HBO Max's 'Lanterns' Inverts Hal Jordan and John Stewart's Dynamic, Straying From Comics

When John Stewart first appeared in DC Comics in 1972, he arrived as something rare: a Black superhero whose origins carried explicit political weight. Created by Neal Adams and Dennis O'Neil, Stewart was introduced as an unemployed architect chosen by the Guardians of the Universe to serve as a reserve Green Lantern. His first encounter with Hal Jordan became a crucible for examining bias itself. Jordan, seeing Stewart stand up to an aggressive police officer, immediately stereotyped him as a troublemaker—a judgment the Guardians themselves identified as rooted in Jordan's "petty biases." When Jordan tried to teach Stewart a lesson by assigning him to protect a racist senate candidate, Stewart's apparent indifference seemed to confirm Jordan's prejudice, until Stewart saved a policeman's life and exposed the senator's scheme to incite a race riot. The story worked because it made Stewart's resistance to authority—including to the blue-skinned Guardians themselves—inseparable from his identity as a Black man navigating a system designed to diminish him.

That origin lasted roughly three decades before it was substantially rewritten. In 2000, Bruce Timm's Justice League animated series introduced John Stewart to a new audience, but stripped away the political context entirely. Timm reimagined Stewart as a former U.S. Marine, a change that proved so popular it jumped from animation into DC Comics canon itself. Geoff Johns, writing Green Lantern comics in the early 2000s, formalized this retcon by establishing Stewart as a former sniper. As subsequent writers built on that foundation, Stewart's original identity as an educated, radical figure faded from view. The character who had once embodied a specific moment in American culture—one in which a Black superhero's skepticism toward authority was a feature, not a flaw—became instead a disciplined military man, his origins now framed through the lens of service and obedience.

HBO Max's Lanterns series, now airing its third episode, is not reversing this trajectory. Instead, it's deepening it while simultaneously inverting the dynamic between the two Green Lanterns. The show's version of John Stewart is not only a former sniper; he was trained since childhood by his own parents to become the perfect Green Lantern, all at the Guardians' direction. After being dishonorably discharged from the military—a consequence of taking the fall for an international incident caused by Hal Jordan's recklessness—Stewart is finally recruited to observe and eventually replace Jordan, who has become a liability to the Corps following Sinestro's coup. The reversal is stark: Hal is now the reckless hothead who resents authority, while John has become the by-the-books operative, the straight-shooter who follows orders.

This inversion creates a peculiar problem. Episode 3 attempts to layer commentary onto Stewart's origins about the exhausting demands of Black excellence and the burden of constantly exceeding expectations to prove one's worth. These are real themes with real resonance. Yet the character Timm created—the self-serious former Marine—lacks the narrative power of Stewart's original conception. The 1972 version worked because it was loud and specific to its moment; it gave readers a character whose world-weariness and anti-authoritarian stance were rooted in something concrete and recognizable. That version of Stewart eventually became a shrewd leader and the only mortal Guardian of the Universe, his skepticism of power having been vindicated by experience.

Lanterns appears to be setting up an arc in which John begins to question the authorities guiding him—whether his parents or the Guardians themselves. This is not necessarily a weak idea. The problem is that it mirrors the arc Hal Jordan already traveled in the comics, making Stewart's journey feel derivative rather than distinctive. By stripping away the political and cultural specificity of Stewart's original origins and replacing it with a military background, then layering on themes about excellence and expectation, the adaptation has created a character who speaks to contemporary concerns without the grounding that made the original so powerful. What remains is a character caught between two versions of himself, belonging fully to neither.