5 Reasons The Emotional Spectrum Ruined Green Lantern Comics

Superstar writer Geoff Johns owes a lot of his current power in DC Entertainment to his seminal run on Green Lantern, starting in 2004 with Green Lantern: Rebirth and continuing through such beloved events as The Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night. While “Green Lantern” is a title that has belonged to many different characters over the years since the 1940s, Johns specifically salvaged Hal Jordan’s reputation with his work.

In 1994, Hal was turned into the villain Parallax due to an editorial mandate because the character had gotten rather boring over the years. (The most interesting development at the time was that he was starting to go gray.) He was replaced by Kyle Rayner, a novice ring-wielder who was a good contrast to “Greatest Green Lantern” Jordan. In retrospect, Kyle is very guilty of Spider-Man syndrome and a lot of his positive attributes can be traced back to Peter Parker, but his role as the everyman made him a great fit on Grant Morrison’s JLA team. Still, there were elements of the Green Lantern mythos that had been abandoned to pave the way for Kyle: The Corps and the Guardians of the Universe were gone. These were features that made Green Lantern feel unique and different from other superheroes and they were missed. In fact, they even started to slowly creep back in: Kyle tried to re-establish a new Corps with disastrous results and later gave up his flashy powers as Ion to bring the Guardians back to life.

To paraphrase Peter Sanderson’s “Rubber Band Theory,” the Green Lantern concept could only be pulled in one direction so far before it eventually snapped back to its natural state. Kyle’s tenure as sole Green Lantern lasted about a decade before Johns brought back the Corps, the Guardians, numerous fan favorite alien corps members, and of course Hal Jordan, whose complicated path from Parallax back to hero is best saved for a wikihole. Rebirth was a blockbuster hit that reinvigorated the franchise and put Johns on the map like never before. While it’s a stretch to say Green Lantern is a household name (and if it is, that household is probably thinking of John Stewart from the Justice League cartoon show), we most certainly would never have gotten a Green Lantern movie in 2011 if not for the staggering popularity of the comics.

Johns asked and answered questions about Green Lantern no one had ever dealt with before and made us all feel like idiots for never asking them. Prior to Kyle, every Green Lantern’s ring would not affect the color yellow. At the time of the character’s creation in the Silver Age, it was felt that a hero needed an easily understood weakness (the Golden Age Green Lantern’s ring refused to work on wood), but Johns actually devised an in-story reason for it. He asked the simple question: “why aren’t there rings for the other colors?” and gave birth to the Emotional Spectrum, with each color corresponding to an emotion and each emotion providing the power for its ring. A splash page toward the end of Sinestro Corps War showed all the different Lantern corps fighting each other and it felt like a veil had been lifted. Red Lanterns? Blue Lanterns? It all felt so amazing.

But then, time went on. Blackest Night came and went, but the other corps stuck around. The success of the concept may have been its greatest injury. The assorted rainbow corps became a permanent fixture of Green Lantern comics, weighing down each subsequent story arc with more and more nonsense. In many ways, Green Lantern has yet to recover and now, almost a full ten years after the concept’s introduction, we are still dealing with the War of Light in some way, shape, or form and the books are suffering.

Green Lantern’s ring runs on willpower. The user has to imagine what he wants to create and then concentrate or “will” it into existence. It’s like trying to quit smoking times a million. We as readers can easily comprehend how such a weapon would work. We’ve all had to impose our will on the world in some form or another, even if it’s just resisting a late night cupcake, but do you understand how to weaponize love? Or greed?

The emotions of the spectrum are supposedly what power their respective rings, but the more you think about this, the less sense it makes. First of all, can willpower even be defined as an emotion? If a loved one dies, I will become sad, automatically; there’s no effort - it just happens. Emotions are out of our control, for the most part (see: the entire antidepressant industry), but willpower is essentially just extremely focused concentration. It hardly counts. And yes, the text tells us that Green, being in the center of the ROYGBIV spectrum, is the most stable emotion, unlike Red anger and Violet love, but that just seems to make the case that willpower is not an emotional at all. You can be consumed with rage or lust, but how often do you find yourself suddenly consumed with will? You might as well say boredom is an emotion, or apathy (these were often featured in parodies of the concept).

To reiterate, it’s simple to understand that Green Lantern wants to make a giant boxing glove, so he pictures it in his mind, concentrates, and creates a construct. But other rings can make constructs as well; is willpower not involved for those? How does the fear ring work, precisely? Does the wielder have to be afraid of her creation? Some of the rings sidestep this problem by changing the functionality. Red rings turn the wielder into a mindless, acid spitting goon. Blue rings of hope can only work if they’re close to a green ring, because “hope is nothing without the willpower to enact it.” But, both rings are capable of giving the user the power of flight and a protective aura which makes no sense. Green Lantern wills his ring to make him fly, to provide the aura. How does a Red Lantern, who is blind with rage, make his ring fly? By yelling at it? Does a Blue Lantern just really, really hope that his ring will let him fly to another planet and that his aura won’t vanish and expose him to the vacuum of space? But we were just told hope can’t do anything without willpower!

Also, the Emotional Spectrum has managed to cheapen the very concept of emotions, in general. Have you been wronged in a significant way? Well now your entire life is dominated by anger and revenge; you’ll seemingly never feel another emotion again. Wonder Woman was chosen by a violet ring to become a Star Sapphire because she is just so filled with love. I’m sure she felt a lot of love for Maxwell Lord as she snapped his neck leading up to Infinite Crisis. No wait, that didn’t happen anymore - or did it? Dammit, DC! Anyway, people are capable of complex emotions. You can, perhaps, be very angry with someone you love very deeply. You can be really hopeful that your enemy dies in a fire. The Emotional Spectrum promotes one-dimensional characters and that’s never good.