Green Lantern: First Flight

Since Justice League: The New Frontier firmly established an origin for the character, Green Lantern: First Flight is allowed to ditch the usual ability discovery and zap straight into intergalactic policing. Hal Jordan's Green Lantern hasn't ever maintained a constant presence in Bruce Timm's DC animated universe. His priors are limited to the aforementioned period piece and a brief cameo in a time-slipped Justice League Unlimited two-parter.

First Flight plays it taciturn, Jordan quietly sniffing out the motives of his new allies and taskmasters, before shining in a series of hyperbolic beam battles. First Flight seizes the cosmic implications of the Green Lantern Corp, wrapping Jordan's trainee efforts in a rich environment of baffling realities and alien otherness. Jordan, a daredevil test-pilot on Earth, takes it all in his stride. The spikey, extraterrestrial characters also work as a further departure from the usually rounded house style, and then as a subtextual body ideal. Jordan is schlubby in Terra civvies, weighed down by oversized baggies that obscure his outline. In Lantern duds he's sleek and gleaming, his space-cop armour glistening like an insect's carapace. Man takes his place amongst the stars.