A photo taken inside the official Lanterns experience at San Diego Comic-Con revealed a surprising connection to Batman’s corner of the DC Universe. The HBO series stars Kyle Chandler as veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as new recruit John Stewart, two intergalactic cops investigating a murder in a small American town. It is the first series in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s rebooted DC Universe made for HBO, and its marketing kept the specifics of that central mystery under tight guard before the show arrives on August 16.
The connection comes through the Gotham Gazette, the longtime newspaper of Batman’s home city in DC Comics. A fan who visited the Lanterns Training Headquarters, the interactive activation HBO Max held in San Diego from Thursday, July 23 through Saturday, July 25, photographed a prop edition of the Gazette pinned to a corkboard inside one of its rooms. Its appearance in official marketing is a strong sign that Gotham has some part to play in the show’s world, even if it stops short of confirming what that part will be.
The prop heavily features the show’s branding alongside other intriguing details. An HBO Max logo can be seen beside the Gazette masthead, and a banner underneath promotes the series with the line, “Stream the HBO Original series Lanterns starting August 16.” The front page features a black-and-white photo of a run-down roadside motel with an aging sign indicating “No Vacancy.”
The motel isn’t entirely random, as the building has actually appeared before. The same battered building featured briefly in the first Lanterns teaser trailer, which arrived in March and flashed a broken motel sign amid scenes of destruction in the town.
Two smaller details on the paper are worth noting as well. Fine print beside the show’s logo seems to say Gotham County, and the edition appears to be dated Saturday, July 23, 2016. Showrunner Chris Mundy already confirmed the series unfolds across two timelines, one set in 2016 and another in 2026, so the date fits the show’s earlier era.
This is not the Gazette’s first appearance in DC Studios’ promotional playbook, either. Fictional clippings from the paper circulated on Clayface’s official social media accounts earlier this year, teasing the brutal attack on Matt Hagen and the experimental treatment that transforms him ahead of the film’s theatrical release on Friday, October 23.
The Training Headquarters itself recreated pieces of the series. HBO Max promised interactive challenges set inside locations from the show, including a sheriff’s office and a dive bar, meaning the props decorating those rooms were made to reflect the on-screen world of Hal and John.
Why the Gotham Gazette Over the Daily Planet?
The choice of newspaper is intriguing, not only due to the Batman connection but also because they could have easily gone with a more established option. The DC Universe already introduced the Daily Planet as its flagship news outlet in Superman, where Clark Kent and Lois Lane work in the Metropolis newsroom.
If the set decorators simply needed a recognizable DC paper to fill a corkboard, the Planet was the easy option, already canon and familiar to general audiences. Reaching past it for the Gazette feels like a very deliberate creative choice, and deliberate choices in studio-approved marketing usually reflect what is actually in the story.
The Gotham County detail is also quite interesting. DC Comics stories have long placed a rural county of that name just outside Gotham City’s limits, which raises the possibility that the show’s murder-stricken town is far closer to Batman’s backyard than anyone assumed. The 2016 dateline also indicates that Batman’s city was active in the DCU long before the events of Superman. A Gotham newspaper covering heartland events during this earlier timeline quietly establishes that the Dark Knight’s metropolis was already fully operational a decade prior.
The timing makes this even more fascinating since DC Studios still does not have its Batman. The Brave and the Bold remains without a cast or release date, and Gunn shot down the latest casting rumors just last week. The news outlet being picked over the Daily Planet heavily implies that Lanterns has more connections to Gotham City than any other location in the DCU.
