On the Spectrum

Me and the missus have lately been enjoying the Home Box Office Maximum program Lanterns, set in the DC Comics universe and concerning the Green Lantern.

The show stars Kyle Chandler—a.k.a. Coach from Friday Night Lights—as probably the most familiar Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. We are a pro-Coach household. We’re also Kelly Macdonald appreciators and dig Aaron Pierre as the upstart Lantern John Stewart. (Not the guy from The Daily Show.)

All of this has me thinking about what a comparatively weird superhero Green Lantern is. Superman has extraordinary abilities intrinsic to his body, at least under our yellow sun. Batman has gadgets and a whole lot of money. Green Lanterns have a ring, courage, and a surfeit of imagination. Their finger bling projects intention as luminous form, limited only by what its bearer can conceive.

The original Green Lantern was Alan Scott, introduced in All-American Comics #16 in 1940, conceived by artist Martin Nodell with Bill Finger scripting the first story. Nodell said the green lantern was inspired by a railway signal, but the underlying mythology was seriously out-there: a mystical green meteor falls in ancient China and eventually becomes the lantern and ring through which Alan draws his powers.

The ring has to be charged every 24 hours, so it’s basically my iPhone. Limitations aside, we already see the essential ingredients of light, ring, bearer, intention and manifestation.

In 1959, writer John Broome and artist Gil Kane reinvented Green Lantern in Showcase #22. Test pilot Hal Jordan is summoned by the dying extraterrestrial Abin Sur, whose ring chooses Hal as his successor. The premise expands to include Oa, the Guardians of the Universe and a Green Lantern Corps whose members oversee sectors of a vast cosmos inhabited by countless sentient beings.

Broome preserves the relationship between mind and luminous appearance. The ring responds to its bearer’s imagination, making thought temporarily perceptible and functional according to circumstances.

There’s even a ritual structure supporting it. The ring is periodically returned to its lantern-shaped power battery while the bearer recites a spicy mantra:

“In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might
Beware my power—Green Lantern’s light!”

John Stewart, introduced by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams in 1971, brings new depth to the concept. The original John is an architect: confrontational, anti-authoritarian and unmistakably emerging from the era of Black political consciousness. He challenges white cops harassing Black men playing dominoes and refuses to wear a mask.

Decades later, the Justice League animated series retconned John as a former Marine, which subsequently became comics canon. Apparently, even the strongest Black heroes must bend to the dominant militaristic culture. And yet Stewart only scratches the surface of Lantern diversity.

There is no singular form of Green Lantern. Kilowog is a massive alien. Ch’p looks like a squirrel. Mogo is an entire sentient planet. Rot Lop Fan, introduced by wizard Alan Moore in 1987, comes from the lightless Obsidian Deeps and has no concept of vision or color. “Green Lantern” is meaningless to him, so he becomes a sound called the F-Sharp Bell. Same potency, different sensory world, different manifestation. Oh, and there are other Lantern colors besides green.

This is where my own mind, trained in Tibetan Buddhism, gets interested.

I’m not suggesting Broome was secretly encoding Vajrayana into Green Lantern. And yet the relationship between mind, light and manifestation is much older than Hal Jordan, John Stewart or even comics. Centuries-old Buddhist teachings, for example, liken “rainbow light” to differentiated luminosity associated with the five wisdoms, five Buddha families and five elements.

But this isn’t a Buddhist periodic table, and I’m not trying to force Green Lantern into a cosmology meant to be grasped lightly, if at all.

What interests me is the spectrum’s limitless capacity for varied appearance. In Buddhist terms, nirmāṇakāya describes manifestation according to the circumstances and capacities of beings. Awakened activity can arise in whatever form is appropriate to benefit—or tame—them.

Similarly, a Lantern can be a human, alien, squirrel, planet or vibration. The ring is equally fluid: shield for protection, net for rescue, cage for restraint, vehicle for transportation, or clobbering appendage.

Its potency contains no predetermined inventory of forms. John Stewart’s architectural mind produces intricately engineered constructs; Lantern Kyle Rayner, an artist, conjures elaborate visuals. Same luminous potential, but different minds and display.

Lanterns draws from ninety years of mythology that echoes much older ideas about luminous energy assuming whatever temporary form circumstances require to benefit beings.

Sometimes, even a gigantic green fist.