Reimagining the Green Lantern Corps

With the box-office success of Aquaman, long-gestating projects based on DC properties are sure to be getting a bit of a boost. One such project, a Green Lantern Corps movie, has been in the air but never solidified since the critical and box-office disaster of the 2011 movie starring Ryan Reynolds. However, what I would like to do here is not to propose a set of inane criteria by which Warner Bros. can "do the property right" or pine for a series of doubtless obscure and ultimately juvenile comic pages to come to "life" on the big screen, but instead to formulate a vision by which the formula and indeed the identity of the Green Lantern Corps might be subverted, perverted, and completely reimagined. I want to use the general concepts introduced in the comics as a springboard from which to delve into more interesting themes in greater depth than is offered by the typical superhero comic or blockbuster movie.

Project: Return to 'Return to Sender' Top-Level Image

Previously I posted about the visual development of an image for a small project titled Return to Sender. That post can be found here. Essentially I walked through the various steps I used to make the image (planning, model-making, photography and compositing) and ended with a note that I was somewhat satisfied with the image but considered it not entirely finished. I have since gone back and revised the image, so this post is meant to document those updates.

Warming Up to the Techno-Fix

In a brief but broad discussion in 2015, award-winning science fiction author and literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin decried the absurdity of those who would turn to the techno-fix to combat global climate change (The Nation, 2018). The expression is a common one: technology got us into this mess, now we want to use it to get us out of it?

The trouble is, there simply isn’t any other way to deal with it. Either we face up to our responsibility as the driving system for global climate or we abdicate that role, pretending that our professed ignorance is the same as innocence and being both surprised and resigned to miserable outcomes. It’s a shame about all the displaced peoples in the Third World, we’ll say, but what can we do? And how could we have known? And all that biodiversity rapidly disappearing, at least we were able to preserve most of them as digital recreations inside of simulated realities so future generations can experience them.

Science and Self-Imposed Limits

If science is, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, a language that excludes all teleological vocabulary (Bauman, 1989) - a descriptive technique that avoids purpose or will - then it follows that there are limitations to its reasoning that are built into its interpretive framework. These limits manifest at the innermost and outermost scales - the questions concerning the self and the nature of the universe.

Peak Postmodernity: Peak As in 'Peak Oil'?

The present moment is characterised by peak postmodernity. 'The Death of God', what Nietzsche foresaw as an event that had occurred and yet was still on the way (Roderick, 1991), has come seeping into the culture at large, so that its engulfing damp has become unavoidable. What starts at the boundaries of the organism comes to reside within it, before being incorporated, integrated, and accepted into the body proper. The nihilism that Nietzsche feared as gripping a culture that had begun to realise the 'Death of God' and yet failed to put anything of worth in its place was in full evidence on the Internet 4chan board /b/ and other marginal subcultures that would soon give rise to the alt-right (Nagle, 2017). Within these subcultures nihilism had come to reside as a sort of default, and the appeal of fascist totalitarian solutions began to permeate the consciousnesses of those who feared the spilling out of the attitudes of the Internet onto behaviour in the "real-world".

Ancient Modernity

All my life I've dwelt among the creaking frames of ancient modernity. The world of callous institutional lighting along with the requisite always-flickering-but-never-to-be-replaced fluorescent tubes, paint-slathered brickwork in heavy desperate coats – trying to cover it up… always covering things up – drab brown-brick exteriors and the mediocre monotony of seventh-generation xeroxes of so-called exemplary modern architecture, worn thin by the necessary concessions to cost-consciousness; utopian ideals yoked and made subservient to capital. A world that can only inculcate a vague ambivalence, for feeling too is made hazy and indistinct by the replications of the cultural photoreceptors. A world that is holographic, hollowed out, and made so oblivious by the lobotomization that it cannot comprehend its own irrelevance. A world that can only pantomime to the march of progress in a somnambulant stupor while feasting on the remains of its own rotting flesh.

Don't worry folks, we can make things better, and that's exactly what we are doing and what we're going to do! And don't fret about those ideas floating around in the air, they never happened! We can have it all, we can be modern and anti-modern all the same. No contradiction there, no siree!

Project: Return to Sender "Top-Level" Development

Back in Fall of 2017 I started work on Return to Sender¹. This was to be a very short comic that I would incorporate into a larger set of comics as part of a personal project. I won't go into the details of that project here (perhaps another post), but instead I simply want to detail the development of what I refer to as the "top-level domain" within the comic.

Some background is perhaps in order though. Return to Sender is an idea for a short story I came up with: a visual narrative of a woman coming upon a lab not intended for her eyes, discovering tanks with brains hooked up to computers and having the startling and unnerving realization that if those brains are simulated people then she too might be simulated, and on and on. To illustrate this I intended to depict four different levels of reality: that of the woman, a lab environment above her, an industrial environment above that, and finally a seemingly alien environment as the top-level domain.