Phillip Kennedy Johnson had an excellent premise for he and Montos' Green Lantern: War Journal, with John Stewart brought back from retirement to battle an ancient, multiversal threat gunning just for him. But with all of that established in the first volume of Green Lantern: War Journal, along with big, splashy scenes of John fighting Radiant Dead zombie hordes, there’s not much else to do in Green Lantern: War Journal Vol. 2: The Builder; the book continues mostly along the lines you’d expect, with no big surprises among the six main issues to its conclusion.

I appreciate that Johnson has a fantastical mythology that he’s been perpetuating through his DC works, first Action Comics and now continuing into War Journal; I’ll be all the more impressed if he can use it again in Batman and Robin. That said, in a DC Universe that already has gods of various cultural mythologies and its own Fourth World saga — which themselves I can often only take in small doses — the travails of old god Olgrun are sometimes engaging, sometimes bordering dangerously on the dull. I’d be curious for Johnson to go ahead and tell the story he seems to want to tell; a full-on fantasy set in the DCU might be more workable than stories of these characters bent sometimes awkwardly to serve the interests of the writer.

[Review contains spoilers]

I am, I know, the problematic Green Lantern fan who enjoys it more when a Green Lantern is an earthbound superhero, rather than an often-esoteric cosmic warrior. Pre-Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps War was more my jam in Geoff Johns' run, and I liked Far Sector because, alien locale notwithstanding, it was at heart a murder mystery solved with a Lantern ring. And so, with Johnson playing up John Stewart’s architect background, serious art from Montos, and John battling the Revenant Queen and her Radiant Dead henchmen across Metropolis, Green Lantern: War Journal Vol. 1: Contagion seemed exactly what I was looking for.

Understandably, Johnson must then up the stakes, so the second half of War Journal — what was pitched as an ongoing series but seems increasingly always intended to be a miniseries — takes John to battle in the Revenant Queen’s realm. He’s there for most of the six issues — once or twice repelling an invasion on behalf of some friendly aliens, many times listening to someone tell him the history of the place or playacting in the role of Olgrun or his family. The structure is exactly what the structure of a story of this sort should be; Johnson simply fails then to bend it against expectation or offer surprise or suspense in any way.

I’m a fan of what seems the mostly forgotten Darkstars series by Michael Jan Friedman, a Green Lantern Corps-type title during a time when there wasn’t a Corps, though sometimes more street level and sometimes more political — and of which John Stewart was a member. We’ve seen the Darkstars resurrected in different forms in Robert Venditti’s Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps and Grant Morrison’s The Green Lantern, though it’s never turned out to be quite the same thing.

To that end, it was a big part of War Journal’s draw to be featuring the Darkstars symbol in a title with John Stewart and to offer references, if somewhat opaque, to John’s time as one. And so perhaps the biggest letdown in The Builder is the long story in the third chapter (issue #9) of the Maltusians, ancestors of the Green Lantern Guardians, who harness the power of Olgrun’s “Dark Star” to fuel their own warriors.

Page upon page, this fan waited to see how Olgrun would be integrated into the Darkstars and John Stewart’s own past history … only to learn in the end that the Controllers liked the name “Darkstars” and so appropriated for their own team. It seems Johnson is treading almost too timidly here, careful not to upset anything we already knew, and the result is Builder offers a lot of build-up without lasting effect.

Builder’s end is perhaps purposefully ambiguous, as John seems to have modified his ring in some way such that his mother is the “soul” of it, and the construct of his deceased sister Ellie is still around too and seemingly gaining sentience. We don’t get much detail on either; it’s a dubious prospect that John Stewart will fly around with his mother in his ring for the rest of his time, letting alone whether it actually is his mother or just a construct, and the same for his sister.

John talks about feeling closer to his family than he has in years, but the jury’s out how much is his family and how much is John trading actual human connection for the imagined family in his ring. I’ll be curious whether Jeremy Adams and Morgan Hampton try to unsnarl any of this in their new Green Lantern Corps series or if this is a problematic idea that just starts and ends with Johnson.

Of the seven aspects of Olgrun that we’re told are out there, Phillip Kennedy Johnson has spoken for two now — the ring John Stewart wears, if I understand correctly, and the power inside Super-Twin Osul-Ra. Maybe Johnson’s got five more series to write after Green Lantern: War Journal Vol. 2: The Builder, but that seems an awfully long way around. Given two books now in the “Olgrun cycle,” I’d be as interested to see Johnson get a Fellspyre Chronicles-esque deep fantasy book set in the DCU than have Olgrun again in the background of a different series; Johnson has managed to make it work for both Superman and Green Lantern, but not seamlessly and perhaps less so successively.

[Includes original and variant covers]