Just as a heads up, this is going to involve spoilers for series like Blackest Night, Brightest Day, and DCeased. So if you want to go into any of those spoiler-free, I’d suggest coming back to this after you’ve read them.
So I recently did a video running down all of the Lanterns from Earth, and I specifically left out any existing characters who were already established heroes and villains that briefly became Lanterns later. And I wanted to talk about them separately, because when enough thought is put into it, giving a Lantern ring to a character who doesn’t normally have one can be a turning point in that character’s life. It can reinforce what’s always been true about that character, while also giving them a new perspective that’ll inform who they are going forward. So I put together a list of what I feel to be the ten best examples of characters being profoundly impacted by gaining rings late in their careers.
10 - Superman
Now I’m not talking about any of the times Superman has worn a Green Lantern ring, or a White Lantern ring, or even the time he became a member of the Sinestro Corps. No, I’m talking about the time Superman was possessed by Parallax the fear entity, the living embodiment of fear itself. Sinestro had achieved such a complete mastery over the power of fear that he could actually control Parallax, and was hunting the creature across the universe. The only thing Parallax could think to do to escape was hide inside of a host that was too powerful for Sinestro to defeat…so it came to Earth and possessed Superman.
It’s really cool to see Superman as the sole protagonist of what wold normally be a Green Lantern story. It’s a really interesting couple issues that fleshes out the relationship Sinestro has with Parallax, as well as the relation both of them have with fear. But the best part about it is the way the story uses fear, and Superman’s reaction to it, as a way to remind us of the qualities that make Superman…SUPERMAN. He’s not out to simply defeat his opponent, he wants to save them. He wants to save Parallax, while also ending the threat it poses. Superman ultimately contains Parallax within a ring, so that he can give the ring to the Green Lantern Corps, so that Parallax won’t have to worry about Sinestro getting him anymore. He never lost the moral and ethical high ground, and he did it all while defeating Sinestro and neutralizing the threat of a parasitic cosmic entity. This story ends up being a nice reminder of why people look up to Superman.
09 - Black Canary
Black Canary is different from everyone else on this list. I mostly picked characters who’s extreme affinity for the ring made acquiring one this transcendent moment in their lives, opening the door to character development they may never otherwise experience, or providing a way to reinforce something that’s always been true about their nature.
With Black Canary, the ring represents tragedy. And don’t get me wrong, she absolutely deserves it. She’s been a superhero longer than most, even serving as the leader of the Justice League, pushing through everything in her path armed with nothing but her training, her Canary Cry, and her unstoppable will to keep going. But then the infection came. A zombie-like plague spreading across the world, unable to be contained, turning civilian and hero alike into a threat to everyone around them. One of the infected was Hal Jordan, and he was inches away from killing Oliver Queen. Dinah did the only thing she could…she screamed, louder than ever before. She killed him.
Hal, Ollie, and Dinah were more than best friends. They were like family to each other. For so many years they’ve loved and laughed and fought and cried together, and to have it end this way, so suddenly, during a happy moment together…I can’t even begin to describe how it must’ve felt.
The ring does what it’s supposed to do, it takes off in search of a new person to carry on as Green Lantern. It finds her, Dinah Lance, Black Canary. It makes her Hal Jordan’s replacement…and she doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want to carry around a physical reminder of what she just did to her friend. But she has to keep it, because the world is falling apart around them, and the power of a Green Lantern could make or break any attempt to save as many people as possible. In a story all about heroes learning how far they’re willing to go to save people from an unstoppable force, Black Canary can only make a difference by holding on tightly to the ring that symbolizes the worst thing she’s ever done in her entire life.
08 - Flash
Barry Allen believes there’s always a way to save everyone. That belief is reinforced by the fact that he’s so fast, he can fit a full day’s worth of activity into a few seconds. There’s always more than enough time to think things through, from every possible angle, and then pick the best course of action. Nobody can be everywhere at once, nobody truly has all the time in the world…but the Flash is close. And that ability fills Barry Allen with this extremely hopeful optimism that everything will always turn out alright, that all will be well. Even in the final moments of his life, he uses his last words to reaffirm that he believes in the power of hope.
I know a lot of people were surprised that Superman didn’t end up with a Blue Lantern ring, and that’s understandable, but when Barry Allen is right in front of you, there really isn’t any other choice.
