The Green Lantern ring is one of the most powerful items in the DC Universe. The will-powered weapon can produce anything that its wielder can imagine, its constructs letting normal humans keep up with veritable gods like Superman and Wonder Woman. Individually, some of the only items able to keep up with the Green Lantern rings are other emotional spectrum rings. The Absolute Universe, however, has seen fit to change this concept a bit by removing the ring and charging its lanterns themselves with the green light, making them into living conduits of willpower, and this does not seem to have made them any weaker. Still, all of this does not mean that the Green Lantern powers have no counter. In fact, for a very long time they had a single, incredibly crippling weakness, and Absolute Green Lantern just reintroduced this weakness with a major twist.
Green Lantern’s Ring Didn’t Work on the Color Yellow
Like with many superpowered heroes introduced in the Gold and Silver Ages of comics, the writers included a weakness that could shut the hero down cold. Superman with Kryptonite, Thor with being away from his hammer for more than one minute, Wonder Woman by being tied up by a man (I’m so happy this one was lost to history). This was mostly due to the fact that in the early days the heroes were generally even more absurdly powerful than they are today, and they fought a lot of weaker villains early on in their careers. Coming up with the twentieth character in a row who can physically match Superman blow for blow really starts to undervalue how incredible his powers are, in that sense. Instead of fighting yet another cosmic being, Joe Schmoe from down the street could have the hard counter to the hero and give them an even and intense fight for the hero to overcome with their wits as much as their brawn.
The original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, had a weakness to wood. When Hal Jordan took over at the start of the Silver Age, they wanted to carry over a weakness of some kind, but still wanted to differentiate Hal from Alan. So, instead of wood, the new version of the Green Lantern’s ring didn’t work on the color yellow. He couldn’t affect anything to do with the color, and anything yellow could completely bypass his constructs. Needless to say, this made some pretty hilarious situations plausible, like Goldface being one of Green Lantern’s deadliest enemies because he was covered head-to-toe in yellow so Green Lantern literally couldn’t fight him head on. Much, much later this would be explained by the Yellow Impurity of Parallax, the Entity of Fear, being trapped inside the Central Power Battery, but at the end of the day it was just a weakness for the Lantern to have. While modern main universe comics have done away with the weakness to yellow, Absolute Green Lantern brings it back in a new and very interesting way.
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Gold Symbolizes Enlightenment, Not Fear
Absolute Green Lantern #3 focused mostly on the people of Evergreen as they adapted to being trapped inside of Abin Sur’s forcefield. While investigating the bikers who smashed against the wall of light when it first appeared, John Stewart noticed that a yellow ring is the only thing that made it through. He asked Hal for a gold-colored toy, which he threw at the forcefield, only for it to pass directly through it. Next, John threw his grandmother’s wedding ring, which not only passed through the barrier but opened a hole in it for a couple of seconds. John broke down how the more like gold the object appeared, the more it was able to repel the green light, with gold itself being able to totally dispel it. However, this isn’t simply because of the color.
John’s theory about why gold worked when not even signals could pierce the barrier relates to the concept of the Philosopher’s Stone, which was able to transform a normal rock into gold. The Philosopher’s Stone is the symbol of alchemy, which itself is the nature of understanding the rules of reality so well that you are able to change things in a way that most would think impossible. John works under the assumption that the judgement Abin Sur keeps referring to makes their situation a kind of test or experiment he is running. In that vein, since gold symbolizes ultimate understanding, gold thus has the power to break the trap they are locked in, because the trap itself is meant to teach them a lesson. However, John also called out how this isn’t what Abin Sur wanted them to learn from this. Agreeing with him, Abin Sur descended from the sky and blasted John the same way he did Guy, seemingly killing him.
Hal and Jo have lost yet another friend to their alien abductor, and Hal swore that this was the last time. With the knowledge that gold can pierce Abin Sur’s protective barrier, Hal got as much gold as he could to coat bullets in, planning to kill the alien once and for all. Based on how he’s the Black Hand and Jo has become the Green Lantern, with her light seemingly being stored in her gold-colored wedding ring, we can safely assume that this plan goes very, very wrong. Still, this is a major shift to the Green Lantern lore, because yellow isn’t an impurity or the color of fear, rather the color that allows them to hold their will within, because it represents them having the understanding to rise above their fears. It’s definitely an awesome change, and I’m excited to see what they do with it in the future.
Absolute Green Lantern #3 is on sale now!
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