SDCC 2024: Tate Brombal and Werther Dell’Edera on Their Daring, New Green Lantern

DC Comics is set to introduce one of its most curious Green Lanterns the upcoming Elseworlds title, Green Lantern: Dark. The last year has seen the branding return and deliver numerous new stories set in the worlds of classic stories like Gotham by Gaslight and Dark Knights of Steel.

However, later this year, DC Comics premiering an original Elseworlds that will debut a brand-new Green Lantern. House of Slaughter’s Tate Brombal and Something is Killing the Children’s Werther Dell’Edera sat down with Screen Rant to discuss what fans can expect from this twisted new world they’ve crafted and from their mysterious Emerald Knight.

Screen Rant: DC has really been pushing the Elseworlds imprint in the last year. What does Elseworlds mean to you both and why specifically an alternate world for your story?

Tate Brombal: Elseworlds for me is that you can unlock all of the potential of a character. You can go down straight to the iconic core of who they are and do a new fresh spin on it which can reexamine that character in a new light. For me, the seminal DC comic for me was Kingdom Come. I literally didn’t leave the couch for the entire evening and just read the entire thing issue by issue and I was like “This is what is possible with these characters because I’ve never seen Superman like that.”. I’ve never seen any of those characters portrayed that way. It stays so true to who the character is, but you put them in a new situation that unlocks new sides of them. So that is the potential of Elseworlds for me, and also just having fun with new versions of all these characters. We’re having fun with Grundy and some other fun characters that I don’t want to spoil. So that’s huge for me for Elseworlds. What was the second part of the question?.

Tate Brombal: For this one we wanted to take what the Green Lantern is at the core of their power and take it back to the roots. They were once more magical abilities like Alan Scott. So we wanted to bring it back to a magical core instead of the typical sci-fi, space cop stuff we have right now.

Werther Dell’Edera: I love it. Because the idea is that to take this character and do whatever you want with them. It’s amazing. I remember…What was the name? Speeding Bullets? The story where Superman and Batman with that amazing costume with no face was beautiful. That is what intrigued me in the beginning when Tate told me about the story. I was totally in because it means a lot. It means a lot of freedom. The way you can imagine characters so differently. It’s really fun.

Obviously, there is hundreds of Green Lanterns to choose from, but you too chose to make a new Green Lantern, Rina, as the focus of Green Lantern: Dark. What makes her the best to tell your story?

Tate Brombal: Yes, she is the best for this story and she is the best Green Lantern, period, just to make that clear. I wanted a Green Lantern who, even though her powers function on willpower, she barely has the willpower to get out of bed every morning. She’s like “I am tired. I don’t know if I can save the world.”. So that’s her core struggle. and just having the weight of the world on her shoulders. And it’s kind of not fair. All the superheroes are gone and she’s the only one left and she’s become a symbol of hope for everybody who’s left and a symbol of light in the darkness, literally. We wanted a new character that we could kind of really just have a clean slate and build up from that. With other Green Lanterns, because they’re so noble, they’re like “We must find the willpower to do this!”. And I’m like “Sometimes it’s hard.”. So that is Rina’s struggle, which I think will make her like really relatable. She is grumpy. But her character I will be finding that hope. Where does that willpower come from when you don’t have any left? We love her so much.

Werther Dell’Edera: She’s good but she’s not a smooth character. She has a lot of dark corners in her mind, in her soul. Because she’s like “Okay, I don’t want to do it at all.”. But she obviously will do the hero’s journey. Yeah. So it’s really, really fun. Sometimes, she’ll reminds me of me.

Even though Rina is new, I feel like we see shades of other Lanterns and her. She’s grumpy and has a bowl cut like Guy. And with her lantern, I’m getting shades of Tangent Comics Green Lantern. Did you guys try to purposefully bake in some other Lanterns into Rina’s characterization?

Tate Brombal: I think it’s important because we want her to feel like a natural addition to the Green Lantern family. And even if those Lanterns don’t exist in her universe, we just wanted to pay homage to those characters and make her feel like a Green Lantern. And the Tangent Lantern resemblance maybe on purpose, that’s the most clear one. But we won’t spoil anything from the books, but there’s a reason she also has a literal lantern.

Werther Dell’Edera: When I designed the character, I go with the short haircut And when she was done, I look at her and say “Hm. She looks a lot like Guy”. (laughs)

I appreciate you guys using Solomon Grundy, who feels like he’s been left behind as a Green Lantern villain. He’s fought other heroes, but he’s a Green Lantern villain. Do you want to talk a bit about Grundy?

Tate Brombal: Yeah, that was big for me. I was thinking of who our first villain be for for Rina face and I was like “It’s got to be Grundy. It’s got to be Alan Scott’s first villain.”. There’s this idea of Rina holding like the spark of life and Grundy is like the ultimate undying death. And he is terrifying and we just wanted a scary, cool zombie villain. And our Grundy here has an army of zombies. It’s just a lot of fun and it looks really cool. But Werther can talk about the the design.

Werther Dell’Edera:Yeah, we started with the idea of to have a theme related to nature. But with the TV show Last of Us already out, we thought “Okay, we can’t do the same thing because it looks too much like that”. So we started to think about something different, but still related and we got talking each other. He said, What do you like?”. Why not use flowers as the expression of the force of nature because they are beautiful and terrifying. So we put flowers instead of mushrooms on him and it was so fun because the way his power works is really interesting.

Grundy is often kind of depicted as a like a brute and not too much an intelligent person. But you got him leading an army. Do you want to talk about his characterization here?

Tate Brombal: I’ve always felt this deep sadness to this character. I have a lot of pathos for him and I wanted to bring that out even though he’s this villain, and why he is gunning for Green Lantern. But the reason behind him going after Green Lantern is sad even though the whole the whole book you’re scared of him. He’s this undying brute force against his will. He might not even want to be alive still, but he’s this undead zombie who’s stuck with being alive. He only has a few lines in our first issue. But each line I’m like “Oh, Grundy, man, that’s breaking my heart.”. So I’m really excited for readers to see this version of Grundy and just remind them of the core of who this character is. And also giving him this kickass design that’s so cool.

Werther, I know artists have talked about how fun it is working with Green Lantern and the complete creative expression that comes with them. You want to talk about what you’ve gotten out of this as an artist?

Werther Dell’Edera: Well, Green Lantern is one of my favorite characters in the DC Universe. Having the chance to work on this kind of character is amazing. It’s something that I discover page by page. What she can really do, because there are a lot of things that you can think about before and when you are on the page and you are drawing it, at some point, a line of dialogue or a description leads to a new idea, a new point of view on this kind of power. That is so fun because they have literally no limit. So it’s really cool.

Green Lantern: Dark #1 is available on October 23rd from DC Comics.