DC Comics’ recent slate of titles has delivered on the promise of a bright and shimmery new era. But of all the elevated teams and fresh faces on the roster, there’s one title that’s stood out to me: Green Lantern: War Journal. Written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, and with art by Montos, the book’s given John Stewart some much-needed spotlight as both a man and a Lantern.
Across the first five issues, Kennedy Johnson and Montos have given us both a classic Green Lantern story (daring action, space aliens galore, etc.) as well as a thoughtful dissection of family, duty, and what it really means to serve others. Now, with next week’s issue #6, the team are ending the first arc with a proper bang. Here, the Green Lanterns (Stewart and his “protege” Shepherd) finally confront the Revenant Queen. But if Stewart is going to save the day, he’ll have to “unlock his potential” as “the mythical Guardian and the Builder” — unless, of course, he’s interrupted by a “shocking twist” that sends him on a “quest of discovery across time and space.”
It’s not just John Stewart the man that’s being further dissected, but the very origins of both the Green Lantern Corps and even the Darkstars. So, to get a better understanding of the issue’s grandiose stakes, we spoke to Kennedy Johnson recently via Zoom. There, we discussed the larger arc across Green Lantern: War Journal, Stewart’s ongoing transformation, the evolution of Shepherd, and what might come next for the book and the Green Lanterns, among other topics and tidbits.
Green Lantern: War Journal #6 is due out February 20 via DC Comics.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I don’t know if you read your own reviews, but do you have a sense of how this arc has been received so far?
Phillip Kennedy Johnson: When I said yes to this book, I knew the weight of it. I knew that there were a lot of different communities that I needed to not let down, and so I put a lot of love and heart into it. I’ve really tried to do right by all these different communities that are invested in the character of John. So far, everyone seems to be happy with how John is represented. It was really important to me to show how complex John is, and how many different facets there are to him and why that makes him the greatest lantern ever. Lantern fans all have their favorite, right? And everyone’s always asking me online, ‘Who’s your favorite lantern or who’s the best?’
Asking which one is my favorite, I regard that as kind of a trap, but I’ll tell you right now that John Stewart is the greatest lantern. Like, I truly believe. He’s just the one who was always supposed to do it. He didn’t have to prove himself. He was just born to do it. And I hope I’ve shown that, not just in his military background, but the huge debt of inspiration that he owes his mother. She was the great civil rights leader who inspired him and who instilled in him the resilience and the guts to take off his mask right from the jump. No other superhero does [that]. Superman’s got Clark Kent and Batman’s got Bruce Wayne, but John Stewart is Green Lantern, everyone knows that. And I think that just makes him incredibly courageous and awesome.
I also wanted to kind of pay tribute to the military community and show him going through something that a lot of vets go through when they come home from war zones, where they come home and have to deal with problems that they can’t shoot at. And it’s incredibly hard for them often. So I wanted to show that side of John, too. So far it’s just in hints, but it’s going to get more obvious the ties between the Radiant Dead and the Darkstars, which is a big part of John’s past as well. His long-standing tradition of dating alien women. All these things are going to come into play. So I wanted to write the book that would hopefully be the consummate John book that anyone who wanted to get the character can turn to. Like, ‘I want to know who John Stewart is.’
I want them to have a book that they turn to that’s evergreen [that] defines Jon Stewart. So I’ve been really mindful of all these different populations that really care about Jon. And so far, everything I’ve seen at least has been extremely positive, except for the fans of some other Lanterns who don’t think Jon needs book. I’m not too worried about those guys.
Variant cover by Rahzzah. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I was kind of a Kyle Rayner fan as a kid; he came along at the right time and resonated with me. Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate.
I like that you brought up his relationship with his mother, because I think that that’s not really one of my favorite parts of this book. Yuu also mentioned him being a soldier and coming home and feeling a touch listless. I feel like those sentiments were kind of tied together. He’s coming home from this mission and he’s not sure what to do and he sort of has this opportunity to maybe re-engage with his mother in an important way and work that out and figure out how that relationship is going to develop going forward.
PKJ: I think John is very complex, as we’ve said. I still identify him as the architect before almost any other. But, honestly, if I had to pick one quality, I guess it would be his role as his mother’s son. I think that might be the thing that defines him most because of how she inspired him to make him the greatest hero, you know? But also just the concept of duty really just sums him up pretty well.
And that was actually something that Geoff Thorne [who wrote 2021’s Green Lantern] brought up to me when he and I spoke about John. It’s John’s just deep, inherent sense of duty. That is kind of at the heart of this book: that his sense of duty has been splintered in a couple different directions now because he’s been shaped by his duty to the Lanterns. But now that the Lantern Corps — as we’ve seen in my book but also in the other Green Lantern series — it’s under new management now and there’s a different direction. And it’s not a direction that John is sure that he believes in.
Between that and his mother being in great need, this felt like his time to step away. So now his duty is to his family, what’s left of his family, which is only his mother. So that’s where his duty is aimed right now. He thinks he’s done with the Corps. But I wanted to see John tested in that way. I wanted to see what do you do when your duty is to a single person, but the universe needs you. Where’s your duty now? So that’s a question that we’re gonna continue to ask throughout the rest of the series — who is your duty to? Can you serve more than one thing at once with that sense of duty? He’s got that singular, focused sense of duty and now he has to look and he has to point it in more than one direction. What’s he going to do?
