Week 4
Green Lantern, Darkstar and Guardian
Name: John Stewart
Place of Birth:
Aliases: Green Lantern
Relatives: Unnamed Father and Mother (deceased) , Roy Stewart (Grandfather, deceased), Addie Stewart (Grandmother, deceased), Loretta Stewart (Aunt, deceased), Katma Tui-Stewart (Wife, deceased)
Occupation: Green Lantern of sector 2814, Architect, former US Marine
Base of Operations: Earth, Sector 2814
Height: 6’1 – 185cm
Weight: 201Lbs – 90kg
Hair: Black
Eyes: Green
Group Affiliation: US Marine Corps, Green Lantern Corps, formerly Justice League of America and the Darkstars.
First Appearance: Green Lantern (vol.2) #87 Dec. 1971
Powers, Abilities and Equipment: John Stewart’s ring provides him with the abilities of all other Green Lanterns. These abilities include flight and limited invulnerability. As with all other Green Lanterns, the ring is a weapon of the mind and powered by will, therefore only limited to the wearer’s imagination. Like all Green Lanterns, Stewart's personality affects his ring's creations, giving them a solid, architectural quality. In Green Lantern: Rebirth, Hal Jordan remarks that "everything John builds is solid". Hal has also remarked that Stewart is the best flyer in the Corps. In Green Lantern (vol. 4) #26, it was shown that John's willpower exceeds the limit of his ring (when he tried to recreate a planet from scratch), a feat that has not been discussed before which remains to be seen how this will play upon events in the future.
History:
John Stewart is an architect and veteran U.S. Marine who was selected by the Guardians as Hal Jordan’s backup after Guy Gardner was seriously injured in a disaster. Although Jordan objected after seeing that Stewart had a belligerent attitude to authority figures, the Guardians stood by their selection.
To Jordan, Stewart’s first mission began badly with the assignment of protecting a racist politician and Stewart took advantage of averting an accident to embarrass him in the process. However, Stewart soon proved his worth when an assassin shot at the politician, but Stewart refused to intervene with Jordan to move in response to the attack. Stewart had good reasons for this apparent dereliction of duty when he stopped a gunman from killing a police officer in the outside parking lot at the event while Jordan was pursuing a decoy. When Jordan confronted Stewart about his actions, Stewart explained that the politician had staged it for political advantage. With that adventure, Jordan concluded that Stewart was an excellent recruit after all.
For some time, Stewart occasionally filled in for him as Green Lantern when Jordan was unavailable, including some missions of the Justice League.
After Jordan gave up being Green Lantern in the 1980s, the Guardians selected Stewart for full time duty. Stewart filled that role for some years, during which time he married Katma Tui, the Green Lantern of the planet Korugar who was initially assigned to train John in the use of his ring. Kat and John served together within the Green Lantern Corps of Earth alongside Hal Jordan, Arisia, Kilowog, Salakk and other alien Green Lanterns.
After John’s ring was rendered powerless through the schemes of Sinestro, and Katma Tui was murdered at the hands of the insane Star Sapphire, Stewart’s life began to unravel. First, he was falsely accused of killing Carol Ferris, Star Sapphire’s alter ego, and then falsely accused of theft by South Nambia (a fictional DCU nation similar to Apartheid-era South Africa). Jailed and tortured in South Nambia for weeks, John freed himself with his old ring, now re-powered thanks to the efforts of Hal Jordan. As a result, John inadvertently freed both a serial killer and a terrorist. When Jordan confronted John over his actions, the two friends came to blows until John realized the “revolutionaries” he had been aiding intended to murder innocent civilians.
Afterwards, John left Earth for space, where he participated in the Cosmic Odyssey and failed to prevent the destruction of the planet Xanshi by an avatar of the Anti-Life Equation.[1] The incident earned him the ire of J’onn J’onzz, who was with him at the time. This series of tragedies left John a shattered man on the brink of suicide and created the villainess known as Fatality. John finally forgave himself for his past mistakes and grew into a stronger, more complex hero when he became the caretaker of the "Mosaic World", a patchwork of communities from multiple planets that had been brought to Oa by an insane Guardian who had raped John’s mind.[1] Although bitter and sullen at his assignment at first, he overcame this and, using his formidable intellect and talent for unconventional thinking, Stewart forged the Mosaic into a new society and eventually became the first mortal Guardian of the Universe, known as the Master Builder.
As his reward for this new level of awareness, John was reunited with his late wife, Katma Tui. However, tragedy struck once again and Hal Jordan, possessed by Parallax, destroyed both the Guardians and the Central Power Battery, robbing John of his newfound powers and his resurrected wife.
Following Emerald Twilight and the collapse of the Green Lantern Corps, Stewart was recruited by the Controllers to command the Darkstars, another interstellar peacekeeping force.[1] Using the new resources at his command, John evacuated the Mosaic cities from Oa prior to its destruction and served the Darkstars with distinction until he was crippled in battle with Grayven on the planet Rann. John eventually regained the use of his legs as a parting gift from Jordan before Jordan sacrificed himself to destroy the Sun-Eater during The Final Night. As a result of Hal/Parallax healing him, he began to exhibit random bursts of energy from his hands that he was able to discharge on three different occasions. Soon afterwards, after he refused months before, he accepted a new ring entrusted to Kyle Rayner by a time-lost Hal Jordan and joined the Justice League. After Kyle took an extended leave of absence from Earth, he returned to find that John was a much more skilled and experienced member of the JLA than he was.
