The Associated Press announced that DC Comics has relaunched one of its bravest characters, Green Lantern. This time, however, the superhero will come out as gay in order to meet the preferences of the ever expanding group of readers.
Green Lantern is one of the oldest and famous characters produced by DC Comics. He has always been portrayed as a strong superhero, but now editors want to endow him with an additional quality: the comic book protagonist will confess his homosexual orientation in the following numbers of the magazine. The measure was adopted because DC Comics thinks their readers have become more diversified in the past decade and their characters have to correspond to their preferences.
The superhero will come out of the closet in the second issue of “Earth 2” which is due to be released next week. Many other comic books have included gay characters in their publications including Marvel and Archie, so DC Comics wanted to keep up with them.
Writers wanted to make sure that readers understand the fact that the new Green Lantern is different from the previous character with the same name. They claim the superhero will no longer represent the galactic space cop Hal Jordan, who belongs to the Justice League; he is a parallel version of Green Lantern.
James Robinson told the press that it was his idea to turn Alan Scott into a gay character. He further added that Alan Scott had a son last summer, before DC presented all its titles. The son realizes he is gay and he confesses his sexual orientations in “Earth 2” which will be published next Wednesday.
Marvel Entertainment has prepared similar changes for their characters. They announced in May that Northstar will marry his boyfriend in the upcoming issues of “Astonishing X-Men”. Nevertheless, it is DC Comics who was the first to incorporate a gay kiss in their comic books in 1988. Since then, they added numerous other gay and lesbian characters, such as, Kate Kane, who has the ability of becoming Batwoman, The Question, as well as the married characters, Apollo and the Midnighter.
