Red Lanterns Milligan Interview

On Friday, CBR posted a brief interview with Peter Milligan in regards to the upcoming Red Lanterns series. Like many interviews on the popular industry news sites, this feels like a puff piece and gentle advertisement designed to slowly build hype for a series that won't be published for almost another half year.

Obviously, in a discussion about an upcoming book, Milligan isn't going to spell everything out, but I thought a couple of his statements were interesting. When asked if Atrocitus, the main character of the Red Lanterns series, is similar to any other character Milligan's ever written, he replied that Atrocitus shares some qualities with the Rhino, whom Milligan wrote in a particularly memorable Spider-Man's Tangled Web two-parter ("Flowers for Rhino") in the early 2000's. (I notice Milligan also said that the Rhino story was a one-shot.)

"Flowers for Rhino" was definitely a highlight of the entire run of Tangled Web (and that was, with the sole exception of the Daniel Way-penned issues, as good a run of Spider-Man comics as you can hope to read). It instills me with a bit more confidence and optimism to hear that Milligan still remembers that story and can sort of tap into that vein for this new DC series.

On the other hand, Milligan is kind of vague when it comes to how his new series will relate to the various going-ons in the Green Lantern universe (much less the DC Universe as a whole). He doesn't know all the specifics of everything yet, but it does sound like he's completely at the mercy of editorial whims and I wouldn't be surprised if he's forced to juggle around his story ideas in service to various crossovers and such.

Regardless, I'm still looking forward to seeing his take on the Green Lantern mythos. Even if I only have a general conception of what's been going on in that corner of the superhero universe for the past few years, I would still like to see what Milligan will do and how it will compare to his other works.

You can read the CBR interview for yourself here:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=30432