Black Comic Characters - Green Lantern

The Green Lantern is one of those comic book characters that has a very convoluted history...especially to the mainstream culture. When discussing Green Lantern it is important to realize that it is not really a single character, but an intergalactic police corps. Each Lantern possesses a power ring that they wear on one their fingers (or tentacles depending on the species). The ring, through unknown fictional energies, can create anything in physical space that the user can imagine. It allows them to fly through the air, in space, or underwater. The more will power and the more imagination the user has, the more powerful the ring makes them. On occasion, the rings have shown sentience by choosing their own wielders. The Green Lantern Corps are controlled and overseen by a race of powerful beings called The Guardians. They created the rings, ultimately choose the beings in the core, and assigns which Green Lantern is responsible for which sector of space.

Because of various reasons, the sector of space containing earth has had about 5 different humans functioning as Green Lantern and sometimes simultaneously. The one that appears in media outside of comic books in the past most often was a test pilot named Hal Jordan, a white man. He is the Green Lantern featured in the animated movie released on DVD spring of 2008 called Justice League: The New Frontier. He was also the Green Lantern used in almost every cartoon I saw growing up. However since 2001, when Justice League was adapted into a television animated show, Hal Jordon was not chosen to be the Green Lantern by the shows' creators. Instead they chose the only black man from the comic books to be Green Lantern, John Stewart. The show did not go into his back story as much as they did in the books. In the show it mentions that John had been a marine and been in love with his Green Lantern trainer just like in the comic books. However in the books it was pointed out that because John is an architect, he has a powerful imagination that allows him to be very good at using his power ring. Also in both incarnation, John is very disciplined, moral, and not given to wise cracking all that much. The other departure from the comic book that they did in the show was having John fall in love with Hawkgirl and develop a complicated relationship between him, Hawkgirl, and Vixen( a black female superhero). John also guest starred in a couple of episodes of the show Static Shock, made by many of the same producers of Justice League.

All in all I like this version of Green Lantern the best. He was one of the first major black superhero at DC Comics. His ring puts him almost on the same footing as Superman and he definitely knows how to use that power. Thankfully there is a mugen character based on John Stewart. Here is a short video of computer controlling him fighting a computer controlled Sinestro.

Return to Main page.

View blog reactions