Geoff Johns

Johns’s Jawns

by David Uzumeri of Funnybook Babylon

Geoff Johns is a complex writer, albeit not particularly a subtle one.

In the aftermath of Sinestro Corps, and now the Alpha-Lanterns story, we’re starting to rocket into the third act of his grand Green Lantern epic that started all the way back in 2004 with Green Lantern: Rebirth #1. It’s been a huge commercial success for the company, firmly raising both Hal Jordan and the entire Green Lantern mythology into DC’s conceptual A-list while also performing huge acts of world-building and defining the modern ideal for a DC crossover event with Sinestro Corps War. It’s been, undoubtedly, a success for the company.

On a commercial level.

Critically, the book has been more than a little bit beleaguered largely due to its scribe, Geoff Johns. Make no mistake, Johns can be - and largely completely was back in 2004 - a fan’s writer. His enthusiasm for the characters he writes can be either infectious or obnoxious, and when he returned Hal Jordan to the lead role in the franchise, many people felt his enthusiasm for Hal bordered on blind hero-worship. It was a similar concern that Rebirth largely signified that the Green Lantern franchise would forget about more recent characters and devolve into simple Silver Age nostalgia.

Three and a bit years later, it’s pretty clear that wasn’t the case. Johns has, in a manner similar to Braction/Frubaker on Iron Fist, extended the mythology of his corner of the DC Universe to such an expansive system that it doesn’t even really need the containing universe anymore. He’s made a large number of retcons that haven’t discounted early stories but rather just exposed new perspectives on them and incorporated them into a whole - using the emotional spectrum not only as the thread with which many previous enemies and events (Parallax, Star Sapphires, Black Hand) are sewn together, but as the springboard for what was DC’s most successful event since Infinite Crisis. (I realize that was only 2005, but we’re in Event Country now and that’s forever ago.)

It certainly doesn’t take an English professor to figure out the central theme of Green Lantern is overcoming fear. As Johns grows as a writer, his stories’ reliance on and willingness to explore these kinds of themes strengthens. It’s a theme that’s reflected in every aspect of the book, from Hal’s relationships with his family to the internal politics of the Corps to the Star Wars-esque mystic mumbo-jumbo that forms the core of the book’s newly expanded mythology. Nothing he comes up with is out of thin air - the Guardians always rejected emotion, the yellow ring was already in play, the Star Sapphires and Effigy didn’t take much tweaking to fit into the framework Johns built. Honestly, I think it simplifies things, too - if you’re trying to explain where these different aspects of the Green Lantern mythology relate to the central concept, all you really have to do is point at a color wheel. A little Power Rangers, yeah, but it’s more succinct than explaining the history of Maltus and why the Controllers and Zamarons left Oa.

Another very common complaint against the series is that Geoff Johns has some kind of “hero worship” for Hal, and therefore is incapable of portraying him as a flawed character. This is a reading that baffles me - while Johns may not feel that turning Hal into a drunk driver (Emerald Dawn) was the best course of action, his interpretation is still an immature, stubborn, selfish hotshot that very unglamorously tore his family apart, continually wasted Air Force resources, and arrogantly refused to wear his ring while flying, leading to a months-long stay in a Chechnyan prison camp with his friends. He’s been a bad brother, a bad son, a bad soldier and, thanks to Parallax, a really shitty space cop. He’s certainly not perfect.

This imperfection and why Hal keeps on going have been the fuel for his journey over the course of Geoff Johns’s tenure. In Green Lantern: Rebirth #6, at the end of a pitched battle, Parallax implores Hal to give up and he responds he “doesn’t know how.” It was a line that many dismissed as an action movie cliche, but it’s a philosophy that’s formed the core of his decisionmaking process since. No matter how much he fucks up, he’ll try again, and that’s the lesson he learned from Parallax. Before, Hal Jordan had no fear - his cockiness stemmed from an innate urge to utterly deny its existence. To bottle it up deep inside, to never let it affect his thought process. And when the chips came down and the hits kept coming, and he lost his hometown, he completely snapped and gave in, and Parallax had him.

Now, Hal recognizes it and overcomes it. It’s not about pretending the threat and the fear aren’t there; it’s about recognizing them, rationally weighing them, and going ahead anyways. Fear has always been a powerful weapon, and that’s no less true today - and as long as it is, the book’s theme remains relevant. On top of that, Hal’s journey isn’t even over. Johns has stated this is his most personal work right now, and from the fireworks and Photoshop effects of Sinestro Corps War, it’s easy to see how that could be a mystifying claim. However, I think that, like all great science fiction and superhero epics, the large-scale conflicts act as effective metaphors for the personal struggles that give the story resonance.

Geoff Johns isn’t a perfect writer, but he’s learning. Every year, I see more and more complex and varied comics coming from him, from the Norman Rockwell Americana charm of Justice Society of America to the tongue-in-cheek character humor of Booster Gold. While his recent work has certainly improved his critical cachet, there’s still a strong undercurrent within the community that he’s still a “fan’s writer”. While I think his work on Zoom back in Flash was evidence to the contrary, the negative reaction to much of his 2005 work (especially Infinite Crisis) really set this impression into stone for a while. The phrase “big dumb crossover” was used to describe SCW a great deal, but the role that story played in thematically tying up the journey of Coast City in overcoming its own fear, as well as the implications of Sinestro’s master plan, fit into Johns’s grander narrative in a way that is hardly dumb.

Geoff Johns is a very good writer. Within a few years, he’ll be truly great. I really wish he’d give creator-owned concepts a try for a little while, just because I think it would expand his horizons as a writer, but with each new project his understanding of structure and narrative improve to a huge degree. The genuine enthusiasm that fuels his craft is not only infectious to the reader but also the driving force behind his constant (and stated) desire to learn. There is a reason Grant Morrison is mentoring this guy - he has the potential to be far more than another Roy Thomas, Kontinuity Kop (I’d say he’s already there). His work isn’t empty - there are ideas, themes, hooks to all of his stories. They may currently lack subtlety sometimes, but that will come with time. The more his work is treated as something real, the more likely it is to become that. I can’t wait to see what he’s doing in three years - I just hope it doesn’t take that long for people to realize he can get there.