How does green lanterns power work

Hal Jordan found that out in "Green Lantern" 26 in , written by Gardner Fox and penciled by Gil Kane, when he literally went inside of his own power ring. In the backup story of that issue, Jordan discovered that his predecessor Abin Sur had faced a powerful wizard named Myrwhydden, who had great powers to go with his hard-to-pronounce name.

In order to stop him, Abin Sur shrank Myrwhydden down to microscopic size and created another world inside the ring where magic wouldn't work.

The wizard remained imprisoned inside the ring until he gained enough power to try to break out. Jordan shrank down and went into the ring to fight him, amazingly, and defeated him. Long before the Internet and Wikipedia, the Green Lantern Corps had their own huge storehouse of knowledge, and they kept it on their finger. The power rings of the Green Lanterns are connected to the power battery on Oa, and can access all the knowledge of the Lanterns at any time, anywhere.

Considering the Guardians of the Universe have lived for billions of years and the Lanterns travel throughout the universe, that's a lot of data at their fingertips Whenever a Green Lantern needs to research something, they can just ask their ring.

Not only can the ring give them the information they need, it can even create holographic projections that recreate people and events related to the topic. Very little is hidden from the Lanterns, and even then usually only by the orders of the Guardians of the Universe.

With a Green Lantern ring, you don't need the Internet. The ring is the Internet Green Lanterns can make anything that's green, and what's the most famous green object in the DC Universe? No, not a leprechaun. We're talking about kryptonite, the mineral that's deadly to Superman. The question has come up whether the Green Lantern can make a working kryptonite construct that's fatal to Superman, and the answer is yes.

The power ring can simulate any form of radiation, and kryptonite is no exception. It's actually been done a few times, but one of the most famous moments came in "Superman: Man of Tomorrow. In 's "Superman: Man of Tomorrow" 13, drawn by Paul Ryan and written by Louise Simonson, Superman seemingly went out of control, destroying nuclear weapons and unleashing an army of robot duplicates.

To stop him, Martian Manhunter used his telepathy to read the formula for kryptonite from Superman's mind and send it to Kyle Rayner to duplicate it. Superman managed to get away, but the message was clear. It's not easy being green. A Green Lantern has to have a strong mind to create his constructs and control his ring, but the ring itself has a lot of power over the mind as well. It can read the thoughts and memories of other beings and give them to the ring's wearer, giving the Corps the ability to read minds.

On top of that, the ring can also change the brains of others. Jordan has been one who likes to play fast and loose with neurons. For instance, his enemy Major Disaster has been the brunt of it ever since his first appearance in 's "Green Lantern" 43, drawn by Gil Kane and written by Gardner Fox.

Major Disaster found out the secret identity of the Flash and Green Lantern, so Jordan used his ring to erase Major's memory, and later put in mental blocks to keep him from revealing the secrets.

Here's hoping Jordan didn't cause too much damage in the process. Here's one you definitely never thought about a power ring doing, and that's taking the place of a hot cup of coffee. He used his ring to teach him how to create an intoxicating but tasteless chemical in the water supply told you it was an encyclopedia , and sat back to watch as the Corps got thoroughly blasted. It started out entertaining with the Green Lanterns drunk and staggering all over the place, but the plan took a turn for the worse when the Green Lantern Salaak started seeing pink elephants, which his ring brought to life, causing the creatures to begin attacking the city.

In order to stop them, Guy used his ring to blast the Green Lantern Corps with a beam that sobered them up immediately. Bet some of us could use a ring like that on Sunday mornings. Which do you think is the weirdest power of a Green Lantern ring?

What power do you think would come in handy? Let us know in the comments! By Nigel Mitchell Published Feb 10, Share Share Tweet Email 0. When the rest of his village tried to attack him to get rid of what they assumed would percent be cursed, the lantern flamed and killed them all.

And thus, we've got death. Hundreds of years later, with no explanation, the lamp wound up in "an asylum for the insane," where it flamed again and cured a man named Billings of his mental illness after he recarved it into a lantern, thus granting life. Finally, it ended up on a train that was crossing over a new bridge designed by engineer Alan Scott. The bridge was blown up by a rival engineer, but Scott survived, and the lantern granted him the power to get his revenge.

Weirdly enough, it was the lantern itself that suggested that Scott break himself off a piece and carve it into a ring so that he doesn't have to haul around the whole thing. For a sentient prophesying meteor, it definitely didn't seem to mind being hacked up into various objects. 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.

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 , 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. Green Lantern was one of the more popular characters in the Golden Age, but like a lot of his contemporaries, his star would eventually fade as the comics industry went through its first big contraction.

Despite being featured in his own self-titled magazine and as a member of the Justice Society of America, comics' first big super-team, Alan Scott made his final appearance in But then came the Silver Age.

Rather than just bringing back the original, they kept the name and the super-power, but tossed everything else in favor of a whole new character. It worked so well, in fact, that by the start of the '60s, DC was digging through their back catalog to find more characters for the same treatment. The rebooted Silver Age roster would eventually grow to include new revamped versions of almost all of the heroes who'd been around in the '40s. The big shift came from ditching the distinctly pulpy elements of the '40s and replacing most of them with the genre that was growing in popularity in the '50s and '60s: sci-fi.

With that in mind, they were all redesigned to fit in the universe and aesthetic that had evolved around Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman — the characters who'd been popular enough to endure that mid-'50s collapse. The Flash, appropriately enough, was the first to arrive, but it wasn't long before he was joined by the Atom, Hawkman, the Red Tornado, and even a revived Justice Society, which was renamed as the Justice League because — no joke — the people at DC figured that kids were more into leagues than societies because of major league baseball's American and National Leagues.

Out of all of the characters to be rebooted in the wake of the Flash's success, though, the most successful reimagined character by far was, of course, Green Lantern. 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, '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, 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 , which was that the Guardians didn't want the Green Lanterns to be completely unstoppable. Given what happened back in 's Green Lantern 7, that was probably a good idea. At the bare minimum, there were 3, others just like it, and that idea proved to be the central to the Green Lantern story in multiple, very important ways. The first was that the rings — and the Green Lanterns themselves — could be replaced, which was the very first thing that happened in a Silver Age Green Lantern story when Hal Jordan took over for the deceased Abin Sur.

The second was that if the ring wasn't unique, then there was no reason why a bad guy couldn't have one of his own. Thus, we got Sinestro , a villain who debuted in Green Lantern 7 with his own power ring. The backstory was that Sinestro had been a Green Lantern himself Sector , if you're curious who used his ring to become the tyrannical absolute ruler of his home planet, Korugar.

The Guardians stripped him of his power, so naturally, he went to the Qwardians , the Guardians' evil counterparts from the Anti-Matter Universe. You know, as one does. The Weaponers of Qward gave Sinestro a power ring that was exactly like the one he'd wielded as a Green Lantern but with one key difference: It was yellow.

This would seem to be exactly what someone would need to do a murder on Hal and his 3, coworkers, but despite having the advantage, Sinestro has pretty consistently failed to get the job done. For most of its history, the power ring has come with a few additional requirements for its use. The limitations of such use are the skill, knowledge and imagination of the user. Some of the abilities that a Green Lantern Ring has shown are:. DC Database Explore. DC Comics. TV Series. Zack Snyder's Justice League.

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