Ch'p
22 years ago - Ch’p is born on H’lven.
18 years ago - 4-year-old Ch’p defends his homeworld from the Crabbite invasion of Doctor Ub’x. He's captured, but is selected to join the Green Lantern Corp and becomes one of the most successful new recruits, training alongside Hal Jordan & Medphyll and helping battle Legion. He's able to return to H’lven and defeat Ub’xm, becoming the Lantern of sector 1014.
11 years ago - 11-year-old Ch’p marries his longtime girlfriend M’nn’e
7 years ago - 15-year-old Ch’p, Hal Jordan & Killowog are sent by Ganthet, one of the Guardians of Oa, into the forbidden Sector 666 to investigate a group of Lost Lanterns being held hostage by Atrocitus & the Red Lanterns. They are assisted by Bro'Dee, who is given a unique Blue Battery by Ganthet to become Saint Walker, the Blue Lantern.
5 years ago - 17-year-old Ch’p saves thousands of civilians from the destruction of Oa during Hal Jordan's attack, and returns to H’lven.
1 year ago - 21-year-old Ch’p helps Kyle Rayner restart the Oan Battery, returning to the Green Lantern Corps. He is selected to join the new Green Lantern Honor Guard.
The extended membership of the Green Lantern Corp comes from a few different sources, but interestingly, those same sources all seem to happen in cycles. There are characters introduced more or less as background characters who have a line here and there but who gain popularity because of some quirk of their design, there are characters introduced in their own standalone stories whose role may or may not expand over time but who remain popular because that original story was so clever, and there are characters that are actually introduced with the intention of playing a role in the main continuity Green Lantern story. These different character sources repeat through the various eras of Green Lantern Corp mythology, resulting in a pretty deep roster of potential characters for us to go over.
Ch'p was a character from his own short story, but his role in the comics shifted pretty dramatically, so you'd be forgiven for thinking he came from something else entirely. He wound up as such a bizarre inclusion in the regular Green Lantern series that you really have to be clear as to what version of him you're planning to use.
Ch'p was a character from his own short story, but his role in the comics shifted pretty dramatically, so you'd be forgiven for thinking he came from something else entirely. He wound up as such a bizarre inclusion in the regular Green Lantern series that you really have to be clear as to what version of him you're planning to use.
Ch'p's Comic HistoryThe Green Lantern comics of the early eighties are a strange read, because as the stories of the main characters got weirder and more esoteric, the backup stories got more and more fun and entertaining. Issue #148 in 1981 featured an untitled backup story that was really a pretty straightforward adventure of a new Green Lantern as he went to a planet populated by his people's sworn enemies, to save them from a pending apocalypse, and had to fight his own prejudices and their short-sighted violence to save their planet. The only thing that made it strange was the fact that the hero of the story was a little anthropomorphic squirrel.
Ch'p continued to appear in a few different backup stories before eventually starting to appear in the main story, but as time passed his look shifted. He changed from what was basically just a regular talking squirrel into a much more cartoonish character. As the Corp was redefined as a group of characters all living on Earth, Ch'p was a part of their membership, but at this point he looked like he had stepped out of a looney tunes short, wearing ridiculous overalls and a bowtie. Weirdly, as he made this transition, he actually has a more and more tragic background as his whole planet was lost in the Crisis of Infinite Earths. |
Ch'p's role in the comics diminished pretty quickly, and I have to think it's because his cartoonish look was just too much of a non-sequitur to maintain. He did appear again in the John Stewart series Mosaic with a new, less cartoonish look, but the series also featured his death in issue #2 before he continued to appear in later issues. It was a weird series. The main takeaway was that Ch'p was dead.
Here's the thing though; the original concept of a little talking squirrel Green Lantern is a really good one, even if they managed to mess it up by making him a cartoon. Ch'p appeared in several animated shorts and feature films, always as a prominent member of the Corp. When Johns rebuilt the Corp in Green Lantern Rebirth, one of the first things he did was introduce B'dg, Ch'ps successor and exactly what he always should have been; just a little squirrel with a Lantern ring. There are only a few Green Lanterns who would go on to be replaced after their death with a similar character of the same design, which just goes to show exactly how beloved the original was. |
Our Ch'p StoryWe have a few very specific roles we wanted C'p to fill, all of them meant to really play him up as one of the best Green Lanterns of his era. We made him a contemporary of Hal Jordan, actually going through training together and generally outperforming Hal in every way. He has his own heroic story on his own planet, and even gets to marry his girlfriend there. We have a version of the story from the Green Lantern Animated Series, as Hal and Killowog fly into the lost sector to deal with the Red Lantern threat there. We chose to add Ch'p to that adventure, as that threesome just struck us as such a fun way to execute that story.
We wanted him to do something really heroic during the fall of the Green Lanterns, so we made him the Lantern responsible for getting the civilian population of Oa to safety, literally saving thousands. We also made him part of the group of Lanterns that help Kyle restart the power battery, and make him a member of the new Lantern Honor Guard. Obviously, we're huge fans of Ch'p, and a big part of that is because he's my wife's favorite Green Lantern. That's why we're also teaming him up with her OTHER favorite, Mogo, having them solve mysteries together. Yea, it's a lot... but she likes it, and that's more than enough for me. |