The Green Lantern Reinvented: Interview with Liam Sharp

Hal Jordan has been given something of a reboot by DC Comics, once again claiming the title of The Green Lantern in his new comic series. And just two issues in, the book is setting a new standard for DC's living universe.

We've got an exclusive preview of The Green Lantern #2, which adds yet another layer of classic Lanterns, alien conspirators, and mind-bending battles. And even better, we have artist Liam Sharp himself to walk us through the next step in his and Grant Morrison's space adventure.

With The Green Lantern #2 coming from DC Comics December 5th, Screen Rant had the chance to discuss the series with Sharp (as well as his larger career). While the secrets of the villains, super-weapons, and alien regimes on their way are still being held close to the vest, readers eager to see what's next for The Green Lantern can read our full interview, and check out the preview pages below.

SR: You're going to a lot of corners of the DC Universe that will be totally new to readers in The Green Lantern. So how would you introduce people to your idea of Rot Lop Fan and the Obsidian Deeps of the Supervoids?

LS: Oh, how can you not love Rot Lop Fan? The F-Sharp Bell. Just such a great concept.

And you bring a real mind-bending visual to [a Lantern in total darkness].

Well that was--Grant kind of just said you got to imagine a universe where the shapes and everything is based on sound, and acoustic qualities, not what it might look like. So that was quite interesting. If anything it's got musical notes and things that are going to resonate with sound. That was the thinking behind those crazy designs for it. Because it's dark! In that scene we are literally making darkness visible.

And Volk is just great, he's classic. The first time I saw him Kevin O'Neill had drawn him. I don't know if he had been drawn before that, but he certainly feels like a Kevin O'Neill design. I love that we're going back to those crazy concepts for characters. And we talked about him, like is he actually a magma creature? Has the body been created for him to give him form? Is the actual living essence of him the magma that's constantly spitting out the top of his volcano head?

We've given the smoke a face as well, which is fun. It's subtle but Grant was just like, 'can you imagine the concentration of keeping a little face on the smoke all the time?' All of that is fun. [Associate Editor] Jessica Chen, she just loved Volk. Every time he appeared she kind of squee-ed. Like 'He's back, he's back!' We all did, really.

We get to see one of the most arresting images I've seen of Oa, the Central Precinct of the Green Lantern Corps. We've seen it before, but your version takes minutes to absorb from just a single page. How did you come up with the idea of what this version would look like?

It's interesting you said at the beginning about European comics, and Moebius, and all those kind of things. The guy I trained with was a chap called Don Lawrence, who is a legend in Europe. He did a story called The Trigan Empire, and Storm was his famous one. And when I was with him he would spend like two weeks on a page, and just create the most incredible cities, and environments and worlds. They were just astonishing. Fully painted. Really beautiful stuff.

One of the lessons I took away from working with him--I guess I was seventeen when I first started working with him--he once gave me a script as a try-out, and one of the scenes had two characters walking through a corridor. He came over and sort of laughed and said, 'what's that?' And I said, 'that's a corridor.' He says, 'that's not a corridor, it's just a square box with nothing in it. Why is it just square? Think about it, what's it made of? It could be made of meat, it could be made of plant matter. What planet is it on? What's the environment? Where are these people going? Does it have to be square? can it snake? Think about all those things.'

That's really informed my thinking ever since, I think. The environment becomes as much a part of the character as anything else. Certainly in The Green Lantern, I think all of these different planets are characters in their own rite. You have to give them the respect you would give to any of the lead characters and go to town with it. So in terms of doing that shot, I wanted to make it feel really epic for a start, really vast.

I did an earlier version that didn't quite do it for me, I spent like a day and a half on it and it wasn't quite done. I ended up spending about four days on that thing. And in the end it's got to twinkle, so I added all the lights. But then it looks too much like a machine, so now it's got little parkland areas if you look really close. I just kept adding and adding to it. it took a while before I was satisfied.

Page 2 of 3: The New Hal Jordan, and Green Lantern's Future

Green Lantern talks with an alien in the comics

You get the impression in The Green Lantern #2 that this is all commonplace to Hal, as a space cop. The fact that he's beside a walking volcano isn't worth noting for him. But then you get a scene that feels more like an episode of Law & Order or NYPD Blue. Does that come from the same place for you, creatively, or is that really shifting gears?

