Quote Originally Posted by resipsaloquitur View Post
I am wondering how Morrison's "big ideas" fit with Geoff Johns' in the DC architectural structure. They both have significant pull, but sometimes it seems like Morrison is the idea man while Johns is the architect. I don't know.

If I am understanding Johns' Blackest Night and Brightest Day portions of his Green Lantern runs, Johns effectively merged the Green Lantern mythos into the Judeo-Christian understanding of the universe. (I am not saying that Johns is a theologian, just that he's a writer who decided to borrow from Biblical mythology.) Biblical imagery had been present in the DCU since at least the 1980s, and we've long understood that God exists, that Jesus Christ existed (though we don't talk about him much), the Phantom Stranger might have been an angel, the Spectre definitely was an angel, heaven exists, etc. Still, all this imagery seemed to exist either alongside all the other stuff, or else we never really talked about it. God was probably superior to the New Gods (unless you talk to someone like John Byrne, who probably saw God as subordinate to them).

Anyway, Johns took all this further and implied that the Lanterns were all derived from Judeo-Christianity as well. The White Lantern entity was definitely evocative of God (though not explicit); the red energy came from Cain's murder of Abel; the blue hope came after Noah's flood; the indigo compassion came after Jesus' sacrifice; and so on. Oh, Johns wasn't very explicit about it, but there was really no other mythology he could have been borrowing from. It was about as subtle as the Phantom Stranger issue where they revealed that he betrayed his friend for 30 pieces of silver.

What I'm not clear on is where all this ties with what Morrison is doing. Given that heaven is now one of many spheres in the realm of the gods, it seems that DC puts Judeo-Christianity on the same plane and hierarchical level as the New Gods and any other mythology. That's...certainly at odds with contemporary theology, but it's fiction, so we have little room to complain if we're so inclined. The reason why this all throws me, though, is that the Source Wall is now portrayed as a giant rainbow at the edge of the white universe. My first reaction on seeing the map was to wonder if that was now where the Lantern energies came from. But then, this would suggest that the Lantern powers do not come from heaven, or heaven's intervention, as Johns seemed to be implying.

I don't know if these things fit together or not. It could be that Johns has his ideas and Morrison has his, and we're not supposed to worry about it. The "grand ideas" in Final Crisis had little bearing on Blackest Night, even though ramifications from one hit the other. If Johns and Morrison are incompatible, it's probably because they're operating at entirely different levels of storytelling.
I see where you are coming from, but I think the flaw in your thinking is that the Lantern colors are based primarily on theological concepts. I like Johns, but I don't think he gets quite that deep. It's far more likely that he just picked colors that people in the Western world identify with emotions. Red for rage, yellow for fear, pink for love often show up as representative of emotions across media. Now you might have a point that the reason we associate those colors with certain emotions ultimately comes from the Judeo-Christian reasons you ascribe, but they are so ingrained in our culture now that I doubt that Johns primary source was religion