VAN SCIVER: When did you start at DC and on what? STATON: When did I start at DC? Well, I started on Karate Kid, doing finishes off Ric Estrada. When would that be, like ’45? FEMALE VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: ’75. STATON: Oh, ’45, ’75? [joking] Sorry, I was sitting next to Irwin Hasen today… [audience laughs] I started at DC after doing The Incredible Hulk at Marvel— who’s also green—and next, I did the finishes on Karate Kid. And I had a good run on the Justice Society [in All-Star Comics], and various things. But I had always wanted to do Green Lantern because of the whole Julie Schwartz thing. Julie was there [at DC at the time] and [Green Lantern] came around. I think [assistant editor] Jack Harris put in a good plug for me. He did some persuading to get me onto Green Lantern. EURY: Jack C. Harris eventually took over the editorship from Julie on that title during your run. STATON: Yeah. EURY: Joe, one of your first storylines was called “Power War,” with Sinestro. Really, he’s Green Lantern’s only A-list villain… VAN SCIVER: You’re forgetting Evil Star? The Shark? [audience chuckles] EURY: So what makes Sinestro GL’s arch-foe? VAN SCIVER: With Sinestro, it’s like Star Wars. It’s like Jesus and Satan. He fell from grace and has been angry ever since. Except that Sinestro is not Hal Jordan’s father. [audience laughs] STATON: That’s right, that’s right. Sinestro is the fallen angel. He’s the Lucifer of the Green Lantern Corps. You’ve got a greenand-black hero, and a magenta-and-black bad guy, you can’t go wrong with that. EURY: Let’s stay on the topic of Green Lantern’s rogues’ gallery: Outside of Sinestro, no other GL villain has ever really made it to the A-list, with the possible exception of Star Sapphire. This is a question for each of you: Aside from Sinestro, who’s your favorite Green Lantern villain, and why? VAN SCIVER: They’re all great! They’re all great! All of them are great! [audience chuckles] I’m trying to think of a bad one, but all of them just needed to be rethought through and given a little bit of a spit-shine and then put back into play. The original Shark creation, he didn’t look like a shark. He looked like a parrot. [audience laughs] I would like to do Sonar. The lamer, the better. [audience chuckles] Sonar, the Master of Sound, whatever, able to manipulate sound. STATON: With a tuning fork. [laughter] VAN SCIVER: It’s all good. I mean, there’s a wealth of truly weird and wonderful characters and all of them are worth pursuing. You need a feel for it, the right sort of energy. I was not a Green Lantern fan for thirty years, so I felt free to be slightly irreverent and to look at Green Lantern and to see all the pieces, the puzzle pieces, that there’s one here, one here, one here, that nobody ever put together before to make the big picture. You know, Sinestro’s use of the color yellow, which represents fear, which happens to be right on the color spectrum next to green on the rainbow. And yet, for many, many years, these two colors kept converging. Guy Gardner getting a yellow ring for a little while, Sinestro used to be a Green Lantern, Hal becomes Parallax, these two colors come together like colors on a spectrum, on a rainbow. And then suddenly, you look closer and realize that over here, someone’s playing with the violet powers, the Star Sapphire’s. It’s left untouched, it’s left undone, it’s dangling here and suddenly, you go, “Look at all the pieces that are missing.” This all makes sense somehow and it seems like it was there from the very start and so everything makes sense about Green Lantern. EURY: But it wasn’t there from the very start. VAN SCIVER: But somehow, it was! That’s what’s so interesting about it. Oh, I’m sure they didn’t realize it, but it actually was. STATON: You’ve even got Dr. Polaris and everything’s a negative, and so actually in Green Lantern, the whole thing is the color thing.
Rotten to the Corps (above) Arch-foe Sinestro hogs the stage on the cover to Green Lantern Corps #217 (Oct. 1987), penciled by Joe Staton and inked by Bruce Patterson. From the collection of Phillip Anderson. (top) Van Sciver, Staton, and Eury, at HeroesCon 2008. Photo by Rich Fowlks. TM & © DC Comics.
T e c h ,
D a t a ,
a n d
H a r d w a r e
I s s u e
•
B A C K
I S S U E
•
5