Penn Maricc

49 years ago - Penn Maricc is born in citadel space.

28 years ago - 21-year-old Penn Maricc becomes a citadel soldier.

16 years ago - 33-year-old Penn Maricc leaves the citadel service, becoming a mercenary & bounty hunter

9 years ago - 40-year-old Penn Maricc is recruited into the Rogue Corps with Guy Gardner.

8 years ago - 41-year-old Penn Maricc defends the Green Lantern Corps from Thaal Sinestro, and earns his rank within the Corp proper.

5 years ago - 44-year-old Penn Maricc is nearly killed in Hal Jordan’s assault on Oa. He returns to bounty hunting.

1 year ago - 48-year-old Penn Maricc helps Kyle Rayner restart the Oan Battery and rejoins the Green Lantern Corps.

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.

Penn Maricc is one of the Green Lantern characters introduced in his own standalone short-story. He's had very few appearances otherwise, but he happens to fit a particular niche in out larger story, so we're going to include him specifically for that purpose.

Penn Maricc's Comic History

During the late eighties post-Crisis shake-up of the Green Lantern books, we got the regular anthology series Tales of the Green Lantern Corps, and it's three annual issues, all with stories by some of the best writers of the era. The story of Penn Maricc was featured in Annual #2 in 1986, and was written by industry legend Mindy Newell with some very cool, illustrative art by George Freeman. It was called 'Mercenary' and tells the story of the Guardians of Oa hiring Penn Maricc, a gun for hire, to save a young overthrown king from a religious insurrection. It's a fun little adventure story with sharp writing and a great character, but the real payoff is in the end when the Guardians reveal themselves, and grant Penn a role as a Green Lantern, and he roundly rejects them.

Maricc has made very infrequent appearances that establish that he did eventually join the Green Lanterns, but he never really had a huge role to play outside that original story.

Our Penn Maricc Story

In trying to create a unique path to becoming a Green Lantern for Guy Gardner, we amalgamated a few different story ideas and said that an offshoot of the Guardians of Oa broke away and created their own small version of the Green Lanterns, at once more proactive but also likely more violent. We wanted to populate this group with characters that seemed more roguish, and Maricc is an ideal candidate for that group. Eventually he would fight alongside the actual Green Lantern Corp and earn a place with them. So we're not exactly using the story presented in his lone major comic appearance, although something like that may have happened. What we're really focusing on is the idea of a grizzled old space bounty hunter who winds up among the Green Lanterns.

Another reason we like this is because during Kyle's quest to restart the Power Battery, having Penn Maricc among the ex-lanterns that wind up working alongside him is going to have a great energy. He's going to be a tough, bar-brawling, gambling gunfighter, but will have this air of having once been a part of this noble order of space cops. Sometimes sci-fi is just the best, isn't it?

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