Exercise in Egotism 3: John Stewart

As a disclaimer, I like John. I like John a lot. But I think that it's been a very long time since he's been in anything cool. Sure there was JLA, but it doesn't sound like he's going to be in the new group. Hal's got the main series, Guy has the Corps, Kyle has Ion. But what does John have?

My Plot Idea for John
And it's a shame because he's a really good character. He's just...not necessarily good at being the main character of a superhero comic.

But it occurred to me while doing my politics rant, that there is a perfect plot there for John Stewart.

See, what's occasionally hard to remember (though Ragnell's highlighted this before), is that John is a character who embodies social activism.

His roots are in the civil rights movement, and I think maybe some of the loss of impact of his character comes from the lack of focus on those issues in the intervening years. Now John tends to come out to play as main character only in stories involving race or racial allegories.

Which is unfortunate in some sense, but also provides for an interesting avenue for story telling. See, each Green Lantern Corps character has some underlying aspect to emphasize in their stories. Hal's the old-fashioned adventurer. His Parallax adventures lend a nice redemptive arc, but otherwise, his focus is on pretty straight forward action. Guy's more complicated, fridge-bait turned adversary turned antihero, he's the renegade cop who does what it takes to get a job done. To go along with that, he's got the soft squishy core that places as much emphasis on inter-relationships and gruffly expressed emotions that make him an ideal center of a group of manly men (and women) keeping order. Kyle is the young one, the artist, the dreamer, whose stories center as much around personal growth and transcendence as they do around the action-adventure.

And John has one too. He's a crusader. At his best, John Stewart is about fixing things and writing wrongs. John's a character that centers around personal redemption (Xanshi, the sister). More importantly, John's a character that centers around Justice. Which is something that gets lost when he gets shoved into straight-forward adventure roles like Hal.

Mosaic was awesome, but this is my Exercise in Egotism, so I'm going to go in a different direction. Realism versus surrealism.

Basically, I want to send John Stewart to Washington.

John has the best qualities for a public superhero turned politician. He's intelligent and dignified. He's respected. The Green Lanterns, for all of Hal's antics, are still considered more hero than vigilante. And he's got a public identity already.

With all the political aftermath of Infinite Crisis and the preceding events, it seems like the superhero community could only benefit from having representatives in Washington. I don't just mean an independent strike force like Checkmate, but real voices in the government. John would be perfect for this

Politics is a game that requires patience and forethought, both of which are strengths of John's. The changes made by political means are slow but long term. And John is a character that thrives when there's an issue to be enforced, things like metahuman issues, funding for science-fiction-y research, and other nifty comic book-y elements.

John'll also have interesting challenges to overcome, his personal history, habit of dating/marrying aliens, and the possibility of divided loyalties (to an alien police force, of all things) could make for fun obstacles along the way.

I'm not sure how exciting a politics-based comic book would be, but it'd get livened up by the usual amount of Lantern-related aliens, bondage, and other fun things. And it'd be different, at least, and that's always worth a try. :-)