Interview: Talking Alan Scott Finale & MOTU: Revolution w/ Tim Sheridan

After falling in love with Alan Scott’s journey through his DC series Alan Scott: The Green Lantern, I was overjoyed to get a chance to speak with Tim Sheridan about the series’ upcoming finale, his new Dark Horse series Masters of the Universe: Revolution, & the intersection of comics and queer history. You can follow Tim at his website or socials: Instagram, Threads, or Bluesky. You can also pre-order the Alan Scott: The Green Lantern trade paperback at Amazon or let your local comic shop know to order one for you before it hits shelves this summer!

NOTE: This interview was edited for brevity & clarity.

DERBY COMICS: Hi Tim & thanks so much for chatting! Jumping right in, this week we get Alan Scott: The Green Lantern with Issue #6, which is somehow already the finale. Can you catch readers on where we are heading into the final issue?

TIM SHERIDAN: Yeah, so hopefully everybody who's reading this has been reading along and is aware of where we left off in Issue #5. In that issue we learned some of the lore surrounding Alan Scott's powers as the Green Lantern, just in time for a larger threat than even the Red Lantern himself to emerge – a group of Soviet soldiers called the Crimson Host who are here to do some damage. 

They are essentially the replacements for the Red Lantern, something that's blindsided Vladimir. And so now we're in a situation where it looks like our hero and our villain, the Green Lantern and the Red Lantern, are going to have to team up against a common foe.

DERBY COMICS: Very, very exciting! The splash page with the arrival of Crimson Host was so cool!

SHERIDAN: We had so much fun with them! Cian [Tormey] had a great time designing those guys. It's sad that it's Issue #5 and we only have six issues because you can see how we could do a lot more with them.

DERBY COMICS: A lot of loud people on the internet want to retcon DC’s own history and claim that you personally decided to make Alan Scott gay. But we know that that's not the case as Alan came out to his children back in 2021 with DC Infinite Frontier #0. I’ve seen you mention in other interviews how your story is filling in the gaps during a time period of Alan’s life that we hadn’t seen yet. How much did you view yourself as a historian compared to a storyteller when you were trying to fill in those blank spaces?

SHERIDAN: Oh my god, that is such a great question that nobody's ever asked me! There has been an awful lot of research that I've had to do because I didn't grow up with Alan Scott. Most of us didn't. Alan Scott was around, but he wasn’t soloing a title nor was he a character that we knew a lot about.

Actually, maybe we did know a lot about Alan Scott. The problem is we knew so much about Alan Scott that there was kind of all this, you know, competing information about him that was hard to keep, you know, straight, so to speak. [laughs]

DERBY COMICS: [laughs] Or his own voice.

SHERIDAN: Right. He didn't have his own title for like 75 years. So if you're a guest in other books we're not necessarily going to get a lot of inner monologue like we would get from Hal Jordan say, that we've had over the years.

I looked at this as an opportunity to really dive deep and learn about Alan. Who Alan was in the Golden Age. I had a working knowledge of Alan's trials and tribulations over the decades, but sort of like the big hits, such as Sentinel, Zero Hour, and Doomsday Clock, etc. I didn't know a lot about the Golden Age version of the Green Lantern. So there was a lot of feeling like a historian, and not just in terms of Alan. It was its own sort of challenge to figure out who Alan Scott was, who the Green Lantern was in the 1940s, but also what the world was in the 1940s and how that informed who he is and why he is who he is. And then when you add on the new layer of what we now know about Alan, which is that he was a closeted gay man during that time, it became a lot of trying to get it right in terms of the history and trying to at least get the feeling right.

It was very important to me to be accurate historically because I'm a stickler for it. More than getting the details right, I wanted to get the feelings right. How did it feel and what did it feel like to be Alan Scott during that time period. Not just as a gay man, but as a young man coming into his own being imbued with great power. And also where he was in the world and where the world was politically. There was so much going on and that plays out in the book.

