What happened to the Green Lantern Hype?

[Serd]

Hey, when looking over the sales for last month i noticed something. The sales for the main Lantern title are around 40.000 copies. Isn't this really low for a title you was one of the great success stories of the last years in comics?

When i started reading comics on a regular basis in 2011 Green Lantern by Geoff Johns was hot. It was even hotter in the years before and Johns was the king at DC. Even before reading comics you heard about the title and its awesome storylines. People were even joking that the new trinity was Batman, Superman and Green Lantern. The color spectrum was loved and celebrated as something fresh and awesome.

Four years later it seems, that nobody is talking about the title anymore. The Green Lantern mythos once shaped the DC universe (Blackest Night, Sinestro Corps War for example) and now nobody seems to care. There is almost no disscussion, just comments on the wish for a new writer.

Why did this happen? Were did all new hype for the franchise go?

Is it the lackluster reaction for Venditti? Did the movie kill it? Or did the readers and the excitment go with Johns to Justice League?

Is it even possible, that the hot thing wasn't Green Lantern after all? Instead it was "Green Lantern by Geoff Johns"?

[space Gandalf]

Venditti's run started badly but has improved. Unfortunately it's nowhere near the level it was when Johns was writing it. I think DC needed a big name to take over from Johns to keep the positive buzz around the series going.

And the Lantern books lately have been pretty much self contained and crossing over only with other Lantern books or small books like Lobo, that doesn't give new readers an incentive to check out the series like people did with events like Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night.

[Radix]

The Lantern line was supported by Johns. It was also bloated to 4 titles that it realistically could not sustain. So after John's finale, you had 4 books that had no clear purpose & they were crossing over all the time. Now the Lantern line has been trimmed down, but it has lost the momentum it once had. It would take another big name writer I think to restart that process and build a sustainable identity.

[Sirzechs]

The Lantern line was supported by Johns. It was also bloated to 4 titles that it realistically could not sustain. So after John's finale, you had 4 books that had no clear purpose & they were crossing over all the time. Now the Lantern line has been trimmed down, but it has lost the momentum it once had. It would take another big name writer I think to restart that process and build a sustainable identity.

The amount of titles wasn't the problem, shitty directions was, Venditti introduced a crap limitation on the Lanterns,even then a book like Red Lanterns maintained a solid 25K per month with Soule penning it.

[Sodam Yat]

The amount of titles wasn't the problem, shitty directions was, Venditti introduced a crap limitation on the Lanterns,even then a book like Red Lanterns maintained a solid 25K per month with Soule penning it.

I always thought the other titles declined regardless of quality, since the main title have a strong impact towards the other lantern titles.

[TheNewFiftyForum]

Hey, when looking over the sales for last month i noticed something. The sales for the main Lantern title are around 40.000 copies. Isn't this really low for a title you was one of the great success stories of the last years in comics?

When i started reading comics on a regular basis in 2011 Green Lantern by Geoff Johns was hot. It was even hotter in the years before and Johns was the king at DC. Even before reading comics you heard about the title and its awesome storylines. People were even joking that the new trinity was Batman, Superman and Green Lantern. The color spectrum was loved and celebrated as something fresh and awesome.

Four years later it seems, that nobody is talking about the title anymore. The Green Lantern mythos once shaped the DC universe (Blackest Night, Sinestro Corps War for example) and now nobody seems to care. There is almost no disscussion, just comments on the wish for a new writer.

Why did this happen? Were did all new hype for the franchise go?

Is it the lackluster reaction for Venditti? Did the movie kill it? Or did the readers and the excitment go with Johns to Justice League?

Is it even possible, that the hot thing wasn't Green Lantern after all? Instead it was "Green Lantern by Geoff Johns"?

I think the part in bold is the key aspect here. For a while there, you had to read the Green Lantern titles to know what was going on in the DCU as a whole, and what was going on was pretty damn exciting. It's probably the one thing, besides insanely good word of mouth, that can propel a non A-list superhero title up the sale charts these days.

[Black_Adam]

I thin Johns run ended in a really good place and it seems like alot of that has come undone since Venditti came on, which fans may not be happy about. Also the Lantern line seems really separate from the rest of the DCU, it wouldn't hurt to set some stories on Earth and have Green Lantern working alongside other heroes once in awhile.

Also just my personal opinion but after Johns run it was the perfect opportunity to pass the mantle on, I would of loved to have seen John Stewart or Simon Baz in the flagship Green Lantern book at least for awhile. Instead it seems like nothing has changed: Hal has gone all lone ranger again, the Corps are in disarray, universe is in danger, blah, blah. Simon Baz training Jessica Cruz to control her ring, pity we never got that story.

[Trey Strain]

Johns quit when there was nothing more his approach could eke out of it. And Venditti has admitted that he has read only the Johns run on the title.

You see the result.

Geoff's leaving would have been a good time to reboot it -- IF someone who had a vision for it had been in charge of it.

[The Overlord]

Well the bad Green Lantern movie didn't help things either, it really killed DC's plans to branch Green Lantern out in other media. I think the successful Iron Man movies are what pushing Marvel to make him a bigger player in the comics.

[RobinFan4880]

Rare is the time when a popular creator leaves a property and his replacement finds success, especially when the replacement does little to change the tone and scope of what came before.

[colonyofcells]

The Green Lantern franchise tends to collapse after a while. It had happened before with GL, GL Corps quarterly, GL Mosaic, Guy Gardner.

[joybeans]

Johns left the title, and the it went from being a franchise that could support 4-5 books to one that can barely sustain its biggest offshoot. And now Green Lantern fans are at each other's throats over whose Green Lantern should be the center of the universe. Having mediocre writers like Robert Venditti and Cullen Bunn helm the franchise doesn't help, and I doubt that Tom Taylor will, either.

[JackDaw]

Think the film being a complete turkey didn't help.

If film had been a big success, better writers might have been put on series, and it might have gone from strength to strength.

[Dispenser Of Truth]

They didn't seize the moment of having their biggest new franchise in years (and let's face it, relative to where it was at, GL was for all intents and purposes a new franchise) free to go in any direction on the heels of one of the most successful runs of all time. They shrugged their shoulders, decided these were now normal midtier superhero comics again instead of trying to headhunt Hickman or the like, and let it slip out of their grasp.

[Outside_85]

Thinking it has something to do with it being taken over by someone who just doesn't have the same clout at DC as Johns does.

Possibly it also suffers from a mix of event fatigue and home-sickness, since everything appears to be event level with small breathers in between and everything is in the depths of space.