Those who buy in are extremely passionate about the concept in the characters. So when Hal Jordan shows up in a panel of the 2018 miniseries Heroes in Crisis and admits, “I don’t even know what the hell ‘will’ is,” fans were furious.
Furious, but unsurprised. Because Heroes in Crisis came from Tom King, a writer who has made his name with audacious stories that often treat canon and prior characterization as optional. His Batman run killed off Alfred, temporarily turned Nightwing into an amnesiac called Ric Grayson, and famously built to a marriage between Catwoman and Batman that never happened. In Strange Adventures, King turned Silver Age adventurer Adam Strange into a lying war criminal, forever hen-pecked by his Lady MacBeth-like wife. Heroes in Crisis may be the worst offender of all, in which the Flash Wally West gets so distraught about losing his family through the latest multiversal reboot that he kills a bunch of his friends, including fellow Teen Titan Arsenal (they got better).
Yet, for all that King angers some fans, he constantly gains the respect of others, largely because he disregards canon in search of big storytelling hooks. King first got widespread attention for his 2015 series Vision at Marvel, in which he reimagined the titular Avenger as a would-be suburbanite trying to live the American Dream. That series downplayed Vision’s heroism and previous connections, including his marriage to Wanda Maximoff, and instead saw him create his own nuclear family of androids. He followed it up with Mister Miracle in 2017, in which the super-escape artist created by Jack Kirby finds himself trapped in depression. The rest of the New Gods made appearances in the story, and although the title character and his wife Big Barda were multifaceted in their portrayal, others—such as the warrior Orion—were one-note and exaggerated.
For the most part, it worked with Vision and Mister Miracle. Not only were they very effective stories, but they took place out of continuity, in their own little world. But when King made the Flash into a madman in Heroes in Crisis or turns Wonder Girl into a glorified babysitter in his current Wonder Woman series, then people get mad. He’s messing with the “real” world.
Which is why King’s participation with Lanterns has been so distressing for some. Lanterns is fully part of the DCU. Not only does it introduce a character John Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, but it may be the way that James Gunn sets up the DCU beyond Earth and perhaps even the origin of evil. It is setting the canon of this new universe, and that’s the last place that some people want Tom King to be in.
And yet, we need look no further than the last major Green Lantern project to see how wrong things can go when adherence to the comics is paramount. Green Lantern (2011) had a script co-written by Geoff Johns, one of the architects of DC Comics at the time, and it included important Lantern characters like Hector Hammond, Parallax, and Sinestro. And yet, it absolutely sucked because it didn’t know how to tell a good story.