The Making of a Black Man: Green Lantern: Mosaic

Mosaic, the four-part Green Lantern storyline by Gerard Jones, M. D. Bright, and Romeo Tanghal (vol. 3 #14-17), was followed by Green Lantern: Mosaic, an ongoing series about Green Lantern John Stewart trying to integrate the various cities plucked out of space and deposited on Oa to form "the mosaic world." Gerard Jones continued on as writer; the series's main penciller was Cully Hamner, who I know from his work over a decade later on the new Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle book. The series lasted eighteen issues, cancelled as part of a general deck-clearing in preparation for the massive reshuffling of Green Lantern that happened with Emerald Twilight.

In an early lettercol (in issue #5), Gerard Jones says he was unhappy with how the original Mosaic story went (he agrees with a writer who calls it "deadly dull") and wanted to do something different with the premise when it became an ongoing. I don't think you'd need to read the lettercol to know that, because the transition between Green Lantern #17 and Mosaic #1 is obvious and sharp. I think it's best summed up by the aliens. The aliens inhabiting the mosaic in the original miniseries are Star Trek aliens. In the ongoing, they're Farscape aliens. Everything gets weird and dark and twisted and far less human.

Which really sums up the whole approach, because it's not just the mosaic that's changed: John Stewart is weird and dark and twisted and far less human now, too. John Stewart is a man pushed beyond endurance, trying to reconcile the dozens of conflicting peoples of the mosaic, but as the story goes to great pains to point out, that's life as a man of color. His very identity is a mosaic, one that is assembled in a rickety way but must withstand the pressure of American racism. In one sense, John is going crazy because of this sci-fi scenario he's been plunged into, but in another, the story surfaces the problems John Stewart has had all along.

It reminds me of a Vertigo series in style, but it could never be a Vertigo series because of its more "mainstream" content. In fact, I wonder if it lucked out in being born in 1992, that era where DC was publishing the comics that would become Vertigo comics when the imprint was formed in 1993. You wouldn't put this alongside The Sandman, Hellblazer, and Animal Man, it has too many ties to other superhero comics, but it's pretty much like no contemporary DC comic I've read, either. Post-Vertigo, it would have no clear place in DC's line-up, but before March 1993 divides the DC world in Vertigo and not-Vertigo, it's just one of a number of boundary-pushing comics DC published in the early 1990s. Surely, as I often say, one of the publisher's most fertile periods.

One Vertigoesque attribute is it doesn't really feel like a setup for an ongoing set of stories, more like one big story in many chapters. Jones's run was curtailed, and that shows, but I'm doubtful it's the kind of series that could run one hundred or even fifty-plus issues and still remain fresh.

That said, what's here is excellent. The opening issue is fantastic, a strange tour of the mosaic that lets you into John Stewart's mind at the same time: "This is my world... '...and welcome to it.' James Thurber." The second issue is bizarre and dark, the notorious death of Ch'p, the squirrel Green Lantern, but what made it more noteworthy to me is the way Jones and Hamner make Ch'p into something alien himself, not just a comedy alien Green Lantern.

Issue #4 is one of the series's occasional forays into life in the mosaic: the inhabitants of the American town have largely given up hope, and express their despair by watching reruns of classic television ad nauseam, not to mention days-long binge-drinking sex orgies. The issue is told from the perspective of their children who see the mosaic as an opportunity; the don't want to wallow in tv nostalgia, but to push forward into the new, no matter how dangerous. The series didn't often do this kind of thing, but it was usually worthwhile when done. Who would have thought that Green Lantern: Mosaic, of all series, could support a special Christmas issue!? Yet #9 was super-weird and super-fascinating.

The best issue is probably #5, "The Child-Man and the Great White Hero." Hal Jordan comes to confront John over how he's been handling the mosaic, and we get a great, dark insight into John and the way he thinks about Hal Jordan, about how he envies Hal's casual heroism, his whiteness. As John says to Hal, "You fight to prove your rightness, you score your total victories, and you stride out as you entered. I never score a total victory!" The book even gives Hal some casual (or perhaps more than casual) racism: he doesn't like that his old romantic interest Rose is now with John... but he can't quite vocalize why.

There is the occasional misstep; seeing John step outside the mosaic in #6 and into a more clichéd Green Lantern narrative wasn't particularly interesting. The one with the music aliens (#7) wasn't as good as it ought to have been.

The last few issues push John in an interesting direction, as we (spoiler) find out that it wasn't the mad old Guardian who brought all these cities to Oa, but John itself. Yet this idea feels squandered as one of many introduced as the series wraps up; it would have been nice for the series to have the room to actually explore it. The implications of this don't really get the time they deserve. In the final issue, John becomes a Guardian of the Universe himself, or maybe something else: "What's man in me. What's American in me. And what's black in me... I'll nurture every day... as I become a new kind of being."

Yet this would never be explored; John Stewart next appeared in Darkstars, no longer a Guardian or even a Green Lantern, recruited as the head of NEMO (the organization that supports the Darkstars), with no sign of the baggage or characterization introduced here.  

Mosaic is, like so many comic book premises, a great idea cut short by the constraints of the medium. Or, perhaps we might say, cobbled together from disparate parts in crazy ad hockery to make something worth viewing from a distance, even if each individual piece might not shine on its own. That is to say, of course, a mosaic.