07 - Wonder Woman
In Blackest Night #6, when a violet ring flies to Wonder Woman, Star Sapphire says “The light is bursting inside her. She’s beyond anyone else. There is no one on this planet who loves it more than Wonder Woman”. At the time, I didn’t know much about Wonder Woman so that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But since then, I’ve read some of her new stuff and some of her old stuff and seen her movie a couple times…and I get it now. She gave up everything, her home, her way of life, all to help people so different from her that they may as well be from another planet. And even when she saw the worst of us, all that did was galvanize her mission. There are a ton of examples, but but a quote from the end of the movie sums it up kind of perfectly:
“I used to want to save the world. To end war and bring peace to mankind. But then I glimpsed the darkness that lives within their light. I learned that inside every one of them there will always be both. The choice each must make for themselves, something no hero will ever defeat. And now I know that only love can truly save the world. So now I satay, I fight, and I give for the world I know can be. This is my mission now. Forever.”
She knows that in order to achieve peace, she has to help the world have a change of heart. So she’ll help every individual she can, help every large group she can, doing whatever possible to set an example of what it means to treat everyone she meets with love and respect, and hope that the world follows in her footsteps. And if someone threatens what she’s trying to build, then Wonder Woman will fight with everything she has to protect the loving place she knows the world can someday become.
06 - Scarecrow
Scarecrow has always experimented with fear-inducing chemicals of he own design, and to his credit they work really well. All of his victims experience intense hallucinations of their greatest fears that utterly overwhelm them. The only person his fear toxin won’t work on is Scarecrow himself. He’s been so over-exposed to his own chemicals that he’s burned out his fear response. Scarecrow CAN’T feel fear anymore. The only thing that gets him close is Batman, and his main motivation to continue as a villain is to provoke Batman into coming after him, so Scarecrow can taste just a hint of what it’s like to be afraid.
Then he got a yellow ring, and everything changed. Suddenly Scarecrow was bathed in light made of pure fear. Not only could he feel it, but it was unlike anything he’d ever experienced naturally or through his own experiments. This was pure, intense, unfiltered fear…coursing through his body, bending to his will. It was everything he’d ever wanted in his life.
The only real problem with Scarecrow being a Yellow Lantern is that we never get the chance to really sit with the concept and explore it. He’s been inducted into the Sinestro Corps a few times now, but it’s always to help win a specific battle that’s happening right in that moment, and then he loses the ring by the time the fighting stops. More than anyone else on this list, Scarecrow is a character who needs to keep his ring long term, so it can become a vehicle for legitimately impactful character development that might’ve otherwise been impossible. I’m sure that permanently giving Scarecrow these kinds of powers would make it harder for him to remain a Batman villain…but maybe that isn’t a bad thing.
05 - Lex Luthor
Now I know, calling Lex Luthor greedy and selfish seems like a pretty generic thing to say about a villain…hell, you could say it about basically any villain, so what’s so special about Lex Luthor?
Lex has a very specific world view. He believes that Humanity should be entirely responsible for its own advancement, and relying on aliens like Superman is just holding the Human race back, which is why he tries so hard to undermine, and even kill, Superman. In his own twisted way, Lex thinks it’s for the good of all mankind. And every now and then, Lex tries to make the point that his intelligence and resources could make the world a much better place, if only he didn’t have to focus on getting rid of Superman all the time. I want to tell you about one of those times.
Lex and Superboy were in the home of Lex’s sister Lena, who’s suffering from cancer. When Lex starts to go on about what a humanitarian he’d be if only that pesky Superman wasn’t around, Superboy calls him out on it, saying that if Lex really could do what he claims, there’s no reason not to, especially when his own sister is suffering right in front of him. Just to prove Superboy wrong, Lex puts together a drug that he injects into Lena, CURING HER CANCER. It actually works, the effects are immediate and her daughter has her mother back. Lex then immediately injects Lena with a second drug, GIVING HER CANCER BACK, and then acts all proud of himself, because he’s proven what a positive impact he cold have on the world if he didn’t have to focus on getting rid of Superman.
In Lex Luthor’s mind, he’s not a terrible person for withholding things like the cure for cancer, or even for dangling the cure in front of the loved one of someone terminally ill…he’s completely fixated on his view of the bigger picture, on the future he wants for the world, and none of it gets to happen unless he gets his way. Humanity has to advance according to Lex Luthor’s plan, or it doesn’t get to advance at all. It doesn’t get much more greedy and selfish than that.
04 - Ganthet
The Guardians are some of the oldest living things in the history of the universe, and most of that time was spent building up a tremendous sense of superiority to everyone and everything else. As they saw it, nobody but them had the wisdom and power necessary to protect all of creation, so they appointed themselves as Guardians, building armies to enforce laws of their own making, demanding that the universe fall in line. So I can’t really overstate what a big deal it is that a Guardian of the Universe would step down off of his pedestal and join the ranks of his soldiers.
