John Stewart might not even need the ring

If Lanterns is teasing what I think it’s teasing, this John Stewart doesn’t just become one of the best Green Lanterns. He becomes one of the strongest beings in the entire DC Universe.

I’ll be honest, I’m not deep in my Lantern lore. So I went and did the homework. What I found was insane.

The Comic Run That Started This

Geoffrey Thorne’s Green Lantern run gives us a John Stewart we’ve genuinely never seen before — an OP version of the character that reframes everything the ring was supposedly for. Thorne’s Green Lantern series launched on April 6, 2021 as part of DC’s Infinite Frontier line, and he built the entire twelve-issue run around John Stewart from the jump.

For a stretch of that run, John and the rest of the Corps get stranded in the Dark Sectors working without their rings at all — and it’s there the comics lean into an ability that’s genuinely part of his power set: channeling the power of will itself, no ring required.

But his willpower is so strong that he connects to the power of will itself.

Here’s the part that recontextualizes all of it. In the run’s finale, issue #12, John absorbs the “Godstorm” — a cosmic phenomenon that gave him godlike powers, connected him directly to the Source itself, and crowned him the Emerald Knight. That’s not a power-up. That makes him a literal new god.

And it doesn’t stop with the Thorne run. Years later, in Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s Green Lantern: War Journal, John uses his ring to spawn Ellie — a construct built in the shape of his dead sister, meant to comfort his mother through her dementia. Except Ellie doesn’t stay a simple hard-light shape. She grows her own consciousness, her own agency, independent of him. He’s not just building constructs anymore. He’s making life.

The Show Is Already Planting the Same Flag

Now look at what Lanterns has actually put on screen. John constructs a bird using his ring — and the bird stays alive and stays with him even after the ring comes off, surviving him going through hell and back. During his flying lesson at the beginning of episode 2, John creates a green bird that somehow continues to fly even after he removes his ring, and though Hal is obviously taken aback by his subordinate’s advanced Green Lantern magic, he doesn’t pass on the information to the Guardians. That’s sheer willpower with the ring literally off his hand. Hal is shook, and he’s choosing to sit on it.

Stack the rest of the show’s breadcrumbs on top. We know the Guardians chose John from a very young age, possibly from birth — one of the Guardians of the Universe, played by Laura Linney, is standing right in front of baby John and his mom in the flashback before he ever suits up. And Sinestro already knows about him — when Hal visits Sinestro, the former Green Lantern immediately turns the conversation toward John Stewart rather than simply focusing on the Manhunter mystery, and things get even murkier when Sinestro asks about John Stewart directly.

Go back to that early flashback episode where John doesn’t have a ring yet — that’s a full decade after he started training to be a Lantern, and the show frames it as its own mystery.

Where This Is Heading

Put the comics next to the show and the theory writes itself: this DCU version of John Stewart might not even need the ring. He could just be the cosmic power of will itself, the same way his comic counterpart ended up as a literal new god.

I might be reaching. But I just laid out every piece.