With the return of Hal Jordan and the Guardians, the Corps has been reorganized. Each sector of space now has two Green Lanterns assigned to it, and Stewart and Jordan now share regular duty for Earth’s sector, 2814. After the dissolution of the Justice League in the aftermath of the events depicted in the 2004 miniseries Identity Crisis, and the destruction of their Watchtower headquarters on the moon, Stewart has begun playing a larger role in metahuman affairs, working with many former Justice Leaguers.
During the opening “One Year Later” storyline of Green Lantern, Hal Jordan tells Green Arrow that John Stewart is on an off-world undercover mission. The details concerning this mission were revealed in Green Lantern (vol. 4) #17. John Stewart disguised himself as "Hunger Dog" to investigate in Europe. When John hears that Hal Jordan is being held captive by Amon Sur and Loragg, he goes off to rescue him. This leads to a confrontation with Amon Sur, who turns out to be the son of their predecessor, Abin Sur. During the fight, Amon receives a ring from the Sinestro Corps and vanishes.
In the Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special, the Green Lantern Corps are attacked by Bedovian, the sniper of the Sinestro Corps, who is capable of taking out a target from three sectors away, all from the inside of a red Sun-Eater. After Bedovian takes out several Green Lanterns, John Stewart uses his power ring as a scoped sniper rifle to track the nearby sectors. He eventually discovers Bedovian's hiding spot and shoots him. As Green Lantern Corps member were forbidden from killing sentient beings at that time, it's likely that Bedovian survived the attack, however his fate has not yet been made clear.
In Green Lantern (vol. 4) #22, John and Guy Gardner are captured by Lyssa Drak and taken back to Qward, where the two Lanterns are held captive. Hal manages to defeat Lyssa and free John and Guy from their nightmares, while the Lost Lanterns recover Ion. The earth-based Lanterns then return home, only to find that New Earth, as the center of the Multiverse, is the Sinestro Corps' next target. The Sinestro Corps and the Manhunters invade Earth. The Cyborg Superman and Superboy-Prime attack Superman, while Hal confronts Parallax, who has possessed Kyle Rayner, just before the latter is about to kill Hal's family. John orders Guy to retrieve a painting by Kyle Rayner's mother. When Parallax absorbs Hal inside himself, John looks on with sudden shock. Guy returns and shoves the painting into Parallax's eyesight, allowing Hal to use it to help Kyle overcome his fears and expel Parallax. Now in its original form, Parallax is then contained by Ganthet and Sayd within the Power Batteries of Hal, John, Guy, and Kyle. Ganthet and Sayd then reveal that they are no longer Guardians. Ganthet gives Kyle a new Power ring and asks Kyle to become a Green Lantern again, to which he agrees. The four then race off to finish the fight. At Guy Gardner's suggestion, John and the other Lanterns use Warworld as a gigantic grenade, badly wounding the Anti-Monitor, who is then thrown into space by Superboy-Prime.
John Stewart witnessed Guy being infected by the Sinestro Corps member who is a living virus, named Despotellis, and asked Soranik Natu to help Guy. Soranik used the Green Lantern Corps smallpox virus named Leezle Pon, who stops Despotellis. John Stewart was later approached by the Guardians to become one of the Alpha Lanterns, a new division of the Corps devoted to the internal affairs of the Corps. Stewart, desiring more information about the secrecy of the forbidden prophecies, declined the offer, to the extreme disappointment of the Guardians.
It has also been revealed that John served in the Marine Corps as a sniper prior to becoming an architect. While the idea of John being a former Marine was taken from the Justice League cartoon, the sniper angle is a new addition to the character's background. During his time in the Marines, John met the then young Hal Jordan when he was in the Air Force before they both join the Green Lantern Corps Stewart appears in the ongoing Trinity series. He is the one to first attack the alien creature Konvikt, but when he's on the verge of defeating him, his concentration suddenly snaps, and starts muttering incoherently in binary code. A moment later, he spontaneously generates complex weapons from his body, by means unrelated to his ring. Later, he attempts to overexert himself to know how he generated those weapons by running a brutal training session against holographic Qwardian Thunderers, which does not work. He later shows Firestorm the machinery used to monitor the Cosmic Egg imprisoning Krona, but as he leaves again, he suffers from a relapse and start generating knives from his uniform, and it is revealed the entire system is broken.
Later, on board the Antimatter Earth Crime Syndicate satellite, he again loses control and nearly brings down the satellite with his blasts. It is revealed these discharges are brough about due to John's absorption of a Qwardian superweapon, the Void Hound, which has been trying to escape its containment, or at least seize control of Stewart. After the sweeping, devastating effects of the spell engineered by Morgaine Le Fey and Enigma, he is seen in an Earth under the control of a totalitarian Justice Society, where all Green Lanterns are forbidden to be. He eventually starts breaking down, and with the Void Hound gaining enough hold on him to force him to create a black hole with which force him back to Earth, he has no choice but to comply.