The Culture

“Reign of terror? I’m not sure I understand. But you’ve got lots of time to explain it to me. Well, at least the night.”

This prestige format one-shot from DC is part of their Elseworlds series where a twist is applied to a familiar hero usually by changing their normal setting. This mash up of Green Lantern with 1001 Nights was written by Terry LaBan who is more of an underground comic writer/artist but has done some work for major companies including The Dreaming for Vertigo and a Grendel mini-series for Dark Horse. The art was by Rebecca Guay whose work I know from the Black Orchid ongoing series from the 90s and some Sandman spin-offs.

In this story, Scheherazade is a Green Lantern has come to the town of Isafakhar to end the reign of the wicked sultan Ibn Rayner. But once she insinuates her way into the Sultan’s chambers, she finds that he is not the cruel ruler that she was expecting but more of a naive, misled puppet ruler. Through three tales of the reluctant hero Al Jhor Dan and his powerful genie, she tries to educate him in how a ruler show behave personally and towards his people.

A not bad story transposing the Green Lantern mythos onto the tales of the Arabian Nights. As usual with these Elseworlds tales, a lot of the elements of the superhero remain the same just subtly tweaked to fit with the new setting. So in this case the Lanterns do not have rings to start with but summon genies from lamps to carry out their will instead. Perhaps the story was a little over-moralistic but that is the nature of the originals I can live with it. Rebecca Guay’s art is perfect for this tale as she specialises in fantasy illustration and it looks great on the page – especially the leading ladies.