We see a lot of that in this series. Obviously, when the villain is not only an ex-lover of Alan Scott, but also the Soviet Union's answer to the Green Lantern in a time when we know that the Soviet Union is going to become a real threat to democracy. It was quite a balance. Luckily, Cian Tormey is a student of American history. He's an Irish artist who is a student of American history. So in getting the details right in terms of the visuals, it was great to have him as a partner.

Of course, as much as he knows about history, he didn't know about gay cruising in New York city in the 1940s. [laughs]  So I gave him images from the internet (PG images!) and explained to him how men would meet up near the Chelsea Piers under the West Side Highway between parked trucks. And he was able to realize it on the page in a really beautiful way. It really brings to life an actual, important part of the story of queer men.

DERBY COMICS: That brings up a great point I wanted to ask you about. As much as this is a book about Alan's journey as a closeted gay man, it also does a really amazing job of presenting a snapshot of LGBTQ+ history during that specific time period in a specific area of the world, New York. I think we like to view that place as a bastion for democracy, but that’s not always been the case for marginalized communities. You touched on this a little bit, but how much of the history you presented was intentional compared to a byproduct of Alan’s character development that you were writing?

SHERIDAN: I have to say the beauty of it is that it dovetailed, you know. If I'm going to present Alan's life and what he feels and how he lives accurately, there's no way to do it other than to present an accurate portrayal of what life would have been like for someone like him during that period. So, we could have been more fanciful with it. 

There was a moment when I got a note from my editor regarding Issue #2 which takes place in Arkham Asylum and it's pretty heavy. I got the note asking, “should we go this hard this fast?” And I understood it, I absolutely got it in terms of tone and where we want to be at the beginning of a story in order to not turn away some readers who weren't expecting something that real. But for me, it was so important, especially in Issue #2, to present the darkness. For me, this story has always been about a man coming out of the darkness into the light and becoming a beacon of that light for the world. And in order to tell that story, we had to show the darkness and we had to live in it a little bit.

DERBY COMICS: I love that! As somebody reading it in real time, that issue was like a wake up call. Like, oh, this isn't just going to just be a superhero story. This is going to be a human story and we’re going to see what made Alan Scott, Alan Scott.

SHERIDAN: Thank you! I think the whole point of storytelling is that we all get better when we listen to each other's stories and we hear other stories from other points of view we're maybe not familiar with. And I think we're in danger of losing our connection to the history of the queer community. We're getting very comfortable, although there are still so many challenges. We're getting comfortable with the idea that there is a measure of God-given equality that we’ve fought for and achieved today. But we can't forget where we came from and what it took to get to this point.

I fear that there are generations coming up under me that don't have a connection to that history. If comic books can be a place that they go to and read about life and who we are, that’s great. But it's not just queer kids who aren't connected to the history. I think it's even more important for people who don't know anybody in the queer community to read our stories. And in that respect, it's even more important that it's historically accurate because I want you to know who we are. We all get better when we listen to each other's stories and learn who we are and realize that, lo and behold, we're not all that different.

DERBY COMICS: That’s such a great perspective. One of the things that I hear a lot about from queer creators is the use of trauma or shared trauma in our storytelling. How did you balance  showing Alan's trauma, while still making it accessible to people who may not have experienced trauma at a certain level?

SHERIDAN: Some people will read this book and say I didn't balance it, that it's a lot of trauma and it's probably coming from deep within. [laughs]

And you know what? They're not wrong. This story is very personal for me. It was important to live in that trauma a little bit and make everybody who's reading [the book] live in that trauma a little bit. The beauty of it is ultimately we know where Alan ends up. That's the saving grace for me, as a writer in this situation, because we know that he's going to become arguably the greatest hero who ever lived. That's coming from me, the guy who writes Alan Scott. [laughs]

I think that knowing that he's gonna be okay and that he's going to get through this is a marker, a touchstone that helps to ultimately balance all the trauma that he's going through in this story. I hope it's sort of like there's this little buoy that says “it gets better” that lives in the minds of anybody who reads DC Comics. We know it gets better for Alan. And in Issue #6, he's going to get a glimpse of that touchstone and that's something that he needs. I think as readers and fans of the character, we need to know that he's going to be okay.