I mean, everyone is aware of those interrogation rooms. And that is a huge long shot. Over those three pages you've got the shot of the city, and he's tiny in it. Then the next bit you see them more mid-distance and you're in closer in to the machinery of these buildings. Then the interior corridors and then it's a full, big close-up of his face. That pulls you in and then suddenly he's in this interrogation room. There was a thought process to that. I really enjoy going from that big scale to this very intimate little area, and he hasn't missed a beat. There's no sense of wonder to him when he's walking, he's seen it all before, you know? Which makes him really fascinating.

He is an unreconstructed character, in many ways. He's out of time, and out of place, and out of step with the way things are now. I've said before, he's the kind of character that I aspired to be as a kid growing up in the seventies. You know, a manly man, and wasn't overly sensitive... I was a real shy kid, and was very emotional, and sensitive, and all of those things. And I was like, 'I wish I could be more like a manly man!' Neither me or Grant were anything like him, but we both grew up in a period where that was the kind of person you aspired to be. Things have changed thankfully, and they're much better than that. Which means that a character like that hasn't really got a place anymore. But he's grown past that in the sense that he's seen everything. So he might have started out as an unreconstructed guy, but now he's trying to figure out who he is.

He's seen the death of the universe, he's died himself. He's been on the other side of good and bad. He's been everywhere, done everything. And he's literally fearless and unfazed now. And he's so far beyond PTSD that there isn't even a word for what's going on in his head. So what do you with a character like that? How does he relate with the people that he loves, and his old friend on Earth? And hasn't he also got people on many different planet and in many different ports that he also loves, that he also has deep relationships with. So there's a lot of questions and interesting angles to this story that Grant is exploring, or we're exploring together.

In this story, Hal being called back into action is not him going to save the universe, it's him going back on his beat. This issue we get a sense of that, is that a sense of what we can expect from the rest of the series? It has a mix of big and intimate moments.

Yeah, I think it's always going to have that big and intimate, and is definitely going to be crime solving. Like a lot of these TV shows, the idea is to have a sense of a story issue-to-issue, but of course then there's a bigger overarching story which you can draw the dots to over time. But hopefully each issue will stand as a riveting, and interesting, and fun read, even while we're turning a cliffhanger, you know? You'll get some answers and you'll get more questions, but you will have that sense of a TV episodic series. Grant's referring to it as a 'season one.'

And already has some idea for season two I understand?

Yeah, absolutely. We're having a ball, I think we're planning on staying around for a while.

I also wanted to ask you, you Tweeted about the criticism some people make of comic art, or artists who don't feel confined to recreating an accurate human anatomy on the page. The Marvel movies now look like Bryan Hitch drew them, and Jim Lee's take on DC characters is a golden standard. How do you process comments about that, when you're focused on art, not being judged against an anatomy textbook?

I don't really take them to heart, I guess it's frustrating because times have changed. It used to be that we were not about reality... a lot of the people who most inspired me over my career don't necessarily draw realistically at all, it's the way they explored anatomy that was fascinating to me. Whether that's Richard Corben, or Simon Bisley, or Bill Sienkiewicz. The point is it's art, it's illustration, it isn't reality. It's as much about mood, and texture, and ambience as it is about... imagine taking a snapshot of something that's happening right in front of you and putting it on the page. If that was all it was about we might as well just dress in costume and shoot it on stages, and create a blue screen background for everything.

That's not what it's about. It's as much about growing as a creator and pushing yourself, and trying things that are expressive ways of telling a story, as it is about anatomy. A lot of people can draw perfectly good anatomy and you only need to think of the classic example everyone uses: Picasso could draw perfectly well when he was a kid. When he was young he did it, and it was all about going beyond that. You can say the same of Kirby, look back at early Kirby and his drawing was extremely rooted in reality. But it became less and less so, and more about the dynamics, and more about the emotional impact these pages had than anything else, as it went on. He broke every rule! He broke the rules of perspective, rules about anatomy, all of that. It didn't matter, he took you on an incredible journey, and he took you to worlds you had never seen before.

