Popverse's top stories

• For Popverse members only: Between the end of My Hero Academia, the return of Spy x Family, Gnosia as an anime, and a woman slapping her haters, this anime season has the perfect mix of old and new shows
• Watch now: Before Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin remembers being fan number one at the very first New York comic con
• For Popverse members only: The full, official The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon panel from NYCC 2025

DC Comics' Absolute Universe has been widely embraced by fans for its new takes on the characters that they know and love. And while the changes brought to the Absolute versions of Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman have been more obvious to the untrained eye, how do you go about reimagining a character like Green Lantern? What do you choose to alter about the Green Lantern mythos? 

For writer Al Ewing, the decision was simple.

"Man, I guess the first time I was thinking about it, the idea of the Absolute Green Lantern was very much kind of pitched to me in terms of this, ‘What would you do if you were doing Green Lantern today?’ But also the Absolute Universe was pitched to me [as] built on Darkseid," Ewing tells Popverse. "And I think I got a little bit of the taglines, what's Batman's one? It's 'Without the cave, without the butler, without things.' What are these heroes? Obviously, the first thing I thought of was, ‘No rings, no lanterns, and if we can do without the color green, that'd be great as well," Ewing began.

"But the thing that Green Lantern has is that he's known. He's known throughout the universe. Anytime somebody sees a Green Lantern, they know what that is. … He’s only unknown when he was just getting started on Earth - or I guess when Alan Scott was first getting started on Earth - that people didn't really know what that entailed… But everybody in space knew all about it. So, we're kind of doing something a little similar here, in that people in space do know what's going on, but we want to make it a completely unknown alien thing to your average humans, including the human who's been exposed to the green power, Jo," Ewing said. 

This partly explains why Absolute Green Lantern has such a strong horror bent to it. Because what's scarier than the unknown? 

The first trade paperback of Absolute Green Lantern will be released on December 9, 2025. 

You can read our full interview with Al Ewing about his Absolute DC work here.

Need more? Here's our picks for the best DC Comics stories of all time.