Comics: Geoff Johns Talks Rise of the Third Army & New Green Lantern

GREEN LANTERN ANNUAL #1 kind of changes the playing field quite a bit and then with #13 we are introducing a new Green Lantern, the first new Green Lantern from Earth since Kyle Rayner. I can’t really get into who he is or the circumstances yet, but he’s not exactly chosen in a very typical way, it’s very atypical which makes him a bit of a wild card.

We have a storyline running through all of the GREEN LANTERN books, so you don’t have to buy them all. They don’t’ connect like “part one, part two, part three…” There’s just an event happening in the universe that affects everything called “The Rise of The Third Army” and what that is is the Guardians have always been a little bit on the dodgy side.

They create the Manhunters, because they thought emotion was a weakness in the universe and that’s what was causing pain and war and everything else, emotion. So they created the Manhunter police; that didn’t work out so well. The Manhunters destroyed and wiped out a sector before they were stopped. So then they thought “Maybe it’s not emotion that’s the problem, it’s fear. So we are going to create the Green Lantern Corps and they are going to combat fear, because fear leads to mistrust which leads to violence and war.” That didn’t work out so well, because now the emotional spectrum is out there with all of these different colored Lantern Corps. So from their perspective, it’s chaos. They ran this grand experiment and it’s the second grand experiment that’s failed. “We need to create a third army”, and they say “but what is this source of the universe’s problems? What is that element that we haven’t been able to wipe out?” And it’s free will. They say, “We need to destroy free will. Free will is the problem. The fact that beings have a chance to make that choice, that’s a problem” so they are going to wipe that out. That’s their mission.

The ‘Rise of the Third Army’ story arc starts with this September’s 0 issues and continues on in October’s #13s. You can read our speculation about it all by clicking here.

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