Lanterns Quietly Confirmed The Existence Of A Beloved Green Lantern
Don't expect to see a certain Green Lantern on-screen anytime soon. They don't socialize.
Even though both of the respective Big Two companies in comic books have been around for almost 100 years at this point, the mantles of their biggest superheroes don’t really change around all that often. Before Miles Morales stepped onto the scene there had never really been a long-term Spider-Man other than Peter Parker (the closest was the clone Ben Reilly); conversely, while lots of alternate universe versions exist (as well as four distinct “impostors” from the 90s Death of Superman era), there had never been a mainline replacement for Clark Kent as Superman until his son Jon Kent adopted the mantle in 2021.
But unlike most other superhero properties, the core conceit of the Green Lantern Corps is that thousands of heroes all operate under the name simultaneously. There are, of course, the seven human Green Lanterns from DC’s mainline Earth (Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, with a few more before and after), but there are at any given time over 7,000 active members of the Corps in different sectors across the universe. Episode 2 of Lanterns included a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to one of those 7,000, an incredibly iconic member to faithful readers and a character who might earn an “I’m sorry, what?” from the uninitiated.
Warning! Mild spoilers ahead for Lanterns Episode 2.
Somehow John finding Hal’s suit isn’t the most eventful thing to happen during his house call.
Mogo Doesn’t Socialize
In Episode 2 of Lanterns, Hal Jordan sends John Stewart on what should be a relatively simple fetch quest to retrieve his lantern battery from his home. While the straightforward trip eventually gets a lot more complicated (being kidnapped and having violent memories forcibly implanted in your brain will do that), the show does treat fans to a quick name drop when John calls Hal for the password to the safe that contains his battery. “Mogo doesn’t socialize” is what he says into the speaker, a phrase immediately recognizable to anyone aware of Green Lantern deep lore.
Because DC’s very first Green Lantern, Alan Scott, was a relic of the 1940s whose power ring and lantern came from a magical meteorite named the Starheart (an artifact that was retconned much later into being the transmuted body of a deceased Lantern who burnt up in a planet’s atmosphere), the entire concept was retooled with the introduction of Hal Jordan in 1959’s Showcase #22. Instead of one supernatural character with a magic ring, Green Lantern Hal Jordan was one member of a sprawling organization of intergalactic lawmen, equipped with a piece of alien technology. Although the very idea of the Green Lantern Corps was introduced in the same issue that Hal Jordan was, it wasn’t until the 1981 miniseries Tales of the Green Lantern Corps that DC really took advantage of the storytelling potential inherent to the faceless Lanterns patrolling the universe.
It’s hard to believe that a concept as crucial and longstanding as the Green Lantern Corps itself didn’t debut until 19 years after the original Green Lantern first appeared on the page.
While the original Tales miniseries was very short-lived, the next year saw the debut of back-issues (additional short stories in the last few pages of another comic issue) with the same title, each focused on fleshing out a new Lantern; many of them were written by writers who would go on to become comic book legends, including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (the creative team behind Watchmen), who wrote three.
The most well-known is the third, 1985’s Mogo Doesn’t Socialize, which takes place entirely as a frame story told by veteran Green Lantern Tomar-Re to fresh recruit Arisia. In the story, a savage and amoral alien conqueror named Bolphunga the Unrelenting decides to prove his salt as a warrior by defeating the most powerful Green Lantern, who he’s tracked to a seemingly uninhabited planet. At first confused and frustrated by his inability to find his prey, an implausible and yet hopelessly true realization dawns on Bolphunga, and he rockets off to whence he came after finally grasping the fact that his target Mogo is, in fact, the very sentient and very powerful planet he has been searching through.
A Key Player In The Green Lantern Mythos
While the term “Mogo doesn’t socialize” in his first appearance was a reference to the loneliness and solitude imposed by the planet’s immense size, it was also an unspoken editorial guideline as well, because it’s not easy working a living planet into stories. However, since 1985, Mogo has become a crucial and ironically social member of the Green Lantern Corps, factoring into numerous stories — 1986’s Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #2 revealed that Mogo controls the process by which the rings of deceased Lanterns are matched with new recruits, and in 2013’s Green Lantern Corps vol. 3 #24, the sentient planet became the temporary headquarters of the Corps after their original planet Oa was destroyed by a villainous scientist named Relic.
A 2013 storyline in the pages of Green Lantern Corps vol. 3 revealed that Mogo was actually made up of a male and female consciousness mated together at the core of the planet, and it has even been prophesied that Mogo would become the last living Green Lantern, being destroyed in a final battle with Ranx the Sentient City (naturally a member of the Sinestro Corps).
Irrespective of the one-off nature of his first appearance, Mogo has become a crucial character in the Green Lantern mythos for a reason.
As goofy of a concept as it seems at first glance, Mogo is one of the best examples of how perfectly science fiction blends into superhero comics. Recent stories have made the character a full-on superhero in some ways, taking part in massive conflicts like 2008’s Blackest Night and the 2011 crossover War of the Green Lanterns, but that first Alan Moore comic is still a highlight for Mogo, taking what would’ve been a silly premise in anyone else’s hands and turning it into an emotionally thoughtful story about isolation. It’s highly unlikely that the living planet will appear on-screen in Lanterns (although who’s to say the living carnivorous plant John feeds while at Hal’s house isn’t a souvenir), but it’s nice to know that in the canon of the DCU franchise, he’s floating around out there somewhere keeping everyone safe.
