Lanterns is thinking outside the comic book panel.
The makers of HBO’s latest DC Comics series brought Green Lantern down to Earth with physical suits, a mid-production decision that was not made lightly.
“When I first got the show, there may not have been a suit for anybody,” Lanterns costume designer Cynthia Ann Summers revealed in an exclusive interview with SYFY Wire at the show’s Aug. 13 premiere. “The suit came later on.”
While comics lore has maintained the superhero generates a suit using his Green Lantern ring, the adaptation’s vibes required they part ways with the canon.
As Summers explained, “Because our show is so grounded and it’s this noir world we’re living in, the suit needed to fit within our world.”
And in this latest entry of James Gunn’s DC Universe, co-creators Damon Lindelof, Chris Mundy and Tom King insisted the suit, ring and lantern-shaped power battery appear tactile over fantastical.
“We wanted everything in the show to feel like a tool and real equipment,” Mundy told SYFY Wire at the premiere, noting the suit had to be “something that if he was going into battle, that could go into battle with him.”
Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) likewise donned a non-metaphysical suit in Superman, which takes place years after John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) becomes a Lantern Corps trainee under Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler).
“I’m an Air Force veteran. I’m a former test pilot,” Jordan announced in Lanterns’ Aug. 16 series premiere. “I’m a regular person.”
The fresh-faced Jordan, wearing a spiffy new uniform, is in stark contrast to the jaded hero who has ditched his intergalactic get-up for a basic jacket come 2016.
“It’s like when you’re young and eager and you like to prove yourself, so you wear a tie so people will take you seriously,” Jordan explained in the episode. “But when you get older and wiser, you realize ties are a pain in the ass.”
While Jordan is firm in his street clothes preference, footage teases him donning his battle-weathered super-suit in upcoming episodes.
“It was really important to feel the wear and tear of years of him doing it,” Mundy shared. “At the same time, we didn’t want to take away all the green. It was really tricky.”
And one of the trickiest parts was sifting through countless variations of the character’s titular hue. “We had a whole color chart of greens,” Summers noted. “All the gradations from the darkest green, all the way to the lightest green.”
“Once we started shooting the show,” she continued, “we were able to get the right color of green for the green to show up, but not too electric and too bright or too light or too lime, so it didn’t look like it was shouting at us.”
Lanterns drops new episodes Sundays on HBO and HBO Max at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
