Time for DC to put its strangest Green Lanterns on screen

The HBO series Lanterns has already snuck in a couple of deep-cut Corps gags that hint at just how weird the Green Lantern universe can get. In Episode 7, John Stewart tells a story about Hal Jordan’s funeral that includes a guest who couldn’t possibly have been there — Mogo — and Hal busts him immediately for an obvious reason: Mogo is a planet. Earlier, Episode 4 drops a casual nod to a Lantern who looks like a woodland critter, with Hal dryly noting one member is a “squirrel.”

That’s the fun of the Corps in DC lore: the ring doesn’t only pick square-jawed humans or humanoids. Across the comics, Green Lanterns have included a sentient world, a microscopic life-form, beings who navigate entirely by sound, and even living geometry. If the DCU leans into that variety, here are five gloriously odd Lanterns ready-made for on-screen storytelling.

Leezle Pon is a super-intelligent smallpox virus — and a Green Lantern.

Five gloriously weird picks

• Leezle Pon — Introduced by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in Green Lantern #188 (1985), Leezle Pon serves as the Lantern of Sector 119 and is, no joke, a super-smart smallpox virus. During the Sinestro Corps era, Leezle Pon fought the fear corps’ bio-weapon Despotellis after Despotellis infected Guy Gardner. Soranik Natu literally injected Leezle Pon into Guy’s bloodstream, turning the rescue into a microscopic power-ring duel inside his body — and Leezle Pon won. On screen, you wouldn’t need a costume or performer at all; the character could show up as medical imagery, a ring visualization, or a crisis that shrinks the action down to cellular scale.

• Mogo — Also created by Moore and Gibbons in Green Lantern #188, Mogo is a sentient planet and canonically the Corps’ largest member, able to display the green insignia across his own surface. Beyond the Episode 7 name-drop joke in Lanterns, Mogo has serious history: after the destruction of Oa, DC notes the Corps used Mogo as a home base. He’s a character and a setting in one.

• Rot Lop Fan — Dreamed up by Alan Moore and Bill Willingham in Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #3 (1987), Rot Lop Fan hails from the Obsidian Deeps, a region without light. His species can’t perceive color, so Katma Tui reframed the entire Lantern concept through sound. Rot Lop Fan hears the power as an F-sharp tone, serves in the F-Sharp Bell Corps, and wears a bell symbol. He even got a CGI background cameo among aliens in the 2011 Green Lantern movie — a premise this strange deserves center stage, not just a crowd shot.

• Ch’p — From the planet H’lven and Sector 1014, Ch’p is the chipmunk-like Lantern comic readers immediately thought of when Hal mentioned a “squirrel” in Episode 4. Created by Paul Kupperberg and Don Newton, he first appeared in Green Lantern #148 (1982). The visual is disarming, but in DC lore Ch’p is a capable officer whose look underlines how broad the Corps truly is.

• B’ox — First seen in Green Lantern Corps: Recharge #5 (2006), B’ox is exactly what the name suggests: a sentient rectangular solid whose surfaces carry the Corps colors and logo. He’s no prop — B’ox fought the Spider Guild’s invasion of Oa, took part in the Battle of Mogo at the start of the Sinestro Corps War, kept serving through later cosmic dust-ups, and teamed with Stel and B’dg to form an enormous construct against Infinity Man.

Between a planet with a power ring, a virus that can duel inside a hero’s bloodstream, and a Lantern who hears in F-sharp, the bench is deep — and the show has already winked at both Mogo and Ch’p. Rot Lop Fan has even appeared once before via CGI among the aliens in the 2011 Green Lantern film.