Veteran creature designer Constantine Sekeris has opened up his Green Lantern files on Instagram, and one batch looks like it comes from the show Warner Bros. Discovery killed.
Sekeris, whose design credits run across DC and Marvel projects, posted finished Kilowog and Tomar-Re designs from what he calls “a project that didn’t happen years ago unfortunately.”
He says he was brought on to design creatures because of his practical effects background, “as we were looking to build Kilowog as a full practical suit..which would of been so kool and fun.”
Tomar-Re was explored as CGI because of the character’s thinner, elongated build, though Sekeris did a prosthetic makeup version of him as well.
In an earlier Kilowog post, he added that the character “was introduced younger in age and a bit softer but still very much his original design from the comics.”
And the mission statement: “that was always the goal to keep to the original iconic looks but just [update] them in the tone of the show at that time.”
Kilowog was in the canceled show’s lineup
Sekeris never names the project. He doesn’t have to: he calls it a “show,” says it died years ago, and Kilowog was in the announced lineup of the canceled HBO Max Green Lantern series.
That was the big-budget space opera version of Green Lantern on TV, the Greg Berlanti-produced series announced to span decades and galaxies, with Guy Gardner, Alan Scott, Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz, Sinestro and Kilowog all named.
It got far enough to cast Finn Wittrock as Guy Gardner before WBD pulled the plug during David Zaslav’s DC restructuring.
And per our insiders, Lanterns isn’t a James Gunn idea at all — it’s the rehashed HBO pitch, the version Berlanti’s team had rejected.
Sekeris’ art is exactly what the space version needed: actual alien Lanterns, straight off the comic page, built to be photographed. The Green Lantern Corps lives in space. The show that made it to air keeps its Guardians in an abandoned mall.
He also drew the 2011 movie’s Hal Jordan — in a real suit
Sekeris has also been sharing his Hal Jordan concepts from the 2011 Ryan Reynolds movie, done under costume designer Ngila Dickson alongside Neville Page and Simon Thorpe.
“We literally were referencing the comics and translating them in the tone of the film,” he wrote.
The art shows Reynolds in a practical-looking green-and-black suit — glowing fist, chest emblem, domino mask — not the CGI suit the finished film spent 15 years taking the beating for. After Episode 3 of Lanterns, we already wrote the apology.
The vault keeps opening while Lanterns airs
For his part, Sekeris isn’t dunking on the new show.
“I’m loving the new HBO green lanterns series right now streaming,” he wrote, adding he’s “looking forward to the next episode.”
The pattern is bigger than any one artist, though.
With Lanterns on the air, fans keep getting shown every other version of Green Lantern that never made it to the screen. Sekeris rolled these out through late August, and days later, Justice League artist Jerad Marantz dropped his Snyderverse Hal Jordan concepts straight into the middle of the Episode 3 blowup.
The space show exists only in concept art. The abandoned mall made it to air.
