CALL FOR PAPERS

In Brightest Day: Race, Justice, and the Speculative in HBO's Lanterns and the Green Lantern Mythos

Proposed for New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative -- The Ohio State University Press

Edited by Julian C. Chambliss, Ritesh Khandelwal, and Harry M. Foster (Michigan State University)

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: October 15, 2026
Send abstracts (300-500 words) and a bio (approx. 100 words) to greenlanternbookproject@gmail.com with the subject line "Lanterns CFP -- [your surname]."

OVERVIEW

This critical anthology takes HBO's Lanterns (2026) as the occasion for the first sustained scholarly reckoning with the Green Lantern mythos through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, and the speculative. An eight-episode crime-noir set in the American heartland, the series reimagines the cosmic Green Lantern tradition as a grounded murder investigation in Nebraska. A veteran Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) trains rookie John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) as a terrestrial killing opens onto the wider DC Universe. Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, with Mundy as showrunner, it is HBO's second live-action superhero series after Watchmen (2019), and a Chapter One cornerstone of James Gunn and Peter Safran's DC Universe.

Centering a Black cosmic law-enforcement officer who investigates an earthly crime in post-George Floyd America, Lanterns makes explicit a tension the Green Lantern Corps has carried for decades: an intergalactic police force, badged and oathbound, patrolling 3,600 sectors under the authority of the Guardians of Oa. What happens to that metaphor when the officer is Black, the beat is a small American town, and the genre is noir rather than space opera? This is the question the volume takes up.

WHY THIS BOOK, WHY NOW

Despite an eighty-five-year history across comics, animation, and film, the Green Lantern characters and world have gone almost entirely unexamined in the last decade of comics and media scholarship. Earlier work centered the O'Neil/Adams Green Lantern / Green Arrow run (1970-72) as social commentary; little has followed. At the same time, landmark superhero television on streaming platforms -- Watchmen, The Boys, the Marvel series -- has drawn journal articles and book chapters but almost no dedicated, book-length study, even as theatrical films routinely receive monographs.

This collection meets both gaps at once. It offers the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of Green Lantern and a book-length account of a major prestige-TV superhero property, organized around the questions the New Suns series exists to ask. Its nearest model is the series' own Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics -- a multi-author volume that treats race not as a topic but as the organizing lens.

STRUCTURE OF THE VOLUME

The anthology is organized in three parts, described below. Proposals may address any of the directions these descriptions open up; they are a guide to the volume's scope, not a fixed list.

Part I -- Green Lantern Mythology and Legacy

This section provides the scholarly foundation for Lanterns by examining Green Lantern's eighty-five-year history across comics, animation, and prior adaptations, and the context for how the series adapts, revises, and reimagines that world and mythology for modern audiences and streaming television. Essays here analyze the Green Lantern Corps as an intergalactic law-enforcement institution and trace how that metaphor has evolved across creative eras from the Golden Age through Geoff Johns's Emotional Spectrum stories. They examine individual Lanterns' characterizations -- Hal Jordan's journey from hero to villain to redeemed legend, and John Stewart's evolution across multiple origin stories and character-defining storylines -- and engage the Guardians of Oa as cosmic authority figures alongside willpower philosophy as the driving force behind their power. The section establishes what Lanterns inherits from decades of storytelling and gives readers unfamiliar with the comics the grounding to appreciate the adaptation's interventions and innovations.

Part II -- Analyzing HBO's Lanterns

The essays in Part Two engage the HBO series directly, through multiple lenses and methodological approaches. This section addresses the full range of the series, from narrative structure and storytelling strategies to the aesthetics of costume and set design and the other elements that shape the viewer's experience. It creates space for close textual analysis of the series' visuals and their relationship to inherited, contemporary, and modern trends in visual storytelling, as well as for readings of character dynamics and the culture of law-enforcement organizations along racial and class lines, depending on the backgrounds of the characters within the show. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the series' complexity and cultural significance.

Part III -- Lanterns in Context: Industry, Genre, and Future Directions

The concluding section positions Lanterns within broader conversations about contemporary media, generic evolution, and superhero studies. Essays might offer a comparative analysis of HBO's new DCU model and Marvel Studios' approach to superhero television, or examine where Lanterns fits within crime-noir television and how superhero genre tropes interact with crime-noir. Comparative work could read the series both as an entry in the DCU and in how it speaks to or responds to genre-bending works such as HBO's Watchmen or Amazon's The Boys. The contributions here look both around and forward at the landscape of superhero television and scholarship.

WHAT WE ESPECIALLY SEEK

Proposals grounded in critical race theory, Afrofuturism and Black speculative studies, Black feminist thought, adaptation and genre theory, and media and television studies. We welcome established and emerging scholars, and we prioritize a range of methods and standpoints. Because the volume is proposed for the New Suns series, we are especially glad to receive proposals attentive to race, gender, sexuality, and the speculative, and we welcome that lens across all three parts.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Abstract: 300-500 words, describing your argument, object, and method.
Bio: approximately 100 words, including affiliation and relevant publications.
Accepted chapters: 6,000-8,000 words including references.
Send to: greenlanternbookproject@gmail.com with the subject line "Lanterns CFP -- [your surname]."

Note: the volume is under review for the New Suns series at The Ohio State University Press. Final inclusion of individual chapters is contingent on the volume's acceptance and on editorial and peer review; contributors will be kept informed at each stage.

TIMELINE

Call released: August 2026 (after the series premiere)
Abstract deadline: October 18, 2026
Acceptance notifications: NLT Mid-November 2026
First full drafts due: April 2027
Editorial feedback: June 2027
Final chapters due: Fall 2027

Questions and proposals: Editorial Team -- greenlanternbookproject@gmail.com