DERBY COMICS: I love that. Switching gears to a little bit of a lighter note, Alan Scott has had A LOT of different powers attributed to him throughout his history. How much did you go through all the options you had to choose from and were you very specific in what you wanted to highlight in this story?

SHERIDAN: Let's get real, it was kind of a hot mess for a while in terms of his powers and how they make any sense at all! [laughs] 

The first one that I decided I was going to sink my teeth into and try to make some sense out of was his ability to phase through walls, which he used all the time in the Golden Age. They called it moving through the fourth dimension. Now, that was at a time before pop culture told us that the fourth dimension was time. Anybody who pays attention to sci-fi, we all talk about the fourth dimension as time now. But back then, we didn't and we didn't really know what that meant. 

I thought, let me see if I can make some sense out of this and connect it to his powers and what I want to do in this story. One thing we know about Alan is that he has been able to time travel. It has happened in his history, but you know it's never really been explained well. I thought since we have the opportunity with the mysterious Emerald Flame, there also aren’t a lot of explanations out there for how and why it works, so I thought let's see if we can do this.

I said, you know, he's not phasing through a wall. He's actually moving through time at a place when that wall doesn't exist, either before or after it exists. And he doesn't really understand what he's doing. He can't control it because he's just got these powers and he's just figuring it out. It sort of takes Vlad, the Red Lantern, to explain it to him because nobody's there to tell him. He doesn't have a Green Lantern Corps to explain his ring and its powers to him. It's all new.

The other one I threw in, in Issue #5, is when he's powered up by the Crimson Flame and he attempts to use his ring to hypnotize Vlad. One of his powers was that he could hypnotize people with his ring. But it doesn't work on Vlad because it's the red energy. And Vlad makes fun of him for it, which was kind of a little bit me saying, “you've got the weirdest powers, Alan!”

I did this book because Geoff Johns called me and said, “I think we're going to do an Alan Scott book and I think you should write it. Do you think you want to do it? Do you think you have a story?” Geoff and I had met and worked together on ‘Flashpoint Beyond’ and we had the best time. I'm crazy about him. He wanted to lift up not only Alan's voice, but my voice with this book.

In a way, when I'm sort of exploring Golden Age powers and trying to explain them, I feel like I'm sort of lifting up Geoff Johns' voice in the great scheme of things because that's the stuff I think he does so well. I mean, he does a million things well, but the thing that I always remember is whenever he makes those connections between parts of the lore that we don't feel are connected, it makes the DC Universe seem even bigger. And I hope that there's a little piece of that in this Alan Scott book. In that way, it's kind of an homage to Geoff.

DERBY COMICS: You mentioned [series artist] Cian Tormey earlier and while the two of you have been amazing together, I wanted to talk more about all of the creative voices on the team. You have Matt Herms on colors, Lucas Gattoni on lettering, and David Talaski's doing covers. How did you all collaborate to bring your individual talents into one cohesive, beautiful book?

SHERIDAN: This is where the beauty of working in a system like DC [Comics] with DC editors comes into play. The real links between all of it are Andrew Marino and Marquis Draper. Andrew is the Editor on the book, with Marquis as Associate Editor. They've been with us every step of the way. Andrew was the one who thought to put Cian and me together. Cian and I didn't know each other, but we realized we were kindred spirits when we met and I felt like he was someone who was going to really sink his teeth into this book, and he did. Andrew also brought in Matt, Lucas, and all the cover artists.

