The Untold Truth Of Green Lantern's Power Ring

With most of the original Golden Age superheroes, the inspiration their creators were drawing on for their characters is pretty easy to figure out, sometimes embarrassingly so. With Superman, for example, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were inspired by Philip Wylie's novel Gladiator and popular pulp character Doc Savage — you know, Doctor Clark Savage, the Man of Bronze, who has a Fortress of Solitude at the North Pole? Batman was initially just Bill Finger and Bob Kane's riff on the Shadow, and the Joker was visually inspired by a silent film called The Man Who Laughs. 

Green Lantern, however, is a whole lot harder to pin down. The idea of a ring that can create solid images of anything the wearer can imagine doesn't really have an obvious immediate predecessor. The closest thing to a magic green light that would've existed in pop culture at the time would've been the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock in The Great Gatsby, and linking F. Scott Fitzgerald's use of color symbolism to the first appearance of Green Lantern is something even the most daring high school essay writer wouldn't try. 

The broader strokes of the origin story, however, are a little easier to figure out. There are plenty of magic rings in fiction, going all the way back to mythology, but there's one in particular that seems relevant here. Before it's turned into its traditional shape, the green lantern in Green Lantern is actually an oil lamp, like the kind seen in Arabian Nights, which is also where we can find the other connection. While the lamp is the item most commonly associated with Aladdin and his genie, the original version of that story has a second genie that appears when Aladdin rubs a ring, through which he can create anything he can imagine. 

As for the color, a lot of Golden Age characters drew inspiration from Baroness Orczy and her famous character, the Scarlet Pimpernel. So yeah, comic writers gave their heroes names built around their various hues — Blue Beetle, Red Tornado, and so on. In 1939, green hadn't been used that much, and, well, "Green Lantern" just sounds better as a title than "Green Lamp."

Initially, the Green Lantern's "power ring" was a different sort of weapon than what it would eventually become. In the first story, it gave Alan Scott the ability to fly, turn invisible, pass through walls, and become bulletproof, and within a few years, it would be able to blast his enemies with green flames and even read their minds. The idea of forming constructs, which would become the signature power of the Green Lantern character, wouldn't come along until a few years later.

There were, however, a few elements in that first story that would endure for the next 80 years. The first was the ring's insistence that Scott's power was nearly infinite, as long as he believed in himself, and that "willpower is the flame of the Green Lantern." The second was the idea of an oath that Scott would recite when he charged the ring, which originally went, "I shall shed my light over dark evil, for the dark things cannot stand the light of the Green Lantern!" Not quite as catchy as the little poem that would become a sort of nerd shibboleth after the Silver Age, but it definitely set a precedent.

Perhaps most importantly, that story introduced the idea of a weakness for the ring. That was actually something of a novelty at the time. Superman wouldn't have his Kryptonite until 1943, and even then, it was introduced first on the radio show, partly to incapacitate Superman and allow the voice actor a break from the daily broadcasts. Martin Nodell, on the other hand, presumably realized the benefit of giving a character with ill-defined, seemingly infinite powers a weakness in order to create drama. In this case, Scott's weakness was originally characterized as him being "only immune to metals," but it was later refined into being weak to anything made of wood. It seems random, sure, but it did come into play pretty frequently when it turned out his arch-enemy was a swamp zombie. 

While virtually all of DC's Silver Age reboots came with a heavy dose of space fantasy, Green Lantern went further than anyone in swapping out the pulpy mysticism for full-on science fiction. Just like in Alan Scott's debut, Hal Jordan — a jet-setting atomic age test pilot, not a civil engineer — had an origin story that involved the eponymous lantern crashing to Earth from space. Rather than being a magic talking meteor that had been foretold in an ancient Chinese prophecy, though, 1959's Green Lantern was a weapon carried by an alien peacekeeper who'd been shot down in a UFO crash and who recruited Hal as his replacement.

If that wasn't enough sci-fi, that story also introduced the Guardians of the Universe, little blue men with big heads — the visual shorthand for super-evolved psychic beings that cropped up a lot in comics from the era — who divided outer space into 3,600 sectors, each with its own assigned space cop. Each one had a ring that needed to be charged with a lantern-shaped power battery every 24 hours, another holdover from Alan Scott's tenure, but was otherwise limited only by its wielder's imagination and willpower.

