Katma Tui
38 years ago - Katma Tui is born on Korugar amidst Thaal Sinestro’s regime.
17 years ago - 21-year-old Katma Tui fights in the rebellion against Thaal Sinestro & testifies against him, She is offered his ring but refuses, instead becoming a law officer on Korugar.
13 years ago - 25-year-old Katma Tui witnesses her planet being saved by Hal Jordan & Stel. She privately changes her opinion about the Green Lantern Corp.
11 years ago - 27-year-old Katma Tui is again offered a ring and accepts, joining the Green Lantern Corp despite being hated by her own people. She trains alongside John Stewart, and they have an affair.
5 years ago - 33-year-old Katma Tui dies during Hal Jordan’s attack on Oa.
The extended membership of the Green Lantern Corp comes from a few different sources, but interestingly, those same sources all seem to happen in cycles. There are characters introduced more or less as background characters who have a line here and there but who gain popularity because of some quirk of their design, there are characters introduced in their own standalone stories whose role may or may not expand over time but who remain popular because that original story was so clever, and there are characters that are actually introduced with the intention of playing a role in the main continuity Green Lantern story. These different character sources repeat through the various eras of Green Lantern Corp mythology, resulting in a pretty deep roster of potential characters for us to go over.
Katma Tui is a character that was really ahead of her time. There was a lot of innovation in her conception, but she debuted so early in the evolution of not just the Green Lantern mythology, but in science fiction in general, that she wound up just being a collection of pretty dated tropes. Still, she's a huge part of the larger story of the Corps.
Katma Tui is a character that was really ahead of her time. There was a lot of innovation in her conception, but she debuted so early in the evolution of not just the Green Lantern mythology, but in science fiction in general, that she wound up just being a collection of pretty dated tropes. Still, she's a huge part of the larger story of the Corps.
Katma Tui's Comic HistoryKatma Tui debuted in Green Lantern #30. She was introduced as the successor to Sinestro. Hal's shock in discovering that the new Green Lantern of Korugar is a woman really sums up exactly what the point of this story was. Hal was sent to talk her out of retiring as a Green Lantern to get married. The story makes a lot morse sense when you remember that this is 1964, right in the middle of a golden age of science fiction. The idea of sexy alien women whose only distinction is that they're a strange color would go on to be a pretty classic trope in the coming years, and an argument can be made that she was a very early example of it.
Interestingly, because she was introduced as being romantically involved with someone else, I don't think the comic ever tried to suggest that she and Hal had any romantic connection, which is pretty unique. |
Katma would appear regularly for years, often appearing at the forefront of groups of Green Lanterns. Her role got more complicated in the seventies, when the story revolved more around Hal Jordan looking to quit the Corp, doing exactly what he had talked Katma out of doing way back in her first appearance. This also coincided with the introduction of Hal's replacement, John Stewart. The two of them soon became romantic, and in the eighties as the Corp was being reimagined as an earth-based team, the two of them redesigned their costumes to match, and got married. She even had the distinction of being the protagonist in a standalone story by Alan Moore in the pages of Tales of The Green Lantern Corp Annual #3.
Unfortunately, Katma was also a trailblazer in another much more problematic trope. in Action Comics Weekly #601, Star Sapphire came across Katma Tui in a completely domestic setting, and murdered her 'to send a message'. It's only a few years later that another similar murder in the story of another Green Lantern would coin the term "fridging" to describe the unnecessarily brutal murder of a female character to advance the story of a male protagonist, but of course, Katma did this first as well. |
Our Katma Tui StoryKatma Tui was so ahead of her time. Soranik Natu came about decades later, and had a lot of the same qualities that made Katma unique, and she went on to be one of the most important characters in the Green Lantern mythology. Katma was a beloved part of the Lantern story, she just suffered because of the way comics treated female characters.
So what are we going to do with her? A huge part of her story is the fact that she's from a planet that thinks of Green Lanterns as a fascist regime, thanks to her predecessor. We made sure to separate her from Sinestro's tenure a little by changing the story of the robot Green Lantern Stel, allowing her time and perspective. Her decision to accept the role as the new Green Lantern of Korugar is huge, because it shows her making a decision to do what she believes is right even if everyone around her says otherwise. We chose to use the relationship between Katma and John Stewart depicted in the animated series, where they have an affair during their training, and also to include Alan Moore's story where she introduces Rot Lop Fan. And yes, we're also including her death, it's the only way to bring in Soranik, but we are absolutely not fridging a classic character. She's going to die a hero, defending the Corp. |