This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 3.Everyone going into Lanterns knew there would be weird stuff. After all, the HBO series adapts a long-running DC Comics franchise about space cops who can make constructs of whatever they imagine by channelling their willpower through a wishing ring. But even the most dedicated GL fan was probably shocked by the opening of the premiere episode, in which John Stewart Sr. stood his young son in front of the family garage, drew his pistol, and shot an apple off the boy’s head.The scene shocks viewers because of the father’s utterly bizarre behavior and because of the boy’s surprising calmness as it happens. Moreover, it shocks viewers because the scene depicts a home life for John Stewart that differs from the one established in comics. With the latest episode, “OutKast,” Lanterns fully develops that home life in a way that continues to diverge from portrayals of John Stewart elsewhere, but manages to synthesize the various versions of the character across media, resulting in a surprisingly coherent look at one of DC’s most complicated characters.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Green Lantern RisingIf you ask the average superhero fan who John Stewart is, they’ll probably tell you that he’s a Green Lantern, that he’s stoic and tough, and that he’s a former Marine. Those same fans would be shocked to go back and read John’s first appearance in Green Lantern #87 (1971), part of the legendary Green Lantern/Green Arrow run by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams. That issue begins with Guy Gardner, Hal Jordan’s emergency back-up on Earth, getting injured and put into a coma. With Guy out of commission, the Guardians select a new potential replacement and send Hal to inner-city Detroit to train him.Before introducing himself, Hal stands on a rooftop and watches John intercede when a pair of police officers hassle some Black men playing dominos on the sidewalk. John’s cocky attitude offends Hal, who pleads with the Guardians one last time to reconsider their choice. When they refuse, Hal begins training John, and his discomfort only grows. John almost immediately proves himself capable of wielding the ring, but he also refuses to wear a mask, he takes “the superhero gig” for “laughs,” and hesitates while rescuing a racist senator and presidential hopeful from an assassination attempt, making a blackface joke when the hate-monger gets doused with oil.Stewart has a few more appearances around the DC Universe, but it’s Len Wein who upped John’s status. When Wein became the main writer on Green Lantern, he brought John up to the big leagues, making him Earth’s full-time Lantern in issue #185 (1985), penciled by Dave Gibbons. Wein, and especially his successor Steve Englehart, developed John into a three-dimensional character, keeping his passion for social justice but allowing him to be a full person, not just a loud caricature. Under their tenure, John became fully integrated into the DC Universe, even serving on the Justice League of America… a tenure that does not go well for him.John Stewart’s OdysseyThe first major change in John’s personality comes shortly thereafter, in one of the clunkiest stories in the character’s history. In 1988, DC published Cosmic Odyssey, an event comic written by Jim Starlin and penciled by Mike Mignola. In this New Gods-focused four-part story, the Justice League fights against a universe-ending threat, splitting into groups to save various planets. John and Martian Manhunter get sent to Xanshi to fight off an attack, which includes a bomb at the center of the planet. Full of himself, John captures Martian Manhunter in a bubble and sends John away to defuse the bomb himself. But when he finds it, John discovers that the bomb is yellow—the one weakness of a Green Lantern ring at the time—and the planet explodes.John has been written as a braggart, but that was out of character, even for the time (rumor has it that Starlin mixed up John Stewart with Guy Gardner, and somehow it got past editorial). Yet, it gave John pathos, especially when the Green Lantern Corps was destroyed by Sinestro at the end of Englehart’s run that same year, leaving only a few Lanterns in the entire universe. During that period, the supervillain Star Sapphire murdered John Stewart’s wife and fellow Lantern Katma Tui in a story published in 1988’s Action Comics #601, by Christopher Priest and Gil Kane, leaving him utterly devastated. Thus, when the disgraced writer Gerard Jones started writing a relaunched Green Lantern book in 1990, he had a broken, disillusioned John to work with. Jones used that guilt to continue building on John throughout Green Lantern, and especially in the spinoff series Green Lantern: Mosaic, drawn by Cully Hamner, which ran 18 issues from 1992 to 1993. That series followed Stewart as he tried to protect a planet comprised of cities from alien worlds (and one from West Virginia, foreshadowing Lanterns‘s depiction of Rushville, Nebraska). Jones portrayed John as a mosaic himself, deeply introverted and insecure about where he belonged. For every time he asserted himself, whether that be telling off the Guardians or Jordan, John fell back into a period of introspection and questioning.That depiction was the norm for most of Stewart’s stories that followed, especially after he gets paralyzed after a fight with the villain Grayven. Even after regaining his ability to walk and rejoining the Justice League in the early 2000s, writers portray John as thoughtful and sensitive. That is, until they start taking cues from a particular TV show.A Whole New LeagueOn November 17, 2001, the first episode of Justice League hit screens. A spinoff of Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League, and especially its successor Justice League Unlimited, told epic stories befitting the world’s greatest heroes. The team’s main lineup mostly followed the big seven heroes of the DC Universe, swapping out Aquaman with Hawkwoman and making John Stewart instead of Jordan or Kyle Rayner the team GL.Voiced by Phil LaMarr, John Stewart of Justice League was very different from any depiction we’ve seen before. He wasn’t just quiet and thoughtful, nor was he given to any sort of braggadocio. Instead, he was tough and quiet, making him easy to pair with that show’s young and brash Flash. Moreover, Justice League introduced a totally different backstory for John, making him a Marine with the mind of a tactician.As often happens, this version of John Stewart began to make its way into the comics. In particular, once Geoff Johns started revamping Green Lantern in 2004, John became canonically a tough, focused Marine. Furthermore, Johns made Stewarts’s military record canon, even including a flashback that showed John and his fellow Marines getting into a fight with Jordan and his Air Force pals. By the time the DC Universe rebooted with the New 52 in 2011, and then un-rebooted with Rebirth in 2016, the quiet arcitect John Stewart was gone and only the tough Marine remained.Lanterns’s New LightThat complicated history makes “OutKast” all the more remarkable. As we saw in that episode and its predecessors, John is once again a Marine, someone trained to take orders and follow them to the letter. He waits patiently to assassinate his target, neglecting all other needs, in the same way he’s been waiting for his chance at the ring. But “OutKast” also shows that this destiny was thrust upon him. John has the soul of an artist, and would have rather spent his time designing new buildings and sketching birds than doing military drills.To its credit, and especially to the credit of Aaron Pierre and his multifaceted performance, both of these qualities feel true to the character on screen. Finally, John Stewart is everything we’ve seen in the comics: he is passionate, he is thoughtful, he is proficient. He knows how to take orders, he’s willing to push back against authority, and he is deeply sensitive. Lanterns makes clear what has only been suggested so far by the comics and other media, that John Stewart is perhaps the most three-dimensional superhero in the DC Universe.Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. EST on HBO and HBO Max.The post Lanterns Has Finally Fixed John Stewart’s Backstory appeared first on Den of Geek.