Today I want to talk about a short Green Lantern story that I’m pretty sure most people haven’t read. It was published under the title “From Beyond the Unknown #1”, and was a seventeen page digital-only comic that released in June of 2020, as part of a pretty extensive line of digital-first and digital-exclusive comics. The reason I’m bringing it up is because it’s actually a pretty good story that directly addresses a concept that comes up every now and then, but rarely gets talked about in a serious way…that concept being how hard it actually is for a Green Lantern to patrol their entire sector, and what happens to a sector when its Green Lantern stops showing up.
This is something the Guardians are trying to lecture Hal about, in the middle of a fight with Doctor Polaris. They’re concerned that Hal’s been neglecting the rest of his sector while giving so much attention to Earth. There’s a good push and pull here, where Hal says that Earth by itself has an entire sector’s worth of problems he needs to attend to, but the Guardians point out that Earth also has tons of super heroes, so it doesn’t need the constant attention of a Green Lantern, especially when there are so many other worlds out there who aren’t lucky enough to be filled with champions to protect them.
This is when Hal runs into The Gloom, a group of assassins preparing to execute Bolpfunga the Unrelenting. Bolpfunga has always been kind of a joke, he talks himself up as being this big deal bounty hunter, but he’s always getting shut down by Green Lanterns so easily that it’s hard to take him seriously as a threat. What we never think about, though, is the fact that the presence of a Green Lantern is what keeps Bolphunga from being a serious threat. Without Hal adequately patrolling his sector, Bolphunga was free to devastate countless worlds in the pursuit of his bounties. That’s who the Gloom are…survivors of the worlds burned by Bolphunga, filled with hatred and rage, but too weak and broken to fight, so they placed their souls into robot bodies specially designed to hunt both Bolphunga, and the Green Lantern who neglected his sector, enabling Bolphunga to roam free and destroy their worlds. The Gloom even recognize that expecting Hal to be everywhere and save everyone would be ridiculous, and understand that anyone would be biased towards protecting their own home…but they’ve been keeping track of him, and they know how much time he spends on Earth, putting his own kind first at the expense of the rest of the sector. They know that if he had spent more time on patrol, there’s a chance that at least some of their worlds could have lived. And I love this quote that sums up their origin and motivation perfectly: “We were born from your darkness, Hal Jordan. The Gloom is born from the darkness where the Green Lantern Corps refuses to shine their light”.
And seeing all of this, learning what’s been going on in his sector all this time, standing in the ruins of one of the Gloom’s home worlds, a world that could have lived if Hal had been there…Hal realizes that they’re right. This is exactly what the Guardians had been lecturing him about earlier. He messed up, and nothing he says or does will ever make up for the tragedies that were allowed to happen on his watch. But he can’t allow the Gloom’s quest for bloody vengeance continue. In the end, all three members of the Gloom are locked up on Oa, with the implication being that there are more of them out there, the result of the failures of every Green Lantern foolish enough to believe they can actually police an entire sector. And while Hal promises that things can change, the Gloom aren’t very optimistic…because even if Hal’s right, the real problem is the size of the Corps, how it’s structured, and how it’s run. The kinds of changes that would be needed are too big, and would take generations to implement, and even longer to produce the desired outcome. At the end of the day, Hal Jordan is just one Green Lantern, and the most he can do is change the way he personally does things, change his priorities. And the next time the Justice League called him, Hal told them that he’s sorry but he can’t make it. The League has plenty of reserve members that can be called in, but there are entire worlds out there who don’t have any heroes to protect them…they just have him.
I really like this issue. To me, thinking about the mechanics of how the Green Lantern Corps would actually function is super interesting and a lot of fun, and we can take the idea a lot further, too. Something that doesn’t get directly touched on in this issue is the size of the Corps, and whether or not it’s actually big enough to have so much territory. In the past, the Guardians basically admitted that the original version of the Green Lantern Corps was too small, since the second version (introduced in 2005’s “Green Lantern Corps Recharge”) was built twice as big, with two Lanterns per sector instead of one. In this issue, Hal even referred to himself as “Green Lantern 2814.1” when he called the Guardians, and that designation means that he’s got a sector partner who’s designated 2814.2…but once we start going down that road, we have to focus on the real issue, and that’s the fact that a single sector is just too large.