The one exception was a "necessary impurity" that made it powerless against anything yellow. Originally, this was explained as being some weird flaw in the power battery's construction, without which it would lose its power. But it got another, more reasonable explanation in 1991, which was that the Guardians didn't want the Green Lanterns to be completely unstoppable. Given what happened back in 1961's Green Lantern #7, that was probably a good idea.

For most of its history, the power ring has come with a few additional requirements for its use. In Hal Jordan's time, the Guardians only recruited beings who were honest and fearless. In more modern stories, using the ring required its bearer to be able to feel fear and overcome it, and the act of focusing one's willpower enough to actually make it work was shown to be so difficult that it left inexperienced users physically exhausted. That, however, was not always the case, as evidenced by the time that two drunk rednecks found a couple of them at a bar and decided to goof around in the woods making giant chainsaws.

No, really. It happened in Green Lantern #3 from 1990. In that comic, Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner, both of whom were Green Lanterns, got so mad at each other that they decided to settle their differences the old-fashioned way, taking off their rings for a fair fistfight. Unfortunately, they got so caught up in the brawl that they were arrested, leaving their rings back at a bar where they were found by two country boys named Jeff and Wash. Those two went out to the woods and, while speaking with ridiculous Southern accents that even Rogue from the X-Men would think were a little over the top, used them to make constructs like gigantic beers and a 20-foot raccoon.

To be fair, it wasn't easy, but it wasn't quite the physical strain that would be shown in later, grittier stories. For them, it was more like "when ya hammer a six-pack on a Sunday mornin' an' you're tryin' like heck ta stay awake in church!" 

While the Green Lantern power ring was often referred to as the most powerful weapon in the universe, that power had its limitations. Hal Jordan found that out in 1994, when his hometown was destroyed along with most of the people he loved. And the kicker? It didn't even happen as part of a Green Lantern story. It was during The Death of Superman. 

Perhaps understandably, Hal snapped under the pressure. After trying and failing to recreate Coast City and its population using his ring, he decided that what he needed was more power, in the form of more rings. Since the only way to get more rings was to take them from the other Lanterns, Hal embarked on what was basically a campaign of space-murder, killing nearly all of his fellow Lanterns and taking their rings, eventually making it to the central power battery on the Guardians' home planet of Oa, where he absorbed the power of the rings and the battery into himself.

The result was Parallax, an incredibly powerful supervillain with seemingly unlimited power. He had so much power, in fact, that he was able to re-ignite the sun after it was extinguished by a cosmic weapon called the Sun-Eater. Plus, he resurrected his old pal Green Arrow from the dead, and he even made a pretty effective attempt to restart time itself. Eventually, Hal would die, and then become the Spectre, the embodiment of the literal Wrath of God. That sounds like a big deal, but in terms of power, it turned out to be a lateral move at best.

The next big development for the Green Lantern rings came in 2005, with the introduction of the "emotional spectrum." It turned out that there weren't just green and yellow rings. Instead, there was an entire rainbow of Lantern Corps, with each color tied to an emotion that powered its respective ring. 

Green was willpower (not an emotion), yellow was fear, blue was hope, and red was rage (which involved its bearers vomiting blood and replacing it with hate, which is pretty amazing). Orange was greed, indigo was compassion, and violet was love. Then came the reveal that there were two more. Black was death (also not an emotion), and white was life (again, not an emotion). Then, later, just to take things to its most logical and delightful extreme, it turned out there was also a spectrum for invisible emotions that included ultraviolet and infrared lanterns, which were tied to emotions we'd prefer not to acknowledge. Each ring functioned more or less like the familiar green ones, and there were reimagined classic Green Lantern villains as extensions of those corps, like Star Sapphire (violet) and the Black Hand (black, obviously). The only big difference was that there was no corps for the Orange Lanterns, as the embodiment of avarice wouldn't want to share their power. 

Along with this came the reveal that each of the colors was embodied by an entity. The Green Entity, for example, was Ion, a giant, glowing space whale, while it turned out that Parallax was actually the Yellow Entity, a space locust that had been secretly possessing Hal Jordan when he went bad. Oh, and the entity representing love is called the Predator, but it's not that Predator. If it was, the classic Schwarzenegger movie would've been very different.