So today I’m going to be explaining to you what Ion even is, and believe it or not, doing that is going to involve spoilers for the Death of Superman, Reign of the Superman, Emerald Twilight, Zero Hour, Final Night, Circle of Fire, Power of Ion, Rann/Thanagar War, the 12-issue Ion series, and the Sinestro Corps War. Yes I’m serious, so SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS, you’ve been warned.
Ion is a great example of a really simple idea that was made absurdly complicated every step of the way. The easiest way to explain it is to just say that Ion is the most powerful Green Lantern, and doesn’t need to use a ring because the power is inside their body. Sounds simple, right? That’s because I didn’t try to go into any kind of detail. Because in order to explain this concept that first appeared in Green Lantern #145 in 2001, I have to start all the way back with Superman: The Man of Steel #18 in 1992.
Here’s the extremely abridged version. Doomsday shows up. He and Superman fight. Superman stops him, but also dies. Four new heroes show up and try to carry on Superman’s legacy. Two and a half of them are pretty good, but the one who looks like a skeleton monster surprisingly turns out to be a bad guy. He teams up with Mongul and blows up Coast City, killing seven million people. Coast City is where Hal Jordan lives, but he was in space at the time. Hal beat up the bad guys as soon as he got back, and also Superman came back to life, but Hal couldn’t handle the death of his city. He became obsessed with the idea that a Green Lantern could bring it all back with enough power, so he flew to Oa and absorbed all the energy in the Central Battery, hurting and killing whoever got in his way. Then Hal decided the best way to fix Coast City would be to just restart all of time and space with a new Big Bang, but most people didn’t like that, so it didn’t work out. By this point, Hal is seen as an unhinged super villain, which is pretty fair, but he gets the chance to redeem himself by dying to kill the giant monster who ate the sun while also reigniting the sun.
In the middle of all that, Kyle Rayner received the final working Green Lantern ring, and since Kyle didn’t know what he was doing, sometimes his self-doubts and nightmares would leak out of the ring while he slept and become a cosmic supervillain named Oblivian that Kyle would have to defeat through the power of self-actualization, making Oblivion’s energy disperse.
When Hal died killing the Sun Eater and reigniting the sun, it left a lot of ambient Green Lantern energy just sort of floating around out there, near the sun. When Oblivian dispersed, his energy was attracted to the leftover Hal energy, and they mixed together into something far greater than either of them were alone. So suddenly there was this pretty gigantic mass of raw power just sort of sitting next to the sun. And since it’s Green Lantern energy, Kyle’s ring picked up on it, and started to automatically tap into it. And the buildup here was actually really good, because it happened slowly…Kyle began to notice that he didn’t need to recharge his ring nearly as often anymore, then his overall power level began to rise, before eventually realizing what was going on and claiming the power next to the sun by absorbing all of it into his body, taking the name Ion.
The amount of raw power Kyle Rayner now possessed made him a literal God, no longer bound by time and space. Not only did he have the ability to do just about anything, he could be literally anywhere at any moment, even if that meant being everywhere at the same time. While Kyle is sitting at his desk, making artwork in his New York apartment, he’s also hand delivering personalized meals twice a day to tens of thousands of people in Uganda, while also making their soil more fertile. At the exact same time, he prevented a drive-by shooting several blocks away from his apartment, stopped a truck from crashing into a grocery store in Mexico, stopped an armed bank robbery in England, saved a man who’s tractor fell off the side of the road in Iowa, and repaired the doors on the orbiting space shuttle. Kyle describes all of this as being basically just a larger scale version of normal every day multitasking. This is to him what doing things like talking on the phone while making dinner, or listening to music while exercising is to the rest of us. While laying in bed, not sleeping (because he doesn’t need to sleep anymore), he stopped a tornado in Oklahoma, and he stopped a women’s medical center from being vandalized, and he deleted a new computer virus before it could be set loose online.
And while all of that was happening on Earth, Kyle was also stopping a war on an alien planet on the other side of the galaxy. Diplomacy had failed over and over again, and the body count just kept getting higher, so Kyle personally stopped every single individual act of violence committed by every person on the planet. Every bullet, every bomb, every punch, he appeared in front of each one of them and stopped them all, no matter how many were happening across the planet at the same time. Not constructs of him, the real him.
And then there’s the Justice League, who sound the alarm when they discover a cloaked alien armada had been amassing its forces on the edge of the Milky Way for a week. The League goes into full crisis mode, calling in all the reserve members, reaching out the Justice Society, getting on the phone with the military to coordinate efforts, because what’s coming is going to be massive and devastating…and then Kyle just says “it’s ok, I got it”. In the time it took Batman to get up from his chair, Kyle had already gone out meet the armada, and teleport them all right back to where they came from. He was sitting at the conference table, while also floating in space, teleporting thousands of warships to the other end of the galaxy.
