Alright everyone, it’s time to review a new issue of Green Lantern. This one-shot is a direct continuation of the story told in the twelve issue run of Green Lantern, by writer Geoffrey Thorne. This issue takes place after Green Lantern #12, and before the events of Dark Crisis and the death of the Justice League. It hasn’t been specifically confirmed that this is the final issue of Geoffrey Thorne’s run, but the next wave of new Green Lantern books contains a series starring John Stewart, and it’s written by someone else. So unless something comes around to prove otherwise, I’m looking at this as the final issue of Geoffrey Thorne’s run, as well as this volume of Green Lantern, before new creators take over in April. But for now, let’s get into the issue itself.
John Stewart The Emerald Knight #1, written by Geoffrey Thorne with art by Marco Santucci, colors by Michael Atiyeh, and letters by Rob Leigh. The title this time is Geminae Lux, which is Latin for Twin Light.
Two years have passed since the battle on Oa in issues 11 and 12 of the Geoffrey Thorne run of Green Lantern, and in that time, John Stewart and his Emerald Guard have been working to liberate more and more worlds from Esak’s control. John has been using his own power as an ascended being to give the rest of the Quest Lanterns powers that are similar to a Green Lantern ring…they can fly and make constructs, but they’re totally dependent on John acting as a power source.
Esak attempts to kill John and his army in one shot by luring them to an occupied world and then blowing it up, but John manages to shield everyone inside of a massive energy bubble. The planet may be gone, but the bubble was big enough to protect a sizable chunk of the planet, including a densely populated city. John stabilized the bubble, making it permanent, guaranteeing this civilization will be able to survive for generations to come.
Despite all the good they’ve managed to do, John and his allies are barely slowing Esak down. They just can’t compete with the power at Esak’s disposal… power that, according to Lonar, Esak has gained by exploiting a series of loopholes in the rules governing Gods.
Esak is a God of New Genesis, and they each exist to serve a specific purpose. When a New God embraces their true nature, they become the God OF something, which gives them an incredible amount of power over something very specific. Take Lonar for example…he’s the God of Journeys, meaning he can transport you anywhere in time and space with ease, as well as point you in exactly the right direction you need to go to fulfill your destiny…but he does that without knowing what your destiny is, or what you’ll have to actually do to fulfill it. So all those times we thought Lonar was just being a jerk for withholding valuable information, he actually wasn’t, he’s never known any of the answers. All he knows is what direction John’s journey is supposed to take him, because that’s all Lonar is the God of. Esak, on the other hand, hasn’t embraced a specialty yet, meaning he has Godly power without any of the restrictions that limit his actions. That likely means Esak isn’t quite as powerful as the rest of the New Gods, since he’s literally keeping himself from evolving into his final form, but the tradeoff is unfettered freedom to act however he chooses.
…and evolution is really what this is all about. Over time, the New Gods have changed a great deal, and Esak doesn’t like it one bit. He barely recognizes his fellow Gods anymore, and wants things to go back to the way they used to be. But the existence of Gods is governed by The Source, and there’s nothing Esak can do to oppose that…until he found another loophole, by exploiting Hypertime.
Hypertime is the name given to alternate timelines that branch off from the main one, but instead of going on forever as their own separate universe, they merge back into the main timeline after a little while. Every one of these Hypertimelines is a fully populated universe, full of alternate versions of people that Esak can exploit without technically breaking any rules, since everyone he pulls out of Hypertime and kills is still alive in the main universe. He’s not killing Joe Smith, he’s killing a variant of Joe Smith that was only going to exist for a limited time anyway. And he’s using the combined life force of all his victims as fuel to create his own custom version of the New Gods…a version that will be just like the old days, before they changed into what they are today.
Esak has it all figured out. As long as he stays in the Dark Sectors, shielded from the rest of reality by a barrier made of Hypertime, only killing variants and never allowing himself to evolve, nothing can stop him. Even if John managed to kill Esak, The Source would just resurrect him, since Gods are necessary for the universe to function. All of which is really bad, because if Esak is able to create his own New Gods, he’d be doing something that only The Source is supposed to be able to do, and that level of cosmic contradiction could end up breaking reality apart. So once again, John has to make a choice. He realizes that he’s spent the last two years fighting this battle Esak’s way, as one all-powerful being with a personal army wielding a fraction of his own power, so John changes that. Instead of giving a little bit of power to three hundred Lanterns, he’s giving a lot of power to just eight of them, in the form of emerald swords that will never disappear, and generate their own power supply. Their job will be to defeat Esak’s army while John deals with Esak directly. But John’s not doing it alone, he’s getting help from himself, a variant he pulled out of Hypertime.
Together, the two Johns subdue Esak and confront him telepathically, where our John tricks Esak into defeating himself. The reason John Stewart was the perfect person to send against Esak is because they’re opposites. John has always been more than Human, that’s what the Guardians saw in him all those years ago, it’s why they made him a Green Lantern, it’s why they put him in charge of the Mosaic world…it was all a way to teach him how to be what he really is, how to become something more and live up to his true potential. But John rejected it, ran from it, and even asked Ganthet to bury his memories of it. But that didn’t change anything, because evolution is a part of life, no matter how badly you may want things to stay the same.
