One of the absolute best things about Green Lantern is the concept of the Green Lantern Corps. Thousands of beings, from planets all across the universe, each armed with a green power ring that lets them patrol their sector, protecting innocent people and going on amazing adventures that defy the limits of your imagination. It’s the perfect concept to pair with the power set of a Green Lantern…the rings don’t have that many restrictions on what they can do, the biggest limiting factor is the user. If you have the creativity to come up with something, and the willpower to back it up, then the ring can probably do it. There’s a nearly infinite level of personalization and customization to the powers of a Green Lantern, and when you apply that to a Corps with 7200 members who all live on different worlds, experiencing different things, coming from different backgrounds…it gives Green Lantern a level of storytelling potential not present in any other superhero property. A Green Lantern can be anyone, live anywhere, go anywhere, and comes with a fully customizable power set. You can tell literally any story with a member of the Green Lantern Corps…and because the Corps and the universe it exists in is so big, if the character you need doesn’t already exist, you can just create them yourself.
…but the Corps isn’t perfect. There’s a troublesome aspect to the Green Lantern Corps that’s always been a problem, though until now it’s been pretty easy to just brush it aside and keep enjoying the interesting characters and fun stories. But living through 2020, it’s become impossible ignore, and not addressing it would be irresponsible…and that is the fact that the Green Lanterns are the police. More specifically, they’re a highly militarized police force made up of loose cannons who’re no stranger to using excessive force, all of whom are celebrated as heroes. And in the middle of 2020, when public tolerance of police brutality seems to have finally reached a breaking point, the pro-police message of modern Green Lantern feels tone deaf at the very least.
Writers love to lean into the concept of Green Lanterns as cops. Grant Morrison especially seems to like taking every possible opportunity to remind us that Hal Jordan isn’t a super hero, he’s a police officer. But even without having the characters state it directly like that, the trappings of law enforcement have always been all over the Corps. The Green Lantern homeworld, whether it be Oa or Mogo, is always referred to as their central precinct, and contains a massive prison for anyone the Corps sees fit to arrest. There’s even a specific Lantern named Voz who’s sole responsibility is to just stay there and be the warden of the Green Lanterns’ private jail, and another Lantern named Malet Dasim, who’s a legal expert, there to keep the Corps from getting into too much trouble as they run around imposing their justice on the universe.
They’re beat cops with assigned partners and jurisdiction, the text of their stories stating outright that they’re officers policing the stars. There’s even a scene in Infinite Crisis where the Corps is referred to as the “Thin Green Line”, referencing real world police being seen as a “Thin Blue Line” between order and chaos. It gets so overt sometimes that I’m honestly surprised I’ve never read a panel where a character supporting the Corps says “Green Lives Matter”.
…and the reason this is something important that needs to be discussed is that, sooner or later, you start to realize that the Green Lanterns existing as law enforcement becomes a horrific concept when paired with the fact that Green Lanterns win almost all their fights by using excessive force to overwhelm whoever it is they’re trying to pacify.
By firmly cementing the Green Lanterns as a militarized police force, while simultaneously framing them as super heroes, it makes Green Lantern stories into pro-police propaganda. Look at the super cops, they’re the heroes of the story, root for them as they crush any opposition in their path, doing whatever it takes to get the job done.
A lot of typical superhero behavior is excusable because they’re vigilantes, they work outside of the system and have to make the best out of the few options available to them. Spider-Man has to web up crooks and just leave them for the cops to find because everything Spider-Man does is illegal. He’s a private citizen who puts on a mask and beats up anyone he thinks deserves it. The same is true for all super heroes, we just don’t think of it as being a problem because they’re the main character of the story, we’re intimately familiar with their reasoning and their morality, and we know that they’d never abuse their power and take things too far. They’re super heroes, they can be trusted to ignore the law.
…and that thought becomes terrifying when you apply it to the Green Lantern Corp, because they don’t work outside the system. They are the system. They are the police, they enforce the law…and because they’re super heroes, we’re ok with them acting like vigilantes. We’re actually disappointed if they don’t cause excess harm and destruction, because a conflict that ends nonviolently doesn’t allow room for a cool-looking superhero fight scene.