He also healed John Stewart’s spine, giving him back the ability to walk, and restored Jade’s natural powers that had burned out a while ago, meaning she no longer needed the Green Lantern ring she’d been using, which eventually ended up going to John now that he was back in action.
If anything, Kyle’s biggest weakness was the fact that he could do too much and didn’t have any boundaries. His actions were starting to interfere with the ability for people to live their lives normally, and many were staring to form religions worshiping him. So instead of keeping all this power to himself, he chose to use it to refill the Central Battery on Oa, powering a new generation of the Green Lantern Corps. He also resurrected the Guardians from the dead, which wasn’t the best move in the long run, but you can’t really blame him since Kyle only really knew Ganthet and he’s pretty cool.
And for the longest time, that’s all there ever was of Ion, and it was remembered as this really cool story that was needlessly bogged down by a setup that perfectly encapsulates the kind of convoluted, continuity-heavy mess that keeps people from ever trying to get into comics in the first place. And that’s how it stayed until 2006, with the release of the Rann/Thanagar War Infinite Crisis Special, a one-shot spinning off from the non-ending of a mini-series that was tangentially setting up Infinite Crisis while also following up on Green Lantern Rebirth.
Kyle and Jade are out in space fighting a giant pair of hands, but the hands were shooting space-lightning and Jade died, but her soul left her body and gave its power to Kyle, making him Ion again. They would explain this seven months later in issue #6 of a twelve issue Ion series by saying that since Jade’s power came from the Starheart, one of the most powerful sources of magic in the universe, it mixed with Kyle’s own Green Lantern energy and became something crazy powerful, allowing him to become Ion again. This isn’t all that different from what happened the first time around, with Hal’s power mixing with Oblivian’s power…only Hal and Oblivian were already freakishly powerful on their own, and Ion is what you got when both their powers mixed together and got even stronger. Kyle and Jade didn’t have anything remotely close to that level of power to start with, so I don’t see why this merger would make Kyle into this cosmic level being. Although to be fair, this second version of Ion doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as powerful as the first one. Most of what Kyle does during his second stint as Ion is just normal Green Lantern stuff, with the exception of the time when a massive explosion goes off in his face, and Kyle seems to warp reality so that the explosion actually happened in a small globe in his hand and doesn’t hurt anyone when it goes off.
There’s one other notable thing Kyle does in the final issue of the Ion mini series that we should talk about. Kyle’s mom has been hospitalized with a mystery illness, and dies before he can get there. Out of grief, he uses his power to bring her back to life. They don’t say it outright, but they’re pretty blatantly going for a situation where her soul moved on and all Kyle did was reanimate her body, so even though he was supplying a steady flow of energy that kept her body and brain functioning, it wasn’t really her, and the effect went away the instant Kyle turned the power off. The other Lanterns in the room when this happened were pretty shocked and impressed that Kyle was able to do this, but I’m hesitant to think of this as being that big of a deal, since we’ve seen normal Lanterns do similar things. A Green Lantern named Driq died in the line of duty, but his ring’s life support system was able to keep his mind and body somewhat functional despite Driq already being a decaying corpse. And while it doesn’t really count, we do see Sinestro use a normal Green Lantern ring to reanimate a dead person for questioning in the animated movie Green Lantern First Flight. Point is, what Kyle did with his mom isn’t really that far above and beyond what a normal Green Lantern is capable of. They just don’t do it very often, and it sounds like a much bigger deal than it is.
So we get to the end of this 12 issue Ion series with the knowledge that Ion is now the result of Jade’s Starheart magic combining with the power of Kyle’s standard issue Green Lantern ring, mixing together and becoming something strange and new. Three months later, we are told that is completely wrong. After two years of buildup, the Sinestro Corps War storyline finally starts up in the pages of Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1, where we find out that not only did Sinestro arrange for Kyle’s mom to be killed by a sentient virus named Despotellis, but that he did it to exploit Kyle’s grief and make him vulnerable. That’s when we find out that Ion is actually a big fish made of light.
