Earth2 Green Lantern Alan Scott will be a Gay character
Initially started as a rumor, DC Comics stated that they were planning on making a top tier character in the DC universe New 52 reboot a gay character. Rumors and speculation followed. Every character had came up to being questioned. From Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, all the way to Robin, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy, it seemed that no character was safe from the speculation.
Then last week BleedingCool posted that they received notice from a “reliable source” that it would be none other than the first Green Lantern Alan Scott.
Alan Scott was first created 70 years ago, and the original Green Lantern didn’t receive his powers from a Alien ring like the newer Green Lantern’s, but from a mystical artifact known as the “green flame” that fell to Earth in ancient China.
The New York Post broke the news this morning that the reboot of the character will indeed be revealed as a gay man in next week’s Earth 2 #2. Despite his original continuity of him being a married father of two, this new and much younger version of the superhero has a boyfriend in “The New 52“.
In the article, The New York Post caught up with writer James Robinson, who had this to say about the new and controversial changes to the character;
Robinson said he decided to make the change because making the character young again meant erasing Scott’s gay superhero son out of existence.
“The only downside of his being young was we lose his son, Obsidian, who’s gay. So I thought, ‘Why not make Alan Scott gay?'” Robinson recalled. “That was the seed that started it.”
He ran his idea by the bosses at DC, “who signed off on it without hesitation.”
“It’s a realistic depiction of society,” he said. “You have to move with the times.”
“He’s a type-A personality who doesn’t hide in the shadows,” Robinson said.
“I hope he’s a positive figure. If there’s some kind of kid out there who’s reading the comic and who’s worried about the person he is, maybe it will give him a positive sense of who he is. Or maybe a different kid will read it and decide I don’t need to bully some kind of kid in school,” Robinson said.
While a gay wedding in Archie Comics earlier this year and impending same-sex nuptials in a Marvel X-Men comic have recieved a small amount of backlash from angry parents, Robinson said he’s not worried about that because “that kind of negativity is stupid and outmoded.”
“We should be preaching love and tolerance,” he said.
While I do understand his reasoning, and I do respect DC Comics for making such a controversial move that does actually promote tolerance and acceptance, I cant help but feel that if DC or Marvel wanted to do this, it would’ve been best with a newly created character, not one who had be beloved by fans and have been around longer than some peoples grandparents. Either way, its been done, and readers will have to either accept it, ignore it, and move on.