Andrew is the wizard behind the curtain who is bringing everybody together because he can see in his mind how it's all going to work. That's how good editors do their job, because we're kind of all siloed. I'm writing my scripts. I worked with Cian a lot, especially early on. I wanted to make sure Cian was going to get some of the some of the stuff that that I was putting in here. As a straight man and as an Irishman, I wanted to make sure things made sense to him. Of course, I came to realize very quickly that he didn't need me to Timsplain it and he was going to be just fine. [laughs]

I learned early on that he was someone who was going to be able to bring to life some of the emotion on the faces of our characters and tell parts of the story that way. For me, the holy grail is when you write a comic book script and the art comes back and you can just remove every single word balloon and caption from it because the art has done everything for the storytelling. You don't need any words in balloons anymore. In fact, the words are in the way.

Cian’s done amazing stuff. The whole team has been incredible. And I don't want to go too long without talking about those David Talaski covers or the variant covers that have all been remarkable. Nick Robles has done some incredible work. Mateus Manhanini, Fatima Wajid, their covers are stunning. But Talaski has been a touchstone and a guiding light. I feel like there are people who bought this book, and hopefully fell in love with it, but they bought it because those covers on the shelf just spoke to them. We say don't judge a book by its cover, but, you know, please judge this book by its cover. [laughs]

DERBY COMICS: I wish I could buy the original art! [laughs] Moving along a bit, are there any teases you can share for Issue #6?

SHERIDAN: If you can, get a copy of the six-page prologue story that first appeared in the DC Pride: Through the Years compilation last year. I’d recommend reading it because we're going to wrap around to where we started in that prologue.

There was a character to whom Alan is speaking and to whom he's telling this story. We're going to reveal who that character is and why they’re the one hearing it. Hopefully we've put a satisfying punctuation mark over all the characters that you've met and hopefully fell in love with in this series. Ultimately, My biggest hope is that we've left the toys in a place where the next creators will pick them up and play with them and tell all new amazing stories.

Alan didn't have a book of his own for nearly 75 years. These six issues, and that six-page prologue from Pride Through the Years, were designed to be a jumping on point with this character. Hopefully you'll go back and read some of the old stuff too, but you don’t have to, you can start here.

DERBY COMICS: Well, I’m definitely very much looking forward to it! In addition to Alan Scott wrapping up, you also had a new comic series come out last week, Masters of the Universe: Revolution. It’s a prequel to the Netflix series of the same name. What can fans expect of this new prequel?

SHERIDAN: For anyone who hopefully watched the show, this is some of the story that we didn't really have time or space to tell in the show. In order to keep that show focused on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, we couldn't stop to tell the story of when Hordak met Skeletor and why their relationship is so fraught that it ends the way it does in Revolution. It will also connect to the Masters of the Universe: Revelation prequel comic book as well.

It's very exciting to get to do this story for Dark Horse and Mattel and fill in some of the blanks that we didn't necessarily have elbow room to do in the Netflix series. Kevin [Smith]'s and my job was to figure out how to squeeze as much epicness as possible into five episodes.

DERBY COMICS: Is it true that you make your voice-acting debut in the Netflix Revolution series?

SHERIDAN: Ah, yes, it is true. [laughs] It was so exciting! I got to voice He-Man's grandfather in a flashback for an episode that I wrote. And, spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't watched the show, but it meant that I got to play the dad of Mark Hamill and William Shatner! On my tombstone, I want it to say that I voiced the dad of Mark Hamill and William Shatner. [laughs]

DERBY COMICS: You could literally now say, “[Luke], I am your father!” [laughs]

SHERIDAN: You're the first person who said that. Oh my God, you're right. You're right.

DERBY COMICS: No one can ever take that away from you until the end of time. [laughs] Tying Alan Scott and Master of the Universe together, one thing that I quickly discovered about Masters of the Universe is just how queer adjacent it was. Is that something that drew you to that universe as a fan?

SHERIDAN: Listen, we could do an entire interview on the queer adjacent-ness of Masters of the Universe, especially when it comes to She-Ra. When I was a kid, I watched both cartoons and was crazy about the She-Ra show.

