Originally Posted by
Bruce Timm
Bruce Timm on Green Lantern (circa 2004): “The only things that really needed to be settled on were which version of the Green Lantern we were going to use, because there’s so many. We could have used Hal Jordan or Kyle Rayner or Guy Gardner, but for a number of reasons, including ethnic diversity, we chose to go with John Stewart—which has turned out to be probably the single most controversial aspect of the show amongst die-hard comic book fans. John Stewart never really got a whole lot of face time in the comics. There was a small period of time back in the ‘80s when Steve Englehart was writing the comic, when John was the main Green Lantern. […] I’ve always kind of liked him too and, again, aside from the ethnic diversity thing, we were looking at what the group dynamic was going to be.
“One of the things we really wanted to avoid was having a group of characters who were all pretty much interchangeable. Going back and rereading a lot of the Silver Age Justice League comics, they really are all the same character—Batman [had] no different a voice than Superman or Flash. They’re all kind of the same character; the only thing that differentiates them is what colors they’re wearing and what powers they have. So we really wanted to make sure they had a much more interesting group dynamic than that and that they all had different personalities. Going back to the original version of John Stewart from Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ day, the thing that made him interesting to us was that he was quite a bit more of a badass. If you go back and read those, he comes across as a stereotypical, angry, young black man. We knew we didn’t want to do that exactly, but we still wanted to keep a little bit of that edge to him so that he would be one of the more strident of the characters. We hit upon the idea of the Green Lanterns being kind of a paramilitary force, so we said, ‘Ah, marine. Okay, Louis Gossett Jr., Samuel Jackson.’ So that became our take on him (courtesy of Modern Masters: Bruce Timm).