The Green Lantern ordering tofu steaks in Episode 1 is DC's first live-action vegan superhero. He is joining a quieter list that goes back decades.
In the first episode of HBO's Lanterns, John Stewart shows up to a suburban barbecue and the host quietly says he ordered up some tofu steaks.
Stewart, played by Rebel Ridge breakout Aaron Pierre, nods. "That's very kind. I appreciate it." His partner Hal Jordan, played by Kyle Chandler, cracks that Stewart "doesn't believe in anything that causes enjoyment."
It is a throwaway scene. It also makes John Stewart the DC Universe's first live-action vegan superhero in a franchise stretching back to 1938.
The show premiered on August 16, 2026, holds a 92 percent Rotten Tomatoes score at the time of writing, and runs through October 4. And if the reaction on comic-book forums is any signal, plenty of viewers assumed Stewart's plant-based lifestyle was a first for the genre.
It is not. Not even close. Here are the nine other heroes who got there first, in comics and animation, often without much fanfare.
Nine Plant-Based Heroes Who Beat John Stewart to the Punch
1. Beast Boy (Teen Titans)
The most well-known and, frankly, the most obvious. Garfield Logan can shape-shift into any animal on the planet. That kind of empathetic wiring makes turkey dinner a hard sell.
The animated Teen Titans series established Beast Boy as a committed vegetarian, and later runs of the comics pushed him further toward outright veganism. He is arguably the character who first put the ethical case on the page for a generation of readers.
2. Poison Ivy (Harley Quinn animated series)
Ivy has always been complicated. She talks to plants. She sometimes uses them to kill people. But in the current-run Harley Quinn animated show on HBO Max, Ivy is canonically vegan, and it is played entirely straight.
This is not a character-development trick or a punchline. It is a logical throughline for someone whose whole identity is entangled with plant life.
3. Wonder Woman (Greg Rucka run)
During writer Greg Rucka's run on Wonder Woman, Diana of Themyscira followed a plant-based diet. The reasoning, in the comics themselves, was that she can talk to animals, which makes eating them philosophically incoherent.
This is the deepest cut on this list. Most casual DC fans have no idea. But the character canonically ate plants.
4. Bruce Banner (Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk)
In the Ultimate Marvel imprint, specifically the Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk miniseries, Bruce Banner is revealed to be vegan. The framing was health and impulse control, not ethics: fewer stimulants, cleaner diet, lower baseline stress. Banner being Banner, it was also, of course, complicated.
Marvel has since folded and refolded the Ultimate line into other continuities, but the reveal stands.
5. Damian Wayne (Batman Incorporated)
Damian, the fifth Robin and Bruce Wayne's biological son, has been written as a vegetarian in Batman Incorporated, after he rescued a cow from a slaughterhouse in a plotline nobody who reads it forgets easily. It is one of the few DC storylines that treats the switch as a moral decision made by a character on-page, in real time.
6. Scarlet Witch (Marvel Comics)
Wanda Maximoff avoids meat in various Marvel continuities. The framing has drifted over the decades, sometimes tied to her Romani heritage, sometimes to ethical opposition, sometimes to her reality-warping powers making her hyper-sensitive to what has lived. It is less headline-friendly than Beast Boy, but it is on the page.
7. Rogue (X-Men, Chuck Austen run)
During writer Chuck Austen's Uncanny X-Men run, Rogue was written as vegetarian, part of a broader reset of her personal life on the team. It is not a defining trait of the character across all continuities, but it is there in the record.
8. Nightcrawler (comics)
Kurt Wagner has been depicted as vegetarian across multiple Marvel runs, usually tied to his Catholic faith and his deeply held sense of the sanctity of life. A quieter, less commercial version of the same throughline you see in Beast Boy.
9. Spider-Man (Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man)
In the Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man line, Miles Morales' family is shown to lean plant-based, and Miles himself avoids meat in some storylines. As with Banner, the reboots have shuffled this in and out, but the character has that lineage on his record.
Why Now, and Why Live-Action Took So Long
Every hero on the list above is a comic character, or an animated one. Live-action was the holdout. And the reason it took until 2026 is worth thinking about.
Live-action is expensive. Studios have historically been risk-averse about anything that reads as a lifestyle statement, worried it will alienate the audience for a $200 million tentpole. A vegan comic-book hero could be a single panel. A vegan live-action hero has to hold up in a scene, in a script, and in the marketing.
The reason Lanterns pulled it off, arguably, is that its version of John Stewart is a former black-ops soldier: stoic, disciplined, unsentimental. His veganism is not framed as gentleness. It is framed as control. That is a version the mass audience will accept, and it is one that the past decade of comic-book heroes has been quietly building the runway for.
It is also worth flagging what Lanterns is not doing. It is not making Stewart's diet the show's moral center. It is not writing him a monologue about slaughterhouses. It is just letting him order the tofu steaks and move on.
That is, if we are being honest, the version most vegans have wanted on screen for years.
The Bigger Picture
Superhero stories have always been a lagging cultural indicator. They pick up what the audience has already accepted and translate it back at a slightly larger scale. Fifteen years ago, a live-action lead superhero who casually declined a steak would have been a plot point. In 2026 it is a line of dialogue that lasts four seconds.
For the growing number of plant-based readers and viewers, that is a bigger deal than it looks. Representation stops being representation the moment it becomes furniture. John Stewart is furniture.