Now it should go without saying that sectors are big. REALLY big. Nobody actually knows how big they are, or how much territory Guardian Space actually covers, but the implication is that it’s a pretty massive area. Depending on where the borders are, a single sector could contain hundreds, if not thousands of inhabited worlds, separated by lightyears, and just one or two Green Lanterns are expected to cover all of it. The size and scope of a sector always get glossed over in favor of more immediate concerns, and we’re encouraged to not really think about it. But it’s an idea I keep coming back to, especially during periods of time when the Green Lantern Corps disappears.
There have been a hand full of times when the Green Lantern Corps has almost completely vanished from the universe, each time leaving behind at least one Lantern to carry on the legacy, but ultimately leaving all of Guardian space, all 3600 sectors, unprotected. And interestingly, it usually doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. You’ll rarely find confirmation that the absence of the Corps directly lead to a drastic increase of crime and villainy throughout the universe, lending credibility to the idea that the universe was always too big for the Corps to patrol. To put it in perspective…the entire state of New York has almost seventy thousand police officers patrolling it. Imagine if, instead of seventy thousand, there were just two. Two officers for the entire state, traveling around and stopping whatever crimes they can find. Sure, they could still do a lot of good, but they’d never be able to make a meaningful difference to the state overall. In the DC Universe, some of this has been mitigated by the presence of other organizations like the Darkstars and the Sinestro Corps, who’ve both attempted to operate along side the Green Lantern Corps, as well as replace them when they’ve fallen…but these groups are all a similar size, and ultimately have the same problem. The universe is just too damn big for any of these organizations to do the job on their own. John Stewart and Soranik Natu were actually on the right track during the brief time when they tried to form an alliance between the Green Lanterns and the Sinestro Corps, because combining forces and sharing the work would go a long way towards having enough coverage to actually protect these sectors, which can only be achieved by assigning a whole lot more Lanterns in each sector. I know people don’t like how many Green Lanterns are from Earth, but seriously, every sector needs this many Lanterns, hell every sector probably needs more Lanterns than this, because anything less won’t offer enough coverage.
It is fascinating to watch different versions of different Corps try to figure out ways to protect a universe that’s way too big for them, and I really do hope we see the rise of a lasting multi-Corps alliance some day. That’s the entire reason Ganthet and Sayd started the Blue Lantern Corps, after all, those rings were designed specifically to be used in cooperation with the Green Lanterns. If the Blue Lanterns can build their ranks back up, and the Green Lanterns can figure out how to make a more stable arrangement with the Sinestro Corps, it could be a game-changer for the universe. Or maybe the answer is to just think smaller…the current series, by writer Geoffrey Thorne, began with the Guardians giving up one third of their territory. And if that was the only change that was made, it could start us down the path of addressing the problem directly, since instead of having 3600 sectors with two Lanterns each, we’d have 2400 sectors with half of them getting a third Lantern, and the numbers would just keep getting better as the number of sectors gets lower. Although that creates its own set of problems, as you’d have to either reassign or replace hundreds of Lanterns who’s home sectors are no longer in Guardian space, and you’d have to seriously consider what worlds you’d be willing to abandon…all of this has a ton of potential for compelling stories and characterization, as this would mean a big change for the universe, and everyone in the Corps is going to feel pretty strongly one way or the other about all of it.
I cold talk about this all day, but I’m curious what you think. Is the Green Lantern Corps big enough to do its job? How many Lanterns should be assigned to a sector? Should they make alliances with other organizations to extend their coverage? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter @MosaicComics. And hey, Beyond the Unknown #1 is only $0.99 on Comixology, maybe check it out if you’re interested.
Thank you for taking the time to watch. My name is Dan, we’ll talk again soon.
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