Soranik Natu

28 years ago - Soranik Natu is born on Korugar amidst the Sinestro Regime.

17 years ago - 11-year-old Soranik Natu, like the rest of Korugar, still vastly distrusts Green Lanterns once Sinestro’s regime is toppled.

11 years ago - 17-year-old Soranik Natu sees Katma Tui, the “great betrayer”, become the new Green Lantern of her sector.

7 years ago - 21-year-old Soranik Natu first becomes a surgeon.

2 years ago - 26-year-old Soranik Natu is recognized as one of the best surgeons on her planet.

1 year ago - 27-year-old Soranik Natu is selected as a Green Lantern, and she accepts so that she can save her patient, even as she is rejected by her people. She helps Princess Iolande become a new Green Lantern and they become partners. Her relationship with Kyle Rayner gets complicated.

now - 28-year-old Soranik Natu and Princess Iolande go to Korugar to stop a new despot using the Sinestro regime. She starts to earn the trust of her people

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.

Soranik comes from the Geoff Johns era of Green Lantern stories, and she's very heavily tied up in the expansive mythology Johns built across more than a decade and several different series. Anyone that's been around our site for a long time knows that we're pretty actively rejecting the Geoff Johns version of Green Lantern in favor of the earlier versions of the story, but there's plenty to enjoy there as a standalone story, and Soranik is a great example.

Soranik Natu's Comic History

Soranik first appeared in 2005 in issue #1 of Green Lantern Corps: Recharge, the miniseries prelude to the new Green Lantern Corps series that introduced lots of new characters to the newly rebuilt Corp. There were some clever ideas here and there, but it was very clear that Soranik was THE new character that the whole series would focus on.

First of all, she was from Korugar, but unlike the long-dead Katma Tui, she still distrusted the Corp because of the fascist regime Sinestro imposed on his home planet. She was a brilliant young surgeon, and accepted the ring entirely because it enabled her to save her patients life. Her perspective was fascinating: her loyalty to the corp was unquestioned, but she saw it all as an outsider, and was unafraid to point out its inconsistencies and hypocricies. She was also obviously a character being drawn to look good, but who tended to look better when the artist DIDN"T unnecessarily expose her, which is a nice subversion of comic tropes. She would go on to have a romance with Kyle Rayner, because that's just the sort of thing that happens with Kyle.

As John's story evolved, Soranik's role got bigger and bigger. It soon turned out that she was actually Sinestro's long lost daughter, and as such she would eventually leave the Green Lanterns to join, and eventually lead, the Sinestro Corp, and be instrumental in them eventually allying themselves with the Green Lanterns... it's a LOT, and I do recommend you read it, but we're not using any of those stories.

Our Soranik Natu Story

Our take on Soranik is less about the huge stories she was a part of as Johns' mythology went on, and focuses instead on the stellar character we first got when she was originally introduced. Her role as the newest Green Lantern from Sinestro's sector, and the third from Korugar, is just fascinating. The fact that she's really the one responsible for finally undoing the damage wrought by Sinestro to the reputation of the Green Lanterns on her home planet is, I think, a great take on her story. She's presented from the very beginning as being an incredibly capable character and a great counterbalance to the existing Lanterns, and someone whose own stories are just as much fun to follow.

We didn't want to get TOO lost in the weeds with her relationship with Kyle, mostly because within the context of our timeline, he's technically still in a relationship with Jade back on Earth... but this is actually pretty close to the sort of situation Kyle tended to get himself into during his own series, so we thought we'd just leave it kind of up in the air, the way he tends to do anyway.

Allies & Teams