Why Earth NEEDS So Many Green Lanterns

 A question that everyone eventually asks is just why there are so many Green Lanterns from Earth.  There are currently seven Humans active in the Green Lantern Corps, plus Alan and Keli who’re each their own independent thing.  But why?  Every other sector has a maximum of two Green Lanterns, why does there get to be so many from a single planet?  Doesn’t adding more of them just take attention away from the characters we already have?  Why not just bring in some alien characters from the Corps if your story needs more Green Lanterns?  And why can’t any of these new Human characters join other Corps instead of Green?  What is DC thinking?

I’m going to be looking at this from two angles: the ways this makes sense in-universe, and the real world reasons that DC does this.  And by the end, hopefully we’ll all be on the same page and understand why DC keeps accumulating more Human Green Lanterns.  So let’s start with the fun one and take a look at why this makes sense within DC’s continuity.

For better or worse, the planet Earth is one of the most influential places in the DC Universe.  Every single time something happens that has the potential to change all of existence and reality, it either happens on Earth, or at least is caused by an Earthling.  Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Blackest Night, Flashpoint, Dark Nights Metal, Dark Nights Death Metal…events that erased and then rewrote the time stream, wiped out the multiverse and then remade it…it all comes back to the Earth.  And if you’re the Guardians, and you’re even half way serious about trying to safeguard the universe, you’re going to want to make sure Earth gets special attention.  Sure, you might not need to keep all of those Human Green Lanterns patrolling the same sector all the time, but it definitely pays off to have a small army of Green Lanterns who all call that planet home, and have a vested interest in protecting it.  And considering how many of those events come right down to the wire, with every available hero giving it their all, just to barely manage a victory…an extra Lantern here and there can’t hurt.

…but there’s another reason that the Guardians would want more Green Lanterns to be tied to the Earth, and it’s because of a secret that they kept right up until the Blackest Night.  SPOILERS FOR BLACKEST NIGHT, if you haven’t read it you really should go do that before watching the rest of this.  Ok so in Blackest Night, it’s revealed that the planet Earth is the resting place of the Life Entity, the first living thing in the universe.  Everything that’s ever lived, every planet and star, all grew out of the energy emanating from this creature.  All life in the universe is connected to the Life Entity, so if anything ever happened to it, all life everywhere could be snuffed out at once.  The Guardians kept the existence of the Life Entity a secret for millennia, and purposely tried to downplay the importance of the Earth so as to not attract any unwanted attention and risk someone discovering the Life Entity.  At the same time, it makes sense that they’d want as many of their Green Lanterns as possible to be coming and going from the Earth, to increase security and to be on hand just incase.  But you can’t assign that many Lanterns to a single planet without it looking suspicious, so they get scattered around, but always manage to come home.  And it’s a good thing they did, because the Blackest Night alone required every single Lantern in every Lantern Corp to come to Earth and team up, and even then it was barely enough.  If anything, the Guardians probably should’ve recruited more Humans after that was all over, because the Earth clearly needs all the help it can get.

So as far as the fiction goes, the Guardians have more than enough really good reasons to want Earth to have as many Lanterns watching it as possible. But what about in the real world?  Stories can sometimes be tailored to use whatever characters are available, so why would DC keep introducing more and more Human Green Lanterns instead of just using the ones they already have?  Why not just give that attention to the exiting Human characters, and fill in any story gaps with alien Lanterns?  And if they have to introduce more Human Lanterns, why not have them join other Corps?  There are a few answers, and the first comes down to the simple fact that not every character is right for every story.  The more you use a character, the more you flesh them out and define them as a person.  You establish their personality, their values, their beliefs, all in service of building them up into a better and more interesting character.  But there’s a price to doing that.  The more well defined a character gets, the more restrictions there are on what those characters will and will not do.  We gain character growth and development by sacrificing the broad, general nature of a more loosely defined character who can be plugged into any situation and fit perfectly fine.  That’s not to say a well developed character can only do things that agree with their outlook on life, you can get a lot of milage out of putting a character in a position where the only clear path forward is to knowingly go against their own beliefs, but that’s a very particular kind of story, and it isn’t always going to be an appropriate internal conflict all the time.

