The great era of cultural dominance by superheroes is clearly waning. Between 2008 and 2019, with the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and then DC, superhero cinema had become one of the main engines of mainstream cinema. They weren’t merely “genre films”: they were events. The phenomenon was such that television didn’t stand on the sidelines but embraced it, filling schedules and offering titles just as strong. But after more than a decade of interconnected films and series, a portion of the audience began to perceive the formula as repetitive. The enormous proliferation of stories and characters, as well as the ever-increasing demand in terms of time and prior knowledge required from audiences, ended up alienating some, forcing the industry to scale back and devise new approaches to survive. The superhero is returning to being a genre, rather than being “the” dominant genre of pop culture, and at the outset of this new era Lanterns fits very well, the latest HBO Max novelty, premiering today, August 17, with a new episode each Monday on streaming.
What is Lanterns, the new DC series by HBO Max?
Lanterns is perhaps one of the most interesting cases for understanding what might come after the great superhero era. The premise is already highly significant: HBO presents it not as a classic superhero series, but as the story of two intergalactic police officers, Hal Jordan and John Stewart, caught up in a dark mystery set in rural America. In other words, it does not start from the question “how do we make a great Green Lantern story?”, but seems to start from “what kind of great HBO series can we make using the Green Lanterns?”. And that’s a huge difference. Aliens, planets, cosmic wars, rings that can create anything… none of this is missing from Lanterns, so long-time fans can rest easy. However, the network famed for masterpieces like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under bends the mythos to fit its catalog of drama and crime, where True Detective is one of the natural reference points. This brings Lanterns closer to crime drama and neo-noir than to the traditional cinecomic, detaching it from its traditional audience to broaden it to a potentially much wider viewership.
The plot and characters of Lanterns
What exactly does Lanterns tell? The series follows Hal Jordan (played by Emmy winner Kyle Chandler), a veteran Green Lantern now established, and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a new recruit. The two are, essentially, intergalactic police officers belonging to the Green Lantern Corps, and they become involved in an investigation into Earth. The case is mostly set in a small Nebraska community, and takes shape around a mysterious murder. The case initially seems like a local crime story, but gradually it becomes clear that behind the crime lies something much bigger, with cosmic connections.
The true heart of the series, however, seems to be the relationship between the two protagonists. Hal is the veteran: experienced, confident, used to operating alone and trusting his instincts. John is the newcomer, who still has to understand what it means to be a Lantern and is placed in the position of learning from his older colleague. The case thus compels the two to work together, in a dynamic that has been described as a kind of “buddy-cop story”: two very different investigators who must learn to trust each other.
The other interesting point is that the investigation begins as a genuine crime mystery. We don’t have, at least at the outset, a cosmic threat arriving on Earth and forcing the superheroes to fight it. Instead, we have a death, an investigation, apparently terrestrial clues, something off, and a connection to the Lanterns’ world. It is this progressive broadening of the perspective that constitutes the narrative structure of the series. And as the protagonists’ backstories and the reason they were brought together expand with it, it introduces other essential elements such as Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), one of the main villains of the story, and the Manhunters.
Lanterns’ ace up its sleeve
To bring all this to life, HBO and DC have assembled an incredible team, including among others Lost and The Leftovers co-creator Damon Lindelof, who needs no introduction, and the comics legend Tom King, a writer with a unique superpower: turning everything he writes into gold. King possesses the know-how to handle the Green Lanterns’ story with the proper caution. Moreover, he brings with him a substantial wealth of wisdom drawn from the world of espionage and investigation, having previously worked as a CIA counter-terrorism agent shortly after 9/11. He, a comics enthusiast since childhood, had pursued his dream of working in the field, but ended up focusing on something else when, in the early 2000s, the industry faced a deep crisis just as he was completing his degree.
Remember that the head of Marvel called him and said, “Hey kid, comics are dead. This industry is dying. Marvel is going bankrupt. The superheroes are disappearing.” Then, shortly after, films like Spider-Man, Batman Begins, and Iron Man managed to lift things up. “I went to the CIA to apply, because I was good at gathering information. I think comics helped me: I knew every Avenger and his first appearance. I could connect the dots. To my great surprise, after a year of training, they told me, ‘You’re on the front lines,'” he told Variety. It was the era of Al-Qaeda, America needed brilliant minds like his, and that remained his occupation for a long time. Until a package full of comics sent to him by his mother in Baghdad, where he was stationed, convinced him to drop everything and return to writing. Meanwhile, writers like Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar, and Ed Brubaker had elevated superhero stories to a form of prestigious art. “That was the generation that reinvented comics. They transformed them from illustrated books into films with words. I stood speechless.”
In the following years King wrote for Vision, a story that became the inspiration for Marvel’s first Disney+ series, WandaVision. Later, he signed an exclusive deal with DC Comics, writing 85 issues of Batman and the 2021 hit Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. The latter drew the attention of James Gunn and Peter Safran, who aim to relaunch the DC Universe on cinema and television. While that story would become a film, after being recruited by the two to a DC experts’ group—a sort of Justice League of writers—at one of their meetings King pitched Lanterns, a realistic whodunnit concept that the bosses instantly fell in love with. “It’s easy to forget that superheroes are human beings. They want the same things we want. That is Tom’s fundamental approach,” said Lindelof of King. “There’s a certain refinement in his writing because he has lived life. He has experienced a level of intensity that permeates his work.”
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