Blackest Night
In Hitman #18, Garth Ennis, John McCrea, and Steve Dillon introduced Dogwelder, a hero who welds dogs to villains. Why would anyone make such a character? Because someone challenged Ennis to come up with a name dumber than “Green Lantern.”
A typically mean-spirited joke from Garth Ennis is hardly the only hurdle facing any Green Lantern adaptation. The name is indeed goofy, vestigial nomenclature from the first version of the character during comics’ Golden Age, when companies unironically produced stories with heroes called the Green Llama, the Whizzer, and the Red Bee.
That first version of Green Lantern was Alan Scott, a magic-wielder with a wishing ring, as creators Bill Finger and Martin Nodell drew from the Aladdin myth. In 1959’s Showcase Comics #22, DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz introduced the Silver Age Green Lantern, with a story written by John Broome and penciled by Gil Kane.
Schwartz copied wholesale from the Lensmen novel series by E.E. King to create the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic police force under the charge of the immortal Guardians of the Universe. Test pilot Hal Jordan became the new Green Lantern of Sector 2814, which includes Earth, after given his ring by dying alien Abin Sur. The ring chose Hal because he was fearless and honest, and allowed him to create anything he imagined by harnessing his willpower. However, the ring would not work on anything that was yellow, because yellow is the color of fear.
Over the years, the mythos grew only more complex, as the Guardians became more ethically dubious and other humans became Lanterns, most notably John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner. Plus, Hal did some pretty terrible things, including using a racial slur to refer to his Inuit best friend Tom, going crazy and committing genocide, and… uh, dating a thirteen year old.
In short, Green Lantern is a tough sell to the larger public, and that’s before we even talk about other Lantern Corps based around different colors and emotions (example: the Red Lantern Corps harnesses rage and spews crimson bile). Or that the chief Green Lantern baddie is a guy who looks like the devil and is named Sinestro, and he’s a tragic figure with rich emotional depths.