe for exploration.
It’s worth remembering that Superman also establishes that he’s not the only superhero either, with the likes of Hawkgirl, Mister Terrific, and even another Green Lantern, Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner. Not only that, but a mural at the Justice Gang’s headquarters details even more superheroes across the history of the new DCU, hinting at the likes of Black Pirate, Super-Chief, Wesley Dodds’ Sandman, and even Zatara, meaning that superheroes have been throwing down on Earth for hundreds of years. That said, none of the names found in that mural may have been as powerful as a Green Lantern.
Though this first scene offers a big reveal about the timeline of the DCU and Hal Jordan’s history as a hero, it only makes the status of the other Green Lanterns all the more interesting. Ahead of the series premiere, we already know that Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart is in training with Chandler’s Hal Jordan, but it remains to be seen how Fillion’s Guy Gardner fits into the equation.
In the pages of DC Comics, Green Lanterns have long had backups, with these three characters serving as the titular hero across the decades. As the lore evolved, though, even more people on Earth have become Green Lanterns, like Kyle Rayner, Jessica Cruz, and Simon Baz, with multiple heroes all carrying their own rings (and responsibilities) along with the mantle.
It remains to be seen how all of this will unfold in Lanterns, but today’s clip is quick to note that Hal Jordan is Earth’s first one ever. For DC fans with keen ears, this sure sounds like the DCU is writing away the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, out of the continuity entirely. Though Scott may be the first version of the hero in the pages of the comics, that take on the Green Lantern material was notably very different, armed with a magic ring and a magic lantern that charged it, with the intergalactic elements and larger Green Lantern Corps mythology created years later (and without Scott at all).
To that end, it makes sense why the DCU might be skipping out on Scott (though other Golden Age DC heroes are found in the aforementioned Hall of Justice mural), but the question remains how the DCU will handle this large roster of Green Lanterns in the future. HBO Max’s Lanterns premieres this Sunday, and fans are already expecting to see Ch’p, but the real question is which humans will hold the ring when all is said and done?