I think [the queerness] shines best for me when you see me writing Evil-Lyn. This is a character who is powerful and fabulous and camp, but has been through it and is going to tell you about it and give it back to you. She's just serving all the time. I found I had a new queer awakening writing Evil-Lyn. You don't have to write Masters of the Universe as queer focused because it's just in the DNA of it all. There's so much about it that appeals to queer fans.

I created two new characters for the comic book, Succubug and Tarangela. They work for Hordak but they very easily could have also wrestled for GLOW [Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling] in the 1980s, which is kind of one of the campiest, gayest sort of things from the 80s. I think Masters of the Universe is for everybody but I think it's amazing that queer fans see themselves in it. One of the great things about Alan Scott is when I go to conventions and I meet people who get very emotional and say things like, “I've been reading this book, and I see myself in this book and thank you for seeing me.” What they don't understand is that when they say that to me, I feel like I'm the one being seen and that's just a really cool thing. Whether it’s Alan Scott or MOTU, there are lots of ways for fans, queer or not, to connect and I’m here for it.

DERBY COMICS: That’s so awesome to hear. Between your work with DC and Masters of the Universe, you've gotten to work on some major pop culture universes and characters. Was there a pitch that scared you the most?

SHERIDAN: I guess it wasn't really a pitch because I was hired to do it, but my first outline for The Long Halloween: Part One, which was the animated adaptation that I scripted. I think I was most terrified of that because DC had to approve it, the producers had to approve it, and Warner Brothers had to approve it. I thought there's no way they're gonna like this because it's an adaptation of one of the greatest books of all time. It's required reading for Batman fans and DC fans, so I was terrified and I don't know how, but somehow, through what I think was a mix of good preparation and being a real fan of the material, DC sent their feedbackon that outline and the only note, for the first and only time ever in my life was, “No notes. This is great. Keep going. Write it.”

That came from Mike Carlin, who's a hero of mine and a very important part of DC Comics history. He was an editor when I was reading comics as a young man. That note filled me with so much confidence going into writing a screenplay that I was terrified to write. I needed that boost and it made all the difference. It was really a fun experience getting to work with that team. Everybody on that project, we did something that we are all really proud of.

And I finally got to meet Jeph Loeb [author of Batman: The Long Halloween] last year at New York Comic Con. He could not have been nicer. And talking about being terrified, I was terrified of that. That's what I was most terrified of. Not the outline going to DC Comics, but meeting Jeph Loeb. The only thing I could think to say to him was, “I'm sorry.” He said, “you have nothing to be sorry about.”

That movie was important to me. That book is important to me and the movie was meant to be a celebration of the book and hopefully get people to go out and buy that book, or pick it up and read it again, or for the first time. I think we managed to reach some people.

DERBY COMICS: One question that I like to ask everybody is, what's a question you've never been asked, but that you've always wanted to answer?

SHERIDAN: Oh, what a great question! I'm unprepared. Let's do something fun. Here's what nobody ever asked me, that I wish they would. What does Mark Hamill smell like? And the answer, believe it or not, is sunshine and roses. 

DERBY COMICS: Not blue milk?

SHERIDAN: No, no. Weirdly. Sunshine and roses.

DERBY COMICS: [laughs] Ok, last question, then I will let you go! Where can fans look forward to seeing you next?

SHERIDAN: I will be at Fan Expo Boston in the middle of June [June 14-16] and I'll be down at San Diego Comic-Con. I've been every year since 2000, first as a fan, then when I was working the show for Mattel for a while before I was a writer, which is a whole weird story about my weird life. Hey, that's a question that nobody’s ever asked me!

I'll be at New York Comic-Con I believe as well because that'll be around the time that the ALAN SCOTT: THE GREEN LANTERN trade comes out. And you can always find me on www.timsheridan.com. 

DERBY COMICS: Amazing! Thank you again so much for taking the time to chat with me & I can’t wait to see how Alan’s story ends this week!