Hannu
1880 - Hannu is born on Ovacron 6 during an incursion of the Reach, growing up fighting them back.
1901 - 21-year-old Hannu becomes the Green Lantern of Sector 2, keeping constant watch over the Reach.
8 years ago - Hannu & Shilandra Thane are selected to join the Green Lantern Honor Guard upon the deaths of Apros & K'ryssma
5 years ago - Hannu dies during Hal Jordan’s assault on Oa, allowing the Reach to again build up their forces.
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.
Hannu is a pretty ubiquitous presence in modern Green Lantern stories, but the most interesting thing about him, in my opinion, is the very weird way he came to be. It's a weird quirk in the way the larger mythology of Green Lanterns has played out.
Hannu is a pretty ubiquitous presence in modern Green Lantern stories, but the most interesting thing about him, in my opinion, is the very weird way he came to be. It's a weird quirk in the way the larger mythology of Green Lanterns has played out.
Hannu's StoryHannu's first appearance is in Green Lantern vol 3, #49... right in the middle of Emerald Twilight, the story of Hal Jordan's rampage through the Lantern Corp. In this issue we see Hal fighting Green Lanterns from all over the modern Lantern stories of the time... we see characters introduced in the regular series like Tomar Tu, Bodika & Kreon, characters from the Guy Gardner series like Graf Toren, and characters from anthology series like Laira and Jack T Chance... and then there was Hannu, who was completely original. All of them were killed in that issue.
Then, fast forward a decade to the Geoff Johns era of Green Lantern. We discover that all of the Lanterns that were killed in that issue had survived and were being kept prisoners by the Manhunters. This group was called the 'Lost Lanterns', and all of them were given more extensive characterizations. In Hannu's case, of course, that means giving him one at all, as he literally had only ever appeared in a single panel featuring his murder. This strange origin means that Hannu is kind of a blank slate for us. When we started working out how to use him, we chose to make him a veteran Lantern of a extremely important Sector, pitting him against the Blue Beetle villains the Reach, so his death actually explains why new Blue Beetle Jamie Reyes actually is able to access the sci-fi elements of his powers when his predecessors couldn't. We also made him one of the Honor Guard, making him one of the most powerful Lanterns of his era. |