Take Far Sector for example.  Ever since that series was announced, people have wondered why DC bothered to introduce a new character, Sojourner Mullein, into the Green Lantern Corps when existing characters like Kyle Rayner, Simon Baz, and Guy Gardner haven’t had anything to do in a very long time.  Couldn’t this have been John Stewart or Jessica Cruz?  If the story takes place so far from Earth anyway, why not use an alien Green Lantern?

What all of these questions fail to consider is the idea that Sojourner “Jo” Mullein was built to tell this story, and this story was designed to require a character like her.  Far Sector is a story about politics and systemic injustice, it’s about a very slow and nuanced life long struggle.  Hal Jordan is a good character, but he’s built for climactic moments where he pushes through with one big bombastic display of power.  He jumps in without thinking, uses his ring like a wrecking ball, and saves the day.  Hal Jordan is not equipped to handle the problems going on in Far Sector.  None of the Earth Lanterns are.  None of them have the kind of background, the life experience, suited to this kind of story.  You could always change them to fit the story, but then you’d be writing them out of character, grafting histories and ideals onto them that weren’t there before…and at that point, you may as well just make up a new character anyway.

And yeah, you could easily come up with an alien member of the Green Lantern Corps who has the equivalent of all of Jo’s backstory and baggage, but then you lose the impact of the setting.  Far Sector takes place in a massive alien city, built on three interwoven alien cultures that’ve coexisted for thousands of years…our reference point for exploring that culture for the first time has to be a Human protagonist we can relate to easily, to act as our baseline, and be what we compare everything else to.  Jo represents us, and asks the questions we would ask, just by the very nature of who she is.  An alien Green Lantern would be just as foreign to us as the city is, and we’d have to spend just as much time learning to understand them and their customs as we would the city, which would make it a lot harder to explore the world of Far Sector as deeply as we can with a Human protagonist who’s automatically a more easily relatable POV character.

But the other big problem with focusing on alien characters in starring roles is actually the same reason new Human characters become Green Lanterns instead of some other color Lantern…because they don’t sell.

I decided to take a look at the sales numbers for all the Lantern books that launched as part of DC’s New 52 initiative back in 2011.  I picked these books because they all came out at the same time and all had the exact same New 52 marketing push behind them, meaning this is the closest we’ll probably ever get to seeing how a wide range of Lantern books compare to each other on an even playing field.  And when I say a wide range, I mean it…so many of the things I always see Lantern fans say they want out of Green Lantern is represented in these books…not everything, but a lot of it.  Green Lantern is a book focusing on Hal Jordan and Sinestro.  Green Lantern New Guardians is a Kyle Rayner book that also brings together one member of every different Corps, and eventually becomes a book about Kyle Rayner the White Lantern.  Green Lantern Corps focuses John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and a whole bunch of alien Green Lanterns.  And then Red Lanterns is a series entirely focused on a non-Green Lantern Corps with a cast that’s almost entirely made up of aliens, with one Human supporting character, until eventually becoming a Guy Gardner book.

Green Lantern #1 sold 141,000 copies, New Guardians #1 sold 84,000, Green Lantern Corps #1 sold 74,000, and Red Lanterns sold 66,000.  And the thing to remember about comic sales is that first issues tend to always be big sellers that don’t represent the sales of an average issue.  Tons of people who wouldn’t ordinarily buy the book will check out the first issue, either to see what it’s like or to snatch up a potential collector’s item, and then never go back for another issue.  So the expectation is that there’ll be significant drop-off from the first issue to the second issue, and that’s largely what we see with these books.  New Guardians goes from 84,000 to almost 72,000, Green Lantern Corps dropped from 74 to 70, and Red Lanterns stayed remarkably consistent at 66,000.  The real outlier here is Green Lantern, which actually sold more copies of issue two than issue one, which doesn’t usually happen.  So overall, the New 52 Lantern books had a very healthy, promising start.