At the end of it all, John asked Esak one question. He only had to make Esak acknowledge one thing. He looked Esak in the eye and asked him “what are you the God of?” And in that moment, the God who tried to change the rules of the universe just to recreate a past he was fond of, realized exactly what he really was. In a blinding flash of light, Esak evolved, becoming the God of Nostalgia.
Now that he’s been made to choose a path, Esak can no longer act freely, and is physically unable to finish the work he’s started. And after vowing revenge, he simply vanishes, and it’s all over. Well, mostly over. Esak has left the Dark Sectors, but his followers are still there, and their armies are still claiming worlds in his name. So John makes one more choice.
The two Johns use their combined power to send the three hundred Quest Lanterns home…and the variant of John goes with them. Our John Stewart made the decision to stay in the Dark Sectors, and keep helping all of the people Esak dragged out of Hypertime. There are a lot of worlds out there that still need to be liberated, and John won’t have to do it alone. A small group decided to stay behind and help him. A few of them are Lanterns, like Kenz, and ilo is there, all grown up. And Lonar apparently still can’t get enough of seeing how this story plays out.
So with a job to do, a team to support him, and the infinite possibility of Hypertime at his fingertips, we close the book on this volume of Green Lantern, and leave John Stewart in a place where he’s finally accepted the truth of his own existence, and in doing so has been rewarded with the potential of a truly happy ending.
Honestly, the worst thing about this issue is that it’s so compressed…there’s so much in here that I find genuinely interesting and would love to have seen explored over a longer period of time. The fact that ilo, the kid from the early issues of this run, grew up and joined John’s cause is just kind of glossed over, as is the fact that his mother Saquari is dead. And then there’s the fact that Esak’s final stronghold is a variant of the planet Xanshi, which is now alive and well in the Dark Sectors, a fact that we don’t get to see John react to at all except for one single panel at the very end. In addition to a version of Xanshi still being around, Hypertime opens the door for John to find a version of his wife Katma Tui who’s still alive, which makes John’s decision to remain in the Dark Sectors feel like him being rewarded for a lifetime of struggle. All of that, on top of the variant of John being the one to go back to the main DC Universe, makes this issue feel like it could be the final story about the original John Stewart. It would be easy to just bring him back to the main universe whenever they want, but who knows how many writers will even know this happened? After all, the two Johns are indistinguishable, and a variant is exactly as real as the version we’ve been reading about all these years.
I really just wish that all of this didn’t have to get crammed into one issue. Like the reveal of Esak’s true nature, which I love, since it speaks directly to something I care a lot about. I’ve talked before about how my least favorite aspect of American superhero comics is that things rarely change, and how changes that do happen rarely last, because everyone always wants to bring back the most iconic version, or just whatever version they read when they were growing up. So for this story, about John Stewart embracing change, to have a villain who embodies nostalgia…that has the making of a perfect meta commentary on superhero comics, but only if it has room to breath.
A lot of people have bad things to say about this run, but my biggest regret is that we’ll probably never get to see the rest of it. And we’ll never know how the events of this one-shot would have played out naturally, over the course of the two remaining arcs.
This whole run was an attempt to make Green Lantern a little less like Star Wars and a little more like Star Trek, by injecting some real scientific theory into this universe, to balance out all of the literal space magic that’s all over the place. And while some of it could have been handled better, I respect the effort, especially since I actually did learn a little bit about science by reading this run. You can argue that it’s not the comic’s job to teach science, and that’s fair, but I now know what Entanglement is, and I only know that because of this storyline, so I think that counts for something.
At the end of the day, I think the best thing about this run may have been the fact that Geoffrey Thorne published a series of blog posts that pulled back the curtain a little bit, and showed readers a more honest version of how mainstream comics are made. I think most comic fans, whether they realize it or not, believe in auteur theory…the idea that there’s one dominant creative figure at the heart of a project, who’s single handedly responsible for everything good or bad about the final product. We assume that a writer shows up with a complete story mapped out in their head, which they then write exactly the way they want, and then that’s what gets published. In reality, that’s not even close. Remember, Geoffrey Thorne’s entire Green Lantern run was originally just supposed to be a mini-series about John Stewart exploring and tying together the cosmic aspects of DC. Then, all of a sudden, it had to become an ongoing series that incorporated elements and characters that were never part of the original version of the story. And then, once he had adapted his story into a long-form, multi-arc format, Dark Crisis came out of nowhere and sent the whole DC Universe in a new direction, cutting his story short after only one third of it had been told. These are the realities of mainstream comics…you show up with the best of intentions, and then do the best you can with what you’re given, while everything around you continues to shift and change. But despite everything, what I’ll always remember about this run is the fun I had trying to figure it all out, and the joy I got from seeing my favorite series, Green Lantern Mosaic, finally come full circle. In a perfect world, this all would have gone differently (and in some Hypertimeline it probably did) but I’m ready to move on to whatever’s next with few regrets.
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