Review: Green Lantern: War Journal Vol. 1: Contagion trade paperback (DC Comics)

We know now, like more than a few titles in the Dawn of DC era, that the Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s Green Lantern: War Journal series really turned out to be a two-collection, 12-issue miniseries. More’s the pity, because when I finished reading Green Lantern: War Journal Vol. 1: Contagion, I was far more comfortable with this John Stewart-focused title being DC’s Green Lantern book than I was with Jeremy Adams' Hal Jordan-focused Green Lantern book proper.

[Review contains spoilers for the Dawn of DC Green Lantern and Green Lantern: War Journal titles]

Obviously there are stories to be told coming in both the second volumes of Green Lantern and of War Journal. We understand between the pages that the United Planets took over the Green Lantern Corps and that Hal Jordan quit in protest, with the other Earth Lanterns reassigned, but War Journal offers us John Stewart having also made his way to Earth. Both are seemingly powerless, though by the end of their books Hal and John have each developed ways to harness the Lantern power. I very much appreciate not one but two Green Lantern books that have a strong foundation on Earth instead of Oa or out in space — and both rather mythos-light — but it would seem there’s some cosmic elements in the wings to fill in some of these gaps.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

The start of War Journal is wonderfully mundane, in that we spend a couple of chapters with John puttering around his childhood home, mulling his want for retirement from the Lanterns versus his lack of any idea what to do with his life otherwise. There’s something exceptionally charming, as John Stewart is often charming, about the hero just bantering with his mother. Too, it’s fun to see John going for a largely “normal” job interview at John Henry Irons' Steelworks in the midst of the Steelworks miniseries.¹

All of that’s balanced by scenes of cosmic warfare in an alternate dimension where familiar-looking Green Lanterns battle an all-consuming evil. This builds from Johnson’s Green Lantern story in Dark Crisis: World Without the Justice League (so is all of that happening within Pariah’s imagination?); I enjoyed the alt-takes on Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner (not unfortunately any more the Green Lantern Jason Todd), which help acclimate the reader to the foreign landscape. Artist Montos does fantastic work throughout, but particularly with the zombified Radiant Dead; some of the images of the half-rotted beings could teach Knight Terrors a thing or two. (I don’t know why Montos or the colorists at times apply a gritty moire pattern to the solid colors, but I love it.)

I’m interested to learn more about Johnson’s evil Revenant Queen; late in the book she talks about having once possessed John’s wife, which I’d think refers to the late Katma Tui. I scoured some entries on Katma and I couldn’t find reference to this kind of thing, so I’m not sure yet if this is something that happened to the alt-universe’s John Stewart’s wife, or if this suggests the Revenant Queen, besides being related to the old gods from Johnson’s Superman: Warworld Saga, might also have ties to the Star Sapphires or Nekron, entities involved with Katma — not to mention what the Revenant Queen’s connection is to the Darkstars!

It may seem a small thing, but I thought Johnson making even the henchman villain Varron compelling said a lot about how much was working in War Journal. Varron starts out one of the United Planets Lanterns, accepted apparently not due to skill but nepotism. He feuds with John first due to sheer arrogance, and his grudge builds after both defeats and his possession by the Revenant Queen. By the time John crushes Varron (not to death, hopefully), we’ve seen Varron evolve and we know why he hates John Stewart, and that felt more fully realized than if the Revenant Queen had just nameless drones.

In recent John Stewart stories — like Geoff Johns' later work, though not as much in Geoffrey Thorne’s Green Lantern series before the current — there’s been a tendency to emphasize John’s military sniper background. Admittedly I’ve never quite discerned what’s historic and what’s a new addition to the character — a lot of my familiarity with John was in the Darkstars days, an architect dating Merayn Dethalis. For me this was another plus for Johnson’s depiction of John, reflecting fewer of John’s violent tendencies and more his architectural and engineering background (short of a platoon construct helping him out). Too, that John really does seem intent on leaving the superhero life, until he’s drawn back in by a threat that’s targeting him specifically.

Take all of that and pit it against Jeremy Adams' Hal Jordan, a man who returns to Earth and begins immediately stalking Carol Ferris, who puts on a happy demeanor but is meanwhile making constructs of his dead friend. I finished Green Lantern Vol. 1: Back in Action not knowing what to think, really — does Adams mean for us to interpret Hal as disturbed or are Hal’s layers not as apparent to the author as to the audience? In contrast, John Stewart is righteous, though not perfect — we see in resurrecting his baby sister that John isn’t making all the best decisions, but that’s clearly part of Johnson’s whole conception of the character. Given the two, I know which Green Lantern I’d more trust to save me.

In the tense astronaut scene toward the beginning, in jettisoning at least some required knowledge of the Green Lantern mythos, in Montos' gritty art, Green Lantern: War Journal Vol. 1: Contagion reminds me of Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman’s Green Lantern: Earth One, a series I’m now realizing never did get a third volume and probably never will. But this, like that, is good Green Lantern, a story of a compelling character against bright cosmic lights. In the Dawn of DC era, War Journal and not Green Lantern is the GL series to beat.

[Includes original and variant covers]

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1. To my strictly ordered comics brain, it felt unusual for John Stewart to be applying for John Henry Irons to give him a job (so, working for Steel), given that John’s been around the DCU for 50 years, including pre-Crisis, and John Henry a “scant” 30. Also I wondered why not John working at Terrifictech under Mr. Terrific instead of Steelworks, given that Terrifictech is more ubiquitous in the DCU (employing Wally West, etc.) than Steelworks. The answer to all of it is probably writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson, with one foot in Metropolis himself even as he writes War Journal.  ↩︎

Rating 3.0