However…there’s one more thing to always keep in mind when it comes to comic book sales numbers, and that’s the fact that books are pre-ordered months in advance, which means that the first two issue of a new series have to be ordered before anyone knows what these books are like, and before retailers can be sure how many copies will sell.  That means the first two issues of each book benefited the most from the New 52 marketing push, because at that point all anyone had to go on was the excitement surrounding the relaunch, and that excitement lead to inflated numbers on the first two issues of each book.  The fun really starts when it’s time to order issue three, because now everyone’s had the chance to actually read and evaluate these books.  And it starts right away, with the sales numbers of all four series steadily declining with each passing issue.  New Guardians tending to hover around 50,000, Green Lantern Corps in the mid 40s, Red Lanterns reaching the 30s…by comparison, Green Lantern is doing great.  It was more successful right from the start, so the decline isn’t hurting it as much as the other books.  And when you compare it to the second highest selling Lantern book, New Guardians, it took Green Lantern almost a full year of declining sales just to get down to the level of New Guardians highest sales numbers ever.

Now DC did try to keep the numbers up by having all four books cross over with each other a hand full of times, as well as having them participate in line-wide events like Zero Month and Futures End…but in every one of those cases, the Lantern books would all see a small increase in sales during the event, only for the numbers drop back down to where they were as soon as the event is over.

What’s interesting is that two of these books tried to dramatically reinvent themselves fairly late into their runs.  Red Lanterns got a whole new creative team, and added Guy Gardner as the new main character, as of issue #21.  And while there was increased interest that helped sales, it wasn’t by very much, and those numbers began to drop again one issue later, with issue #23 actually doing worse than before the big change happened.

Let’s jump over to Green Lantern New Guardians #21.  The book has been totally revamped, new creative team, new direction, no more team of rainbow Lanterns, this is now a White Lantern book starring Kyle Rayner.  The only thing that’s the same is Kyle Rayner being the lead character, the title of the book, and the numbering.  And when the book has to stand on its own, without any crossovers or events to help it out, it manages to stay around 40,000 for two issues, before slipping down to 34,000.  The really big problem is that the very next issue is a crossover that bumps them up to 35,000…but as soon as that’s over, the book actually sells worse than it was before, now down to only 32,000.  And that’s especially bad, since this is issue #25, and milestone issues like #25, #75, or #100 usually get similar speculator bumps like first issues do.

What all this tells me is that when it comes time to pay money for Lantern books, most people aren’t that interested in buying series that are about alien Lanterns, or non-Green Lanterns, even if those non-Green Lanterns are Humans…regardless of weather or not it’s a new character, I should add, because Red Lanterns actually did the thing that people are always saying DC should do.  That book introduced a brand new Human Lantern, but had him join the Red Lanterns instead of the Green Lanterns…and nobody cared.

So when we put it all together, what we’re left with is the fact that if you want your Lantern book to sell, your best shot is to have a Human main character who’s a member of the Green Lantern Corps, not one of the other colors.  And since continuing to flesh these characters out for decades can limit the kinds of stories each character naturally fits into, every now and then it becomes necessary to create a new character that will fit the stories that all the existing characters won’t.  And that new character will have to be a Human Green Lantern if they’re going to have any chance at all…which is fine, because there’s plenty of in-universe justification for why Earth needs so many Green Lanterns.

We all have our favorite characters that we want to see get the spotlight, but we also want to see them written with a level of consistency where they don’t act too out of character just for the sake of the story.  And for that to happen, we need to be open to other characters coming in and taking the spotlight away from our favorites now and then.  Sometimes that’ll mean giving the book over to an existing character you’re already familiar with, and sometimes it’ll mean introducing someone entirely new.  And you may not see your favorite again for a long time.  But either way, it’s a good thing for fans, because more characters means more stories that can be told, more possibilities that can be explored through new and different perspectives.  The best thing about the Green Lantern Corps is the amount of variety that goes along with it, there is no such thing as a story you can not tell through the lens of Green Lantern, and weather we like it or not, an expanding cast of Human Green Lanterns is the most reliable way to ensure those stories get told.

So next time you see a new Human Green Lantern show up, or someone points out how many of them there are, remember the sales numbers for the books that don’t have them.  Remember that the reason there are so many of them is because the franchise needs them.  And remember that when it comes right down to it, DC is going to do whatever the numbers support.