In an interesting unofficial announcement, The Green Lantern season 2 has been cut from twelve issues to only eight.  This coming from a comment that series artist Liam Sharp made during an interview at the Den of Geek website and a follow up question posed to Sharp on Twitter.

“Season 2 ended up having to be shorter than the first season so Grant and I have responded by going all-out nuts with it, and basically having as much fun as it’s possible to have on a monthly!” – Liam Sharp

The obvious question to ask is “why?” and there doesn’t seem to be a real clear answer.  Generally a series would get shortened in length or all together cancelled if it were due to sales.  However a close look at the book’s performance on the sales charts shows that The Green Lantern is routinely the highest selling non-Bat non-event book for DC Comics.  Another odd part of the puzzle is that the book has been called a twelve part series as recently as this past week when DC Comics released their April solicitations.  By Sharp’s comment the reduction in issues isn’t coming from the creative team, but from DC Comics themselves – so what gives.

Well the first thing that comes to mind are the rumors about Dan DiDio’s plan for his “5G” initiative – aging out and replacing all of DC’s iconic characters to replace them with new versions.  DiDio claims that there are lots of “half-truths and misinformation” about this plan, however I can’t imagine there not being a lot of truth to it at this point since the publisher hasn’t done anything to stem the rising disdain for the concept I see from fans.  In fact his failure to address this does nothing more than confirm it to be true in the eyes of most fans, myself included.

Based on the revised number of issues, this sets Morrison’s run to end in September well before his planned run was to end.  I remember talking with Tom King at Terrificon this past year and talking with him about his Darkseid War Green Lantern one-shot and he reiterated something he had said on a panel once about Hal Jordan being the most fun character to write.  I asked if he was interested in taking over for Morrison after the second season and his response was that Morrison was having too much fun and that, in King’s opinion, Morrison would be sticking around longer than those second twelve issues.  For DiDio to cut a creator of Morrison’s caliber off early implies this is something major for DC Comics and that Hal Jordan cannot be starring in the Morrison book for DiDio’s plan to be executed.