‘Lanterns’ Just Hid a Major Batman Villain Easter Egg in Plain Sight

HBO’s ‘Lanterns‘ has spent its first three episodes building a slow-burn mystery around Rushville, Nebraska, but the show has also quietly been doing something else in the background. Alongside the investigation into Hal Jordan and John Stewart’s case, the series has been dropping small, deliberate references that tie its world to Gotham City, even though Batman himself has yet to appear anywhere in James Gunn’s DC Universe.

Episode three, “OutKast,” picks up two months into John Stewart’s training to become a Green Lantern before flashing back to the strange, extended job interview that actually landed him the role. Inside an abandoned shopping mall, a Guardian of the Universe played by Laura Linney questions Stewart about his troubled childhood, his military career, and his complicated feelings toward Hal Jordan, all in an effort to determine whether he truly deserves the ring.

Leading up to that interview, though, the episode slips in a detail sharp-eyed fans have already connected to a very specific Batman villain. An advertisement for a company called Janus Cosmetics appears in the background, a name that comic book readers will recognize as belonging to Roman Sionis, the businessman-turned-crime-lord better known as Black Mask.

Janus Cosmetics and Roman Sionis actually date back to Sionis’s original 1985 comic book debut, where he inherited his family’s cosmetics empire before rushing an untested waterproof makeup product to market that left customers permanently disfigured. After losing control of the company to the Wayne Foundation, Sionis eventually transformed into Black Mask, one of Gotham’s most brutal and mask-obsessed crime bosses.

Black Mask isn’t unfamiliar to live-action audiences. Ewan McGregor played a version of the character, Roman Beauvais Sionis, in 2020’s ‘Birds of Prey,’ though that film exists outside James Gunn’s current DC Universe continuity, and other DC projects like ‘Batwoman’ and ‘Gotham’ have featured their own separate takes on Sionis over the years.

What makes the ‘Lanterns’ reference notable is that it isn’t an isolated nod. The Sionis name has also turned up in set photos from ‘Clayface,’ DC Studios’ next theatrical release, where signage for Sionis Industries, the parent company behind Janus Cosmetics, was spotted during filming. That overlap connects two very different corners of the new DC Universe through the same fictional business empire.

Whether that shared branding means Black Mask himself is on his way into live action, or whether the Sionis name is simply being used as connective background lore the way James Gunn has done elsewhere in the DCU, remains unconfirmed. Gunn has talked before about wanting the DC Universe to feel interconnected through smaller touches like this, rather than forcing every project into one continuous, tightly plotted storyline.

There’s also a comic book wrinkle that makes the Lanterns connection feel less random than it might first appear. In the “Blackest Night” storyline, the villain Nekron reanimates a deceased Black Mask as a Black Lantern who goes after Catwoman, giving Sionis a direct, if grim, history with the Lantern mythology the show is currently exploring.

With ‘Clayface’ set to hit theaters later this year and ‘Lanterns’ continuing to drop Batman-adjacent breadcrumbs nearly every episode, the overlap between the two projects looks increasingly intentional rather than coincidental. Whether any of it eventually pays off with Black Mask actually appearing on screen is still very much an open question.

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