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.

Review: Green Lantern: Mosaic by Gerard Jones, M. D. Bright, and Romeo Tanghal

Green Lantern: Mosaic is one of those cult classic comics runs-- I don't think it was successful in its time, and it's never been collected, but people who have read it speak highly of it, and I was sufficiently intrigued to break my rule of only picking up those space-based DC comics that do not feature Green Lantern. But before Green Lantern: Mosaic, the ongoing series, there was Mosaic, the four-part Green Lantern story. (That's not confusing at all.)

There was obviously even some set-up before this, but it works on its own well-enough; in fact, despite having been originally published in 1991, it reads like something optimized for the trade paperback era. The background is pretty easy to work out: one Guardian of the Universe, the so-called "Old Timer" (the same one who traveled America with Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen) went mad and died, but not before using his power to bring one settlement each from a number of planets to Oa, clustering them together into a sort of a "mosaic" world. While Hal Jordan cruises the universe re-establishing the Green Lantern Corps (I'm not sure why it needs re-establishment to be honest, it seems like the Corps is always being un- and re-founded), John Stewart has been assigned to watch over the settlements on Oa.

Gerard Jones seems to me to be a perennially underrated writer. I know his career is over now, but it seems to me that in the early 1990s he was putting out quality stuff on a regular basis but he never made it big like some of his contemporaries did. In addition to a redefining run on Green Lantern and various spin-offs, he also wrote or co-wrote much of Justice League Europe (issues #14-50), and he was responsible for the only Elongated Man series ever published, Europe '92. The more I read of him, the more I see what a versatile writer he was. Mosaic is not just the story of people having to learn to co-exist on an alien planet (and failing), it's a deep dive into the traumas and history of John Stewart.

The main plot of Mosaic is the conflict between the various way of thinking on the mosaic world, some of which are quite alien; the whole thing kicks off when an alien race with an irrepressible desire to expand at all costs kills a couple innocent humans. Armed conflict between the two species quickly escalates, despite the best efforts of both John Stewart and a woman named Rose Hardin. John can't come up with any solutions other than brute force: giant walls between settlements that his ring needs his force of will to maintain. But things keep getting worse. There's some pointed commentary on race, especially as humans start finding allies among the aliens-- allies in a desire to tear down the walls so that the fighting can resume.

But the real story of the book is the mind of John Stewart. Jones's script brings together a number of incidents from John's past to give us a broken man: his history as an architect, his perennial outsider status, the death of Katma Tui in Action Comics Weekly, the destruction of Xanshi in Cosmic Odyssey. Jones does a great job of uniting these disparate threads into a picture of a desperate man, suffering from tragedy (he even deftly justifies John's poor judgement in Cosmic Odyssey as a consequence of him overcompensating for the powerlessness he felt after Katma Tui died), who his whole life has tried to build structures that turned out to be more like strictures-- and now he has to try his hand at sculptures for the first time if he's going to save the planet and save himself.

I mostly knew Jones for comedy with a tinge of character in JLE and Elongated Man, and for more straightforward cosmic adventures in the other bits of his Green Lantern I'd read. Oh, and for whatever the heck Batman: Fortunate Son was meant to be. But here he shows himself to be capable of complicated psychological tragedy. I look forward to seeing where the mosaic world and John Stewart go when Jones and I return to it in the Green Lantern: Mosaic ongoing series that began eight months after this storyline came to an end.

Perhaps unjustly, I haven't said much about it here, but I enjoyed the artwork of M. D. Bright and Romeo Tanghal here. Bright was one of the, ahem, bright spots of the otherwise dismal run of Green Lantern in Action Comics Weekly, especially his out-there space adventure stuff in the story in Green Lantern Special #2 that tied up the whole storyline. He's just as good here, handling Jones's human drama and far-out space plots with equal skill. The kind of artist I wish I saw more of. As for Romeo Tanghal, the man was basically ubiquitous as an inker at DC from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, and he's never disappointed me. It's just a shame neither man really returns for the Mosaic ongoing, but hopefully its actual artists will be quality ones as well.

Mosaic originally appeared in issues #14-17 of Green Lantern vol. 3 (July-Oct. 1991). The story was written by Gerard Jones, pencilled by M. D. Bright, inked by Romeo Tanghal, colored by Anthony Tollin (#14-16) and Matt Hollingsworth (#17), lettered by Albert DeGuzman, and edited by Andy Helfer.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Gotham, Part XX: Batman: Fortunate Son

Batman's back, baby! Forget about your multiversal crises, and sink your teeth into some good old-fashioned street crime...