Variant cover by Nikolas Draper-Ivey. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: We’ve talked about the book being a deep dive into John, but it’s also been a way to transform him and prepare him for kind of the next step. I don’t want to spoil it, but in issue #6 there is that rather big transformative moment for him. And I think it’s really powerful and effective, but I think what was so brilliant was that it played out very real to who John is as a person. Was it cognizant on your end to have this big moment, but to make it feel like it almost wasn’t a big deal for John?
PKJ: Yeah, he’s the architect, right? I see a kind of a kinship between him and another very unlikely character outside of the DC universe. I kind of see him like Forge of the X-Men. There’s that thing in issue #1 where his mother, who has dementia, she tells the story over and over of him taking his grandmother’s clock apart when he was very, very small just to see how it works. He said he wanted to see how it works from the middle. And that shaped his whole view of the world around him.
It almost foreshadows how his brain works. He wants to see how everything works in the middle. And then later, when he has this ally who is dying, he has to see how that works from the middle. When he sees the nature of it, yeah, he mimics it in his own powers. He figures out a way to make it work through his own mind and his own will. And he shows us once again why he’s the greatest. Not just because his will and his courage and his willingness to scrap and to fight unwinnable fights, but his singular mind. So there’s an element of Forge to John that is one of the many things that sets him apart from other Lanterns and from other heroes.
AIPT: I also want to talk about Shepherd as he’s had an interesting arc these first issues. He also undergoes his own transformation in issue #6, where he sees John stepping into his potential as the John from another universe. And now it feels like the two are coalescing into a proper mentor-mentee relationship.
PKJ: In the beginning, [Shepherd] is sent to our universe by his John Stewart, the Guardian and the Builder, who has this crazy command of hard light technology. He’s this Lantern who was made of light, and who is himself the ‘Watchfire’ that keeps the whole thing going. That representation, that otherworldly version of John, that is [our] John’s destiny. John will always eventually become that pinnacle version of himself. And our John is still on that path, and he’s not yet found his way to becoming the greatest Lantern of all time, but the potential is in him. He’s just still getting there. And so when Shepherd meets our John, he’s disappointed. He’s like, ‘You’re a scrub. You actually quit the Corps.’
A variant cover featuring art from Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Courtesy of DC Comics.
To him, finding a John Stewart who had quit the Green Lantern Corps is unthinkable ’cause he was this diehard Lantern in his world and all he ever wanted to be was John Stewart. And he always saw John Stewart as this Christ-like figure and seeing someone who has bad breath like the rest of us was very disappointing. But now in issue #6, John actually steps into that power and he crosses over and becomes that great thing, the Guardian and the Builder, for the first time in order to save a friend’s life.
I wanted that moment to be because of Shepherd. Like, if Shepherd did not come here, that would not have happened. I wanted Shepherd to almost do the Kyle Reese thing. I talked about this before as this book being almost like an ’80s action film. Really, I was hinting at similarities between this and Terminator. Shepherd is the Kyle Reese character, and he changes our world’s fate by his place in it. Him coming here helps John realize his full potential as the Guardian and the Builder.
AIPT: The other big moment in #6 is the “reveal” of the Revenant Queen. Was there a hope that people are going to have a really big reaction to kind of how she reveals herself? Or do you think that maybe this is a thing that you’ve sort of been playing with and building toward across your different stories? And if people sort of know your work, they’ll sort of maybe be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
PKJ: I love dropping beats in stories that reward readers of other books without punishing new readers. I don’t want anyone to see the name drop that you’re talking about and be like, ‘Well, now I’m lost.’ It’s still a cool, impactful moment, but if somebody has been following my work and then they see it, I want to get this big, ‘Oh shit moment.’ All those readers are like, ‘Now I’ve got to go back and read that again.’ Or, ‘I can’t wait to see the next series.’
My fans have been so kind online and with me directly at cons and whenever I meet one. I love fan service; it’s not a dirty word to me. I love feeling that way myself as a reader and I wanted to give them that payoff. But that’s not why I did it. I mean, I do love longform storytelling, and I think it’s becoming clear to anyone who read the encyclopedia set that is the Warworld Saga. I want there to be just a massive body of work that all ties together that people will see one day. Like, ‘Oh, it was always one big thing.’
Variant/incentive cover by Mirko Colak. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I told someone who’s not a comics fan that it’s like if your favorite band played some B-side that was released in Japan and only four people have ever heard. Like, you’re very clearly rewarding people who put in the effort.
PKJ: It was an important beat, and I’m very glad you got something out of it.
There’s a lot more to tell with that character. The Green Lantern story, by virtue of how old it is, feels like the Wild West to me.
There’s just so much you can do. There’s so much out there that we haven’t seen yet. And as much as this was clearly a character study of John Stewart…I also want to write lore that helps shape the Green Lantern mythos going forward. I wanted to really develop the Lantern mythos in very additive kind ways. And that includes the Revenant Queen and the Radiant Dead and that includes that other universe that Shepherd comes from and it includes the Darkstars. It’s these new races and people from other worlds that we’re about to introduce. There’s so much you can do with Green Lantern, and to me, John Stewart is just the perfect vehicle for that stuff.
AIPT: One final question: are there any big beats or moments you can tease for the next arc?
PKJ: You’re going to see a character from Action Comics very soon. I think the reaction that you got from that name drop in issue #6, it’s going to be times two when you see the character in the next book.
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