I first started following Green Lantern on a regular basis back when Kyle Rayner was the only Lantern in the universe. I mean, Alan Scott was still there, but they made enough superficial changes to him that they could pretend he wasn’t a Green Lantern anymore…even though he absolutely was. And I’m glad that this was the era where I first got to dig into Green Lantern, because Kyle himself viewed it as this awe-inspiring thing to be a part of, and he had fun welding that power while also having respect for what it can do. The mix of reverence and imagination that Kyle’s stories brought to Green Lantern made it so much fun to watch him figure out what his ring is capable of, and how far he could push his limits…and he could push them pretty damn far.
Kyle had a habit of displaying overwhelming levels of power whenever the situation called for it, and it pretty much started right away. One of the earliest things Kyle did with his ring was destroy a planet. In order to stop a power-mad Hal Jordan in the wake of the Zero Hour event, Kyle blew up Oa while they were both standing on it. And the thing that really stands out about this is the fact that it wasn’t very hard for him to do…he just points his ring at the ground, fires for a couple minutes, and then Oa is gone. And when it was all over, Kyle was still there, completely fine, meaning he was both powerful enough to easily destroy a planet, and powerful enough to survive the destruction of a planet happening right under his feet. It’s also worth noting that this didn’t use up too much of his ring’s power, because Kyle spent the next issue wandering around space, getting into trouble as he tried to figure out how to get back to Earth, and running out of power wasn’t a problem.
And as long as we’re on the subject of Kyle’s ability to blow things up, we should talk about nuclear explosions, because he’s able to both stop and start them. During his time as a member of the Justice League, Kyle put a shield around a city to protect half a million people from a nuke that went off right next door, which was pretty hard to just whip up with no prep time, but he made it work, and even managed to transport the population away while maintaining the shield.
Kyle’s destructive power was made crystal clear the first time we met Alex Nero, an unstable man wilding a yellow power ring. This terrifies Kyle, way more than any other super villain ever has, because this is someone operating on the same level of power Kyle possesses, only without any restraint. His first instinct is to gather the Justice League and tell them they have to kill Alex Nero, which the League felt was an over-reaction to say the least, but then Kyle spells it out: he can use his ring to split atoms. It isn’t even hard to do, all it takes is concentration. Alex Nero had the potential to detonate nuclear explosions with a thought, and Kyle knew that because he can do it too.
But the most impressive display of power from Kyle is the time he contained the full force of a sun going super nova during the DC One Million event. Now to be fair, this almost broke him, and he did receive help from other heroes after a few minutes…but he still contained a supernova by himself for a few minutes, and it wasn’t just a normal star, it was Solaris the Super Sun, so it may have actually been outputting more power than a regular supernova, who knows? The point is, Kyle being able to do any of this at all is incredible.
All of this, by the way, is what Kyle was capable of just as a normal Green Lantern. He’s not getting boosted by the ion power, or any borrowed power from anywhere else. This is just a regular guy with a regular Green Lantern ring. The last Green Lantern ring. But something strange happens when it suddenly isn’t the last Green Lantern ring anymore.
Green Lantern Rebirth starts giving rings back to a hand full of characters, and recruitment really kicks in as of Green Lantern Corps Recharge #1. The number of Green Lanterns grew incredibly fast, going from one to five to three hundred, with a target of seventy two hundred, a total that doubles the last incarnation of the Green Lantern Corps. And once the Corps was back, we started to see an extreme reduction in the power of any single Green Lantern. That doesn’t mean the impressive feats of power stopped happening, but they did become the result of a group effort.
At the end of Green Lantern Corps Recharge, there were a little over three hundred Lanterns gathered on Oa. They fully charged their rings at the Central Battery, and then combined all their power to grab Oa’s sun and throw it through a wormhole. It’s a really awesome moment, and it’s the kind of bombastic thing I love to see every now and then, but it always struck me as odd that they needed three hundred fully charged Lanterns to do this. Considering that Kyle Rayner by himself had the power to contain a super nova, you’d think this would’ve been easier for a group this size to pull off, especially since Kyle was there helping do it.
And it doesn’t stop there. We regularly see entire groups of Green Lanterns working together to manage something that Kyle used to be able to do all by himself. Remember when Kyle made a shield to protect a city on Earth from a nuclear explosion at point blank range? It took nine Green Lanterns working together to make a shield that could protect the city on Mogo from a storm. When the Green Lantern Corps came into possession of the Central Battery of the Sinestro Corps, it took over one hundred Green Lanterns working together to pick up and move that yellow battery, and we can see veteran members like John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kilowag really pouring it on and not having an easy time.
