Laira
29 years ago - Laira is born on Jayd, daughter of Emperor Kentor Omoto.
17 years ago - 12-year-old Laira’s mother is killed in a terrorist bombing. She begins her training as one of her father's warrior elite.
14 years ago - 15-year-old Laira sees that her father is obsessed with revenge and control, but her loyalty to him keeps her at his side.
10 years ago - 19-year-old Laira fights the Green Lantern that arrives on Jayd to stop her father. He sees her hesitance and gives her the chance to rebel. When he is killed, his ring chooses her as the sector's new Green Lantern, and she goes to Oa rather than confront her father.
7 years ago - 22-year-old Laira sees the rebuilt Jayd regime starting to spread to nearby planets, and finally has to defeat her father.
5 years ago - 24-year-old Laira is on Jayd when her ring fails during Hal Jordan's attack on Oa. She devotes herself to ending the conflict on her planet.
1 year ago - 28-year-old Laira returns to the Green Lantern Corps when Kyle Rayner restarts to Power Battery, leaving Jayd to finally govern itself.
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.
Laira is one of those really fantastic Green Lantern characters that came about in their own short story from one of the anthology series. She was so immediately cool that she feels like she should be the protagonist of her own series, but the world of Green Lantern is already overflowing with protagonists. We're left with one great story with one great character, and sometimes that's just a gift.
Laira is one of those really fantastic Green Lantern characters that came about in their own short story from one of the anthology series. She was so immediately cool that she feels like she should be the protagonist of her own series, but the world of Green Lantern is already overflowing with protagonists. We're left with one great story with one great character, and sometimes that's just a gift.
Laira's StoryLaira's story appeared in my favorite Green Lantern series; Green Lantern Corps Quarterly. Specifically, in issue #6 from 1993. It was an anthology series responsible for some of my favorite Green Lantern short stories, in this case it was 'What Price Honor?' by Ruben Diaz. The big draw here was that this is early work by Travis Charest, future artist of stuff like WildC.A.T.S. & Jodorowsky's Metabarons. It's also an absolutely brilliant cross-pollination of Green Lantern mythology and a classically 90's sexy bad-ass ninja girl.
In this story, Laira is a trainee Green Lantern who has been selected after the death of her father, the previous Green Lantern. Her first mission brings her back to her home planet, which has come under the despotic rule of a cult of religious zealots and their ruthless leader. She goes after them, and discovers that their leader is in fact her father, who abandoned his Lantern ring, making her have to choose between her familial loyalty and her duty as a Green Lantern. It's a short story, but you very quickly find yourself enamored with the compelling heroine. |
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About a year later, during Hal Jordan's rampage against oa, Hal was shown deliberately killing several known Green Lanterns drawn from different corners of the Green Lantern mythology, and Liara was one of them. This wound up being a thing, because all the characters depicted being killed here would turn up again later during Geoff Johns as the 'Lost Lanterns', all given new more elaborate backstories. It's in this role that most of Laira's comic appearances happen.
Our main goal with Laira was to include her original story, but when we originally wrote it, it was based much more heavily on her appearance in the animated movie Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, which reimagines her story subtly by making her aware of her father's regime from the beginning. . We've rebuilt her story in a way that roughly amalgamates both the comic and animated versions. We actually had some debate about what to do with Laira once Kyle Rayner restarts the Corp. The idea of a space princess who fights using advanced martial arts that uses her powers to generate her weapons is a very cool one and actually would function just as well without her connection to the Green Lanterns, so we considered her not coming back to the Corp so she could stay on Jayd and be her own character. What ultimately made us decide to have her return to Oa and leave Jayd to govern itself was her original story, and her devotion to the Corp. |
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