Larfleeze
1652 - 51-year-old Larfleeze reaches adulthood. His birth defect preventing him from getting an education, he becomes a laborer.
1683 - 82-year-old Larfleeze's home planet Sh'pilkuzz is occupied by the Lakadakians. Cast aside and marked for death because of his defect, he is able to hide among the bodies being shipped off-planet and escape.
1689 - 88-year-old Larfleeze and his partner Bronia become interplanetary thieves, robbing from the Lakadakians.
1750 - 149-year-old Larfleeze is the only survivor on his home planet Sh'pilkuzz when the Lakadakian sorcerer Myrwhydden uses the Avarice Box, a magical artifact that allows him to absorb the memories and resources of the people of their world and summon constructs of the dead. Larfleeze is able to contact the Green Lantern of sector 1355, Penelops, who is only able to stop the sorcerer when Larfleeze strips him of the Avarice Box. Larfleeze is buried in the collapsing ruins of his home planet with the box and presumed lost, remembered as a hero.
7 years ago - Larfleeze reemerges from within the ruins of his own planet. He uses the Avarice Box to consume an entire planet's resources in sector 1417. Katma Tui, along with John Stewart & Gallius Zed, confront him. Now able to magically summon the historic might of an entire species, he almost defeats them. He is stripped of the Avarice Box and imprisoned, while the box is stored on Oa.
5 years ago - Larfleeze escapes his imprisonment when the Green Lantern Corps is destroyed by Hal Jordan, he begins hunting for the lost Avarice Box, which was taken from the ruins of Oa by small-time criminal Ferenc.
2 years ago - Larfleeze tracks down and murders Ferenc, reclaiming the Avarice Box. Unchecked, he begins to take over whole planetary systems. Kyle Rayner is summoned into deep space to track him down, fighting through an army of constructs to find and finally defeat Larfleeze, destroying the Avarice Box. Larfleeze dives into the resulting stellar mass singularly, consumed in the infant black hole.
This is a loaded entry because, as long-time readers know, not doing the multi-color Lantern Corps is one of the core ideas from the very beginning. I've described this a dozen times, but basically when you flatten everyone into just one more version of the same basic shape, one more character with a ring, you do so at the expense of all the fantastic weirdness of the world of Green Lanterns.
Almost all the characters introduced in this REALLY big and very popular era are... just sort of a monster shape and a ring. Almost. There ARE ideas here that, if you manage to get away from the sameness of the multicolor Lanterns actually feel like they could be a cool if allowed to be their own thing. Larfleeze might actually be the best possible example.
Almost all the characters introduced in this REALLY big and very popular era are... just sort of a monster shape and a ring. Almost. There ARE ideas here that, if you manage to get away from the sameness of the multicolor Lanterns actually feel like they could be a cool if allowed to be their own thing. Larfleeze might actually be the best possible example.
Larfleeze's Comic HistoryGeoff Johns' run on Green Lantern started in 2005. After he introduced the Sinestro Corps, the other Corps started to show up around issue #25. I am really not the person to talk up this era because of my well-documented frustration with it, but to summarize, we got a couple of different Lantern Corps all geared to different emotions. (Willpower is an emotion, apparently. Honestly, I don't think this would trigger me so much if this was just A Green Lantern story and not the ONLY Green Lantern Story.) The Orange Lantern Corps is actually one of the more creative ones. It's geared to Greed, and It's actually only one guy, Larfleeze, who killed the rest of the Corps and manifests them as constructs.
We do slowly get some backstory about Larfleeze; that he's actually billions of years old, dating all the way back to the beginning of the various Corps. This effectively means he's not really a character, per se, so much as he's just a lore element, but there are clearly ideas here that COULD work given the right context. |
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Our Larfleeze StoryThis is a great example of an idea that someone talked me into; all it really took was someone to point out a (with the benefit of hindsight) pretty obvious interpretation of the character. You can do almost his exact story. Just remove the ring.
He's already free of most of the trappings I dislike about the rainbow Lanterns. He's not just a face in the crowd. He actually has his own weird story going on. Once you get rid of the idea of an Orange Lantern and replace it with a magical "Avarice Box", the rest kind of writes itself, doesn't it? He's space Gollum. Just imagine him in a different outfit. We wrote him a pretty tragic backstory culled from bits of his canon lore, just setting it more recently so he's not billions of years old. Once he comes back, he is a really fantastic Green Lantern threat. We decided to actually make him a threat in a different Lantern Sector and pit him against Katma Tui, which means she gets some assistance from John Stewart and his buddy Gallius Zed. It's a different grouping of Lanterns than you usually get, which was fun. Then, of course, we brought him back one more time to challenge Kyle. Hopefully, this is a good illustration of specifically what we're looking for here. Characters that build unique stories, that give us fun new interactions in the timeline. A reimagined Larfleeze absolutely does that. |