Comic trade paperback, 90 pages
Published 1999
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2015

Batman: Fortunate Son

Writer: Gerard Jones
Artist: Gene Ha
Colorist: Gloria Vasquez
Letterer: Willie Schubert

Year Four, Summer
This is a weird book, no doubt about it. A rock musician that Robin's really into commits a crime, or seems to, Batman decides the team will investigate, as a favor to Robin. It turns out that Batman utterly despises rock music, and he and Robin (quite temporarily) split up. It also turns out that in additional to homicidal maniacs (right down the hall from them, in fact), Arkham Asylum houses rock managers who did too much drugs. Also also: the ghost of Elvis Presley, but blond, and only ever referred to as "God"!

Yet... I cannot imagine a better story of Batman and rock music. The weirdness of the story doesn't bother me, because it's operating by its own rules; this is a heightened world where rock music is powerful, where it instigates riots and sweeps people up at the drop of a beat. It's weird and kind of mystical without being magical or fantastical. People can be hypnotized by it, and terrible crimes can be committed by its adherents, all because of the music. It can do great good, but also great evil, and people will do anything to harness its power. You might now be saying, "this world sounds an awful lot like our world." That's the point!

Of course Batman hates rock music, then. Even at its best, it's disorderly, it's suspect. You don't need the scene where young Bruce Wayne is told to turn off that rock music, because it's time to go to the theatre, to make him hate it. Rock is about changing the world, but through disorder. It's accomplishing what Batman stands for the most, through means that are utterly alien to him.

Click to enlarge, duh.

I should also say that I really liked the look of Gene Ha's art, though his storytelling was often confusing. He draws Batman like a guy in costume, if that makes sense; you can tell his suit is something he's wearing, especially his cowl, not something that magically molds into his body. I don't think that approach would work for every Batman story (it's hard to imagine it in my next read, Batgirl: Year One, for example), but it is the right approach for this one, a story which emphasizes the fragility of who Batman is and what he does.

Next Week: And then there were three... the Bat-Family grows again in Batgirl: Year One!

Faster than a DC Bullet, Issue #9: The Return of Superman

Comic trade paperback, ~480 pages
Published 1993 (contents: 1993)
Borrowed from a friend
Read February 2009

The Return of Superman

Writers: Dan Jurgens, Karl Kesel, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, Gerard Jones

Pencillers: John Bogdanove, Tom Grummett, Jackson Guice, Dan Jurgens, M. D. Bright
Inkers: Brett Breeding, Doug Hazlewood, Dennis Janke, Denis Rodier, Romeo Tanghal
Colorists: Glenn Whitmore, Anthony Tollin
Letterers: John Costanza, Albert DeGuzman, Bill Oakley

DC Universe Timeline: Four Years Ago
Real World Timeline: May 1993

(We see an issue of the Daily Planet dated to 28 May 1993, indicating the events of this book occur around this date. However, Superman died just before Christmas 1992 according to World Without a Superman, yet Clark Kent is supposedly "rescued" just over a month after Doomsday's attack, meaning either this story ought to fall in January 1993 or Superman's death should be pushed forward to April 1993. A month doesn't even seem right, though-- there ought to be a substantial time without Superman for the world to feel his lack, and then at least a few weeks where the four Supermen are active in Metropolis.)

It turns out that Superman really isn't dead after all. Please, act surprised. This collection tells of his return to life in an absolutely huge book containing twenty-two individual issues. You can't get that for $19.99 anymore; these days DC would turn that into four (hardcover) trades at least. Of course, Superman doesn't do things by halves, he does them by quadruples-- if he comes back from the dead, he's going to do it four times.

The first half of the book or so focuses on each of the four Supermen in turn, trying to avoid a commitment to any one of them actually being the real Clark Kent. By far my favorite of these was John Henry Irons, who is the only one who doesn't try to pretend to be the "real" Superman. Irons is a man whose life was saved by Superman who build himself a suit of steel to fill the gap left when Superman died. Because, despite World Without a Superman going to great pains to show how Supergirl, Guardian, and Gangbuster were successfully filling that gap, no one at all is doing a thing about it here. Irons goes by the moniker "Man of Steel" and spends most of his time fighting some woman who I guess is supposed to be sexy but is in the issues penciled by Jon Bogdanove, so she just looks stupid. Like everyone he pencils. I say I like the Man of Steel the best, and of course I do-- he's being Superman for all the right reasons: it's the right thing to do. Except he's also trying to atone for his past as a weapons developer, now that his super-awesome weapons are being sold to Metropolis gangs. He feels a lot of guilt over this, because apparently street gangs just wouldn't commit crimes if they couldn't gain access to guns called "Toastmasters". He's pretty much an Iron Man rip-off now that I think about it, except that he's not rich, alcoholic, or Republican.