Because make no mistake, no matter how many times Grant Morrison has Hal Jordan swear up and down that he’s a cop and not a super hero…Green Lanterns are super heroes. Green Lanterns serve on the Justice League with Superman and Wonder Woman. The way we feel about Green Lanterns as super heroes ends up informing the way we feel about Green Lanterns as the police. We see them use excessive force and we cheer. We see them lock someone up without due process, and we accept it without a second thought.
When I really think about it, everything I love about the Corps…it has nothing to do with them being law enforcement. We think of that as being intrinsically tied to the concept of the Green Lantern Corps, but it doesn’t actually have to be. They’re a big group of people with the will to fight for and protect others, going on adventures across space…why does that need the structure of a police force? Why can’t this just be the biggest, most well-coordinated super hero team in the DC universe?
The first decade of Kyle Rayner’s publication history saw him operating as a Green Lantern without anything even resembling the trappings of actual law enforcement. The same goes for Alan Scott, who’s been active on and off since the 1940s. In both of these cases, Green Lantern was never a cop. Green Lantern was just a super hero that flew around helping people out and going on adventures. And that’s what we need to get back to. Because guess what? They don’t need to have authority over people to help them, they don’t need jurisdiction and a private jail to save the day. There’s so much good that can be done, so many stories that can be told, so many characters who can be explored…just from having the Green Lanterns behave in space the same way any super hero behaves on Earth. They can do anything from answering distress calls to helping the Blue Lanterns with Humanitarian missions to battling giant monsters emerging from black holes…there’s no limit to the kinds of stories you can tell with Green Lanterns. I think at some point, people started to forget that.
And while I absolutely think that the idea of being a militarized police force needs to be removed from the concept of the Green Lantern Corps, I don’t want the idea to be thrown away entirely. No, I want it put somewhere that makes more sense. I want it applied to the Sinestro Corps.
Sinestro has always believed in the mission of the Green Lantern Corps, but never believed that they’d go far enough to truly succeed. He built his own Corps for the purpose of doing what the Green Lanterns couldn’t do, maintaining peace by using fear to keep people in line.
Unlike the Green Lanterns, the Sinestro Corps were never created to be the heroes of the story. They’re morally gray at best, one bad day away from being villains. We don’t look at them the same way we do the Green Lanterns, we don’t expect them to be heroic, they don’t have the same burden of altruism that informs the way we see DC’s big name super heroes. The Sinestro Corps are not super heroes…and because of that, they have the freedom to be a vehicle to explore what it means for a Lantern Corps to be a militarized police force. They can comfortably live in a gray area where their methods are questionable at best, and certain officers take things too far, but the overall success rate of the Corps keeps most people happy enough to not make much of a fuss. Juxtapose that with the Green Lanterns, an organization of aspirational super heroes who save lives while keeping their hands clean, who would love to stop the Sinestro Corps outright but don’t have the numbers or the political clout to tear down a corrupt system themselves. So instead they go out there and act as super heroes for the entire universe, without the burden of having to also police it, frequently clashing with the ideology and methods of the Sinestro Corps as a way to continuously dig into the nature of what that kind of law enforcement actually means, while illustrating its consequences in a way that doesn’t have to be neutered to protect the reputation of a big DC hero.
At its best, at its absolute best, Green Lantern represents the pinnacle of creativity in the super hero medium. You can do anything with a Green Lantern story. You can and should do police procedural Green Lantern stories sometimes, just like you should do horror and mystery and every other kind of story. Green Lantern doesn’t need to be a franchise all about super cops, and it shouldn’t be an ongoing monthly reminder that we’re supposed to root for the heroes that are the police. That kind of thing may have seemed fine before, but now? Right now? It does not fit the world we live in anymore. The good news is, Green Lantern wasn’t always like this. It had to become this, it had to change into this…and it can always change again. Right now would be a pretty good time to start thinking about what the future of Green Lantern could be.
I’m not telling you that you should stop reading the comics you like, or that you should boycott Green Lantern or DC or anything like that. I just want you to be mindful of what messages you’re getting when you do read your favorite comics. I love science fiction, I love super heroes, I love Green Lantern, and I love the Corps…but these stories are not innocent escapism, and the fact is that stories all about police officers who violently abuse their power, and then get celebrated as heroes because of it, do not belong in today’s world.
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