And then there’s Hal Jordan, who has what may be the most extreme display of power by any single Green Lantern after the return of the Corps. While fighting Sinestro on War World, Hal lets out enough energy to blow up the planet, which sounds a lot like what Kyle did…except it really isn’t. Hal became so powerful because of prolonged exposure to a prototype Guardian weapon with no safeguards. It changed him into a being of living willpower, allowing him to detonate with so much force that it destroyed a planet. Not only did this kill Hal (more or less), but he was only able to do it at all because of a massive power-up he received from an outside source. Compare that to Kyle Rayner easily destroying Oa and surviving the blast without a scratch, all without anything but a normal ring, and it’s really no contest.
…so, what happened? Why are Green Lanterns so much weaker now than they used to be? This has never been officially addressed, so everything beyond this point is my own speculation, but what if I told you that there might be another character that puts a lot of things about Kyle’s power into perspective, and could make everything we’ve talked about up to now make sense? So in order to figure out what’s going on with the Green Lantern Corps, we need to talk about Larfleeze.
Larfleeze is the Orange Lantern, powered by the orange light of greed and avarice, and in keeping with that theme Larfleeze is the only Orange Lantern in the universe….sharing the power of greed wouldn’t make much sense, so Larfleeze hoards it all for himself. Even the orange Central Battery is the size of a standard personal battery that Larfleeze can carry around with him. And because he’s got the only Orange Lantern ring being fed by the orange Central Battery, Larfleeze has access to the full power of an entire Lantern Corps, and can overclock his ring to run at a power level of one hundred thousand percent…a number that sounds like it was just thrown in there as a joke, except it’s happened before, and treated completely seriously. During his first appearance, Larfleeze overcharges his ring to seven thousand, eight hundred and thirty nine percent…so this is a real thing that he can do at any time.
Why is this important? Well, when Kyle first got his battery, it grew out of a chunk of green alien metal after coming into contact with Kyle’s ring. That’s because Kyle battery is made from a piece of the old Central Battery on Oa, which exploded when Hal Jordan drained all the power from it during Emerald Twilight. For all intents and purposes, Kyle’s personal battery is a new Central Battery, only it’s nice and portable like the one used by Larfleeze. This is also why Kyle’s battery is the only one that works during this era of Green Lantern stories…he tries to recharge his ring from one of the batteries in the trophy room of a bounty hunter targeting ex-Green Lanterns, but nothing happens, because a normal personal battery relies on a direct feed from the Central Battery on Oa to function, and the Central Battery absorbs ambient emotional energy from the universe. And yes, Larfleeze is far more powerful than Kyle was, but the biggest thing separating them may just be time. Larfleeze found the orange battery billions of years ago, and there’s no telling how old it already was at that point, so that Central Battery has been soaking up avarice for an unmeasurably long amount of time, and the only one who ever used any of it is Larfleeze, and even then he doesn’t use very much of it unless he’s lashing out at someone who he thinks is trying to take something from him. He’s been hoarding his power for billions of years, so it’s no wonder he’s got so much of it.
If we accept that Kyle’s battery is a Central Battery, then that means over time it would accumulate enough energy to power a Corps…but there’s no telling how long that would take, especially with Kyle constantly using his ring. It creates this cycle where Kyle’s battery is slowly accumulating enough energy to power multiple Green Lanterns, which Kyle uses to do things that no single Green Lantern should be able to do, which in turn uses up energy gathered by the battery, making it take longer to accumulate enough energy to power a Corps.
Bringing back the Corps meant that Kyle was no longer the only person tapping into that power, and for that matter the current incarnation of the Green Lantern Corps has twice as many members as it did before Emerald Twilight, which means each individual Lantern likely has an even smaller share of the power than they did in the old days. And as for Kyle’s battery, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that something happened to change it into a normal personal battery, whether that be the Central Battery on Oa taking priority on the network, or maybe the Guardians stepping in and changing it with a firmware update or something.
Now, if we can talk about the real world for a second, the actual reason for all of this is the fact that if every Green Lantern was as powerful as Kyle used to be, then the Green Lantern Corps would be unstoppable. A group of thousands of people, each of them powerful enough to stop a supernova…it becomes too hard to find new ways to challenge them, so you trade power for numbers. The price of having seventy two hundred Green Lanterns is that each individual Green Lantern has severely scaled down powers…but that’s not really a bad thing. Green Lanterns have the most versatile power set in all of super hero fiction, and the inability to handle every situation with brute force makes them to lean harder on creativity and team work, emphasizing the qualities that make Green Lanterns unique, opening up the potential for more interesting stories.
So I think it’s alright that Kyle and the other Green Lanterns are on a lower level than they used to be, but if that’s not your preference, don’t worry. Everything in super hero comics is cyclical, everything old comes back eventually, so I’m sure we’ll see Green Lanterns as powerful as 1990’s era Kyle again at some point…even if we have to wait a billion years like Larfleeze did.
Comments
Post a Comment