Ganthet has led a unique life, compared to the other Guardians. For a while, he was the last living member of his people, and thus got the chance to move beyond most of their old ways. He learned to value personal interactions with others, and that abandoning rigid stoicism in favor of giving in to emotion was actually a good thing. And while he was overjoyed at the resurrection of his brothers and sisters, it only makes sense that Ganthet would have a problem with their desire to reinstate the old ways. When he renounced his title of Guardian, and forged his own ring and battery as a sign of his desire to be seen as an equal to the members of the Green Lantern Corps…it felt like a natural step forward for his character, and remains one of the strongest instances of logical character progression we’ve seen from a Guardian.
03 - Black Hand
As far as villains go, Black Hand is the ultimate success story. When he started out in the Silver Age, he was a complete joke. He was just some guy who decided to become a villain because he didn’t like his family, and he was really pretty bad at it. He even washed out of being a villain and tried to go straight, but he couldn’t make that work either. Black Hand was a completely unremarkable character that seemed destined to fade away and be forgotten. And then came the Blackest Night.
All of a sudden, Black Hand was given the first Black Lantern ring, chosen to be the conduit that would bring Nekron and the Black Lanterns to Earth…his sudden cosmic importance matched only by the new depth given to his relationship with his family, fleshing out the motivation behind his origin story to an extent it never had been before.
After a life of failure and ridicule, this D-list villain that nobody could possibly take seriously became one of the most terrifying characters in all of comics. Thanks to that black ring, every decision he made caused the balance of life and death to change. Black Hand wasn’t a joke anymore. And now, he’d be the only one left laughing.
02 - Deadman
It’s a choice so obvious that it almost seems silly. Deadman is a character who’s defining trait is the fact that he isn’t alive. He died a long time ago, existing on as a ghost who helps protect people and solve crimes. Only a hand full of people in the DC Universe know he exists, and only very few of them can see or hear him. The only way he can physically or verbally interact with the living world is to possess someone…to literally live through them.
So what happens when he’s given a White Lantern ring? A ring powered by life itself, which immediately resurrects him, making him a corporal living person again…but instead of celebrating, he’s confused and scared. For so very long, Deadman is all he’s been, and he’d long since accepted his role in the world, to drift through time unnoticed, doing a little here and there to help when he can. But now, being given a second chance at life, being FORCED to be part of the world instead of simply an observer…he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know how to live. And all the guidance the ring will offer is to repeatedly tell him to embrace life, maybe for the first time.
Deadman’s journey with the White Lantern ring allowed his character to develop and grow in ways that otherwise may have been impossible. Everything about the way he thinks about himself, the way he sees the world, and what he believes about his role in the world are so completely different now because of that ring, because it shocked him out of his comfort zone and forced him to truly interact with everyone and everything without a filter for the first time in ages.
HONORABLE MENTION
Batman absolutely belongs on this list, but I’ve already done an entire sixteen minute video all about Batman’s history as a Lantern, so I’m not going to give him one of these slots, but I encourage you to go watch that video if you’re interested, I’ll link to it at the end of this one.
01 - Jade
Jade embodies the legacy of Green Lantern unlike any other character in the DC Universe. She’s the daughter of Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, and very firmly follows in her father’s footsteps, taking the groundwork laid by Alan Scott in the Golden Age, and building a stronger, more connected superhero community.
Jade has spent most of her existence acting as a bridge connecting all of Green Lantern history, while simultaneously being an ambassador of sorts for Green Lantern to the larger DC Universe. This one character has very strong, direct ties to Alan Scott, the JSA, infinity inc, Kyle Rayner, the Green Lantern Corps, the Outsiders, the Titans, the Justice League…she rarely ever gets the spotlight, but I have trouble thinking of someone who did a better, more consistent job of integrating Green Lantern into the DC Universe in the long-term.
We like to give Kyle Rayner credit for being the torchbearer who kept the light of Green Lantern burning after the Corps fell, but people tend to forget that Jade was there too, wearing the ring and uniform of the Green Lantern Corps, keeping its traditions and classic iconography going, protecting everyone weather Kyle was there or not.
Jade has been around since 1983, and it took her until 1999 to get a ring of her own, but she spent those 16 years becoming exactly the kind of character Green Lantern needs…so much so that even when she doesn’t have a ring, and has to rely on her natural superpowers (which are just Green Lantern powers anyway), she contributes as much to the overall Green Lantern franchise as she gains by being a part of it. Giving her a ring, even temporarily, felt like the last piece of the puzzle sliding into place, which is why it’s an easy choice for me to make her number one on this list.
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