Of course, you pretty much have to like the Man of Steel the best, because the other Supermen aren't up to much. Next most sympathetic is Superboy, a clone of Superman created by Project Cadmus, despite the fact that in World Without a Superman they were stopped from creating a clone by Guardian and the Newsboy Legion. Really, just admit none of you read the stories each other write, guys. Anyway, Superboy is cloned with an earring, sunglasses, and a leather jacket, which tells you everything you need to know-- he's a self-centered 1990s teenager who is about as appealing as Superman as a dead rat. Fortunately, the book doesn't even try to convince you that he's the real deal; he just spends a lot of time flirting with a terminally stupid Asian reporter.

And then there's the other two: the Last Son of Krypton and the Man of Tomorrow (a.k.a. the Cyborg Superman). Perhaps the book's biggest failing is that it never really tries to convince the reader that these two might be the real deal. The Last Son has some good sleights-of-hand to show how he could be the real Superman in practical/plot terms, but there's not enough character work to support that. An attitude more like Superman's, or some moment of connections with his "old" life would go a long way. Guy Gardener likes him, which isn't exactly a vote of support either. And despite the excellent "Prove it" chapter where the Cyborg Superman saves Bill Clinton from an improbable assassination attempt, you never really believe in him either.

But perhaps that's the point. Three of these characters have the Superman powers and logo and modus operandi, but they don't have the Superman essence. And this book is about what makes Superman who he is. He doesn't believe in power above all, he doesn't believe in self-aggrandizement, he doesn't believe in unnecessary lethal force. He believes in doing the right thing. And that's why Steel is the closest any of the characters come to being the "real" Superman, even though he doesn't have the powers in any way, shape, or form. And as the story goes on, the Last Son of Krypton (revealed to be a guy named "the Eradicator" that you and I have never heard of in a humongous and clumsy backstory dump) learns this and begins changing his ways, ameliorating his actions so that he's more like the real Last Son.

(Oh, and Bibbo Bibbowski shows up again, goddamnit. He doesn't say "Sooperman" at least, but we're still treated to "you were my fav'rit!" I'd take even Superboy over this guy.)

Of course, the Cyborg Superman knocks himself out of the running by turning out to be Secretly Evil. He's another guy you and I have never heard of, an astronaut or something who hates Superman for reasons none of the main characters are ever told; there's just an entire issue given over to two comedy aliens telling each other convoluted backstory. Oh, awesome. And he's working with Mongul, an intergalactic criminal whose power is being a lame version of Darkseid. Despite this not-quite-winning villain combination, the second half of the book, where the Cyborg and Mongul unleash their plan and destroy Coast City (poor Green Lantern, his hometown wiped out in someone else's comic), is very good.

The real Superman makes his way back to Metropolis, low on power, but determined. He's Superman, you know? He's not going to stop, even if he doesn't have the powers all the other characters do. Of course, he's got long hair and wears black now, but I guess you can't have everything. His return leads to my three favorite moments of the book: the first is when Superboy, inspired by the real deal (I am getting tired of this phrase) diverts a missile headed for Metropolis, apparently at the cost of his own life. Even though he obviously lives through it, it's a powerful moment, as Superboy struggles and struggles to do what has to be done.

The other highlight is when Superman and Steel battle their ways through Engine City. I dig two-men-with-virtually-nothing-against-all-odds stories, and they're even better when the two men are as awesome as Clark Kent and John Henry Irons. (Supergirl's there too, slowly de-laming herself, but who really cares about her?) And then the Eradicator shows up again and--

I like the idea of the ending-- the Eradicator understanding the "true" meaning of Superman's legacy and gifting Superman with power once more-- but its execution is a little clumsy, I have to admit, as not even the characters have a good reason for why Superman's powers came back. And then the way Superman disposes of the Cyborg is kind of lame. But then, there's the third favorite moment: the double-page spread where Superman really, truly, actually is back. Oh yes!

The art is typical superhero comic fare, usually fine except when Bogdanove is drawing. I wish there was a consistent feature to Maggie Sawyer between artists aside from "lesbian haircut", though.

Like all the best Superman stories, this book is about what it is to be Superman. And with some well-crafted character moments (Lois especially shines in this book) and some strong heroic ones, this book stands as the crowning jewel of the death/rebirth trilogy. Not everything's perfect here, but the book works more often than it doesn't, the second half especially.

Note that this originally appeared on my old LiveJournal and included pictures back then. Sadly, the pictures are lost in the mists of the Internet.