So one of the first things Geoff Johns did when he took over as writer for Green Lantern was to say that everything bad Hal Jordan did after Coast City blew up was actually the result of a being named Parallax who bonded to him like a parasite. Geoff Johns’ run on Green Lantern both introduces, and heavily leans on, the concept of the Emotional Spectrum: this idea that all emotion produced by sentient beings will coalesce into massive deposits of power that can be tapped into and used. Green Lanterns get their power from the Willpower part of the spectrum, Sinestro taps into Fear, and so on. The Spectrum also has cosmic entities that act as avatars of each individual emotion, with Parallax being the Fear Entity…and now we’re shown that Ion is the Willpower Entity.
Now at this point you might be asking…wait a second, what about all that stuff with the Starheart mixing with the ring power? And the answer is nobody really knows. We kind of know, but all we really have is one single page that half-heartedly attempts to explain it. That page came in Tales of the Sinestro Corps Presents: Ion, which came out right after the Sinestro War storyline ended. The Guardians explain that the new funky mix of power within Kyle made him into a suitable host for Ion, which…if I want to stretch…I can say makes sense because while Parallax actively takes control of its host, Ion is a passive support Entity (despite that making no sense at all for a being embodying pure Willpower). The Guardians chose Green Lantern Sodam Yat to be the next Ion host after Kyle, and Sodam Yat is a Daxamite which is basically just a Kryptonian, so they gave Ion to somebody with Superman’s powers, suggesting that Ion is better served as an enhancement for someone who already has extraordinary abilities, which is why Kyle’s body housing a new mixture of power that the universe has never seen before made him a good candidate at the time. But that doesn’t explain what happened to that new mixture of power, because Kyle doesn’t have it anymore. This also implies that the Guardians were watching Kyle and Jade out in space, and quickly put Ion into Kyle the instant Jade’s body dissolved. That page clearly shows Kyle as a normal Green Lantern until the moment Jade disappears, and then two panels later Kyle is Ion, meaning the Guardians snuck the Ion Entity in there during one single panel of Alan Scott mourning his daughter.
This whole thing might also be a possible retcon of something the Guardians said back in issue #6 of that 12 issue Ion series, where they say that because of what Kyle has become, they were able to place something within Kyle that they refer to as “the spark of all that we Guardians are. All that the Green Lantern Corps is”. Basically it’s Kyle’s job to restore the Guardians and the Corps if they ever fall again, just like he did last time. Now that line has always been ridiculously vague, but it’s easy enough to say they were talking about putting the Ion Entity inside of him, even though that very blatantly was not the plan when this was written.
The part about this I find the most irritating is the inclusion of one panel, during that half-hearted explanation from the Guardians, where they talk about Kyle being a good temporary vessel for Ion, saying “We knew you would be equal to the task, just as you were before”. They never expand on this at all, but the implication is that Kyle was also the host for the Ion Entity the first time he was Ion way back in Green Lantern #145. And while that does make sense, because why else would Kyle just randomly happen to start calling himself Ion out of nowhere, it creates all sorts of other problems. How did Ion get inside him? Did Ganthet sneak him inside of Kyle? Was Ion swimming around inside of that giant mass of energy next to the sun? Did anything that Kyle did happen because the Ion Entity was inside of him, or was he exclusively using the combined power of Hal and Oblivion? Since Kyle already had all that non-Ion power, did he transfer Ion into Jade when he restored her powers? Is that why her power returning to him made him Ion again? What happened to the Ion Entity when Kyle spent all that power resurrecting the Guardians and refilling the Central Battery? Was Ion inside the battery? Is Ion weaker now because of all the power Kyle used up bringing back the Guardians and the Corps? Why did they even need to put Ion into a host all of a sudden? Was it to stop Infinite Crisis? I could keep going, but unfortunately there are no answers to any of these questions. That first Ion story was far enough removed that there was never any pressing need to fill in the gaps and make it all work. Who knows, maybe that’ll change now that all of DC history is supposed to count towards continuity in the wake of Dark Nights Death Metal, which hopefully will be used to bring a little more clarity to Ion and the other Entities. With the exception of Parallax, we haven’t seen them since the Lights Out storyline in 2013, where all of them but Parallax went to the other side of the Source Wall and…maybe died? It’s unclear. There’s a lot of plot threads with these entities that never got tied up. There’s still new Rage Entity growing inside the center of the Earth…it’s been there since Green Lanterns #6 in 2016, but we’re just going to ignore that I guess.
Sodam Yat did get to keep the Ion Entity for a while, and we’ll talk all about him another time. But for now, we’ll close the book on the confusing mess that is Ion…a really cool, simple idea that was too entrenched in continuity to be easily explainable, and went through so many retcons so quickly that it ended up never really going anywhere. But now you know, and that’s a good thing…because if I have to be cursed with all this knowledge, then so do you.
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