The thing I occasionally get frustrated at--and I shouldn't, and I'm doing my best to not--I think the thing is to try and educate. Sometimes I think I come across as more sensitive than I am, when actually all I'm trying to point out is, 'hang on a second, you're missing the bigger picture here.' Unless you've got a rich knowledge of the evolution of art over many decades... maybe it's not to your taste, and that's fine. But to pick apart the anatomy, particularly when I've seen people picking apart the anatomy of Bryan Hitch, whose anatomy is is exemplary, that kind of is confusing. I know I'm getting it wrong sometimes, but you know, it's not always for want of trying. But the sheer volume of page by page workload in itself, people don't even bear that kind of stuff in mind.

Page 3 of 3: Marvel Movies, Brave & The Bold... and Warlord?

Do you take inspiration from seeing a live-action superhero project? Superheroes are omnipresent now, do you still go back to artwork first?

Oh, yeah that's interesting. So, that's a really great question: I absolutely adore seeing all these worlds on the big screen. I feel like we've been a blessed generation to be able to see... my kids have grown up loving it, and all of those movies have been an event for us, you know? Leading up to the last Marvel movie for instance, the kids watched one every week until that came out, they went through the entire lot. And it's the same with The Flash TV show--you can't keep up with all of them, there's literally too many but we get a kick out of it. And I get a huge kick out of it, when I was a kid it was just the Spider-Man cartoon in the seventies. Which I loved, you know? Then the Hulk TV show which again I absolutely loved.

Interestingly, I said this to somebody the other day... it occurred to me that as much as I really enjoy those films, I've probably only revisited a couple of them. I don't think there's any that I've seen more than twice. Whereas my favorite comics, I go back to again and again and again and again, and I never get sick of them. And I find something new to appreciate them every time I pick it up again. Also sometimes I find looking back, like--I know this is almost sacrilege to say, but I didn't really get Kirby when I was younger. And now I do. I feel horrified at myself for not understanding.

Also, I probably suffered a little bit in my thinking from the people I was really inspired by. You know, I loved Buscema because his anatomy was so damn good. So it was people like Bill Sienkiewicz and Kirby that educated me in the thinking, that there was more to it. There's depths you can trawl here that aren't about perfection of drawing, they're about whole other levels of thinking that actually make it more exciting if you allow it to.

On the subject of books with detail you can keep going back to, I have to ask about your Brave & The Bold series. I can only describe your artwork in that book as 'organic Kirby,' which I hope is as much a compliment as I mean it to be--

[Laughs] Absolutely!

Okay great! What can fans hope for next, even if it isn't specifics?

We've definitely got plans for some sort of follow-up, at some point. I'm wrangling in my head what that might be because I don't want it to be directly more of the same, in a way. It has to move forward. It leaves a lot of questions, and some really interesting situations off the back end of that that are wide open to be explored. They might not all be in Tir Na Nog, for instance, it could all be in Gotham, it could all be elsewhere completely. It might not be the same two characters, either, it could be a whole bunch of other characters. So I don't want to say it's definitely going to be Batman and Wonder Woman, because I would hate to let down the people who might hope that it would be... but it might be [Laughs]. There's a lot to take on board because there does seem to be some appetite for more. It is something I'm seriously thinking about, and working out, and there has been discussions about it, but it hasn't gone beyond that point yet.

I've also seen people asking you what character you would want to draw. But I know about Hawkman, and I know about Swamp Thing, so is there a character that would shock people to hear you say you would love to draw?

Hmmm. I don't know about shock... I mean, I think I would do a good Warlord.

That's a terrific pick. Well, it's been great getting to speak with you, especially after your Wonder Woman: Rebirth run became such a standout (we at Screen Rant praised it as the best-looking comic in all of DC's Rebirth).

No that's appreciated. Honestly, for me, that was such an unexpected... I never expected to be able to come back into the mainstream. I had wanted to for so long, and when I feel out of it in... gosh, the late nineties probably, that had been my whole adult working life. And I had slowly been slipping away into obscurity and it seemed like something I couldn't quite control or stop. And it's not that I went away from comics, I just went on to comics that nobody saw.

Then there's a point when you realize you're back in it, you're back in the game again, and people are seeing what you're doing and appreciating it... You're older, you're wiser, you don't take anything for granted. You know that you're breathing rarefied air, and you're standing shoulder to shoulder with the best in the business. It is humbling beyond words and very grounding. You can't help but be thankful for it, and I just didn't expect to be back here.

The Green Lantern #2 will be available December 5th from DC Comics.