Too Many Earth Lanterns...

[failo.legendkiller]

I'd like to think she's empowering for all readers, regardless of gender. Overcoming fear is a universal struggle and aspiration just as I would hope Hal et al are empowering for female readers as well as male readers.

My problem with Jessica was that her struggle was so predictable that i’ve immediately lost interest.
I’d prefer she stayed as Power Ring instead to become Green Lantern.

[DevilBat66]

Get rid of all of them and focus on one Earth GL.

Kyle Rayner is my favorite and I would prefer he was the only GL again.

That being said, I think Jessica Cruz should be the only GL remaining. She's a good character with lots of potential still. It would also give DC a second female "Big Name" hero and that would go a lot better if she was teh only hero actively being called Green Lantern.

Never happen though. DC is too married to the concept of having their cake and eating it too with the GL franchise.

[Sutekh]

It's sounds crazy, and it's probably not true, and I don't really believe it, but a part of me almost thinks DiDio is allowing this on purpose so that all the Green Lanterns who aren't Hal Jordan destroy themselves, because they will always be in constant competition with each other and will never get any long term opportunities for development, attention, or to really establish themselves.

Caesar - "Hmm. The Senate has too much power and is too unified in causing me grief. I know! I'll just double the number of Senators, and they'll be so busy fighting each other for scraps of the power they used to solely have that they won't be able to unify against me!"

Yeah, that does seem to be the way of it. Fans of Alan Scott kind of resent Hal Jordan. Fans of Hal Jordan kind of resent Kyle and John. Fans of Kyle and John don't want to read about Hal or Simon or Jessica or this new 'Teen Lantern.' Fans of Guy Gardner are used to being told to basically suck it, because if their boy even shows up this year, it will only to be mockingly reminded of how Batman punched him in the face that one time...

I wonder if they could make a storyline out of this meta-issue, and have the 'power of will' be a finite resource, and stretched thin locally by the presence of so many ring-bearers tapping it. Sort of 'law of conservation of ninjutsu' as regards ring-bearers. The more there are on Earth, the less individually powerful they are. Or, to take it an even scarier direction, have it flow both ways. The more ring-bearers are tapping the 'will' generated by Earth, the less 'will' the people of Earth have, and the more susceptible they are to everything from terrible internet memes to the anti-life equation and people who mess with minds or thrive on cults of personality, like the Glorious Godfrey or Queen Zazyl or Brother Blood.

That would make for an interesting digression, and bring the 'too many Earth lanterns' discussion from meta to text and provide a possible in-story reason for restricting the number of 'lanterns' on any one planet full time.

[Frontier]

I'm a fan of all the Earth Lanterns but even I think there's too many for the franchise to adequately serve and spotlight.

We're a long ways away from the Johns era or post-Johns where each of the four main Lanterns had their own book. Now we can't even get a GLC book out.

Hal, John, and Jessica have books right now, but where's Simon and Guy? And now we've got a Teen Lantern and a Far Sector Lantern in different imprints.

Hal needs to be in space, if he's such a big deal like they want us to treat him as then he's got no time for earth BS. He can still turn up in JL etc but treat it as a "Here comes the cavalry" kind of thing.

I just never really get Hal being stuck in space.

I know Morrison believes him to be this listless wanderer on Earth but I just feel like he has too much of a life on Earth to be away from it for that long.

[EsotericFailures]

What I don't understand is the obsession DC has with forcing John, Guy and Kyle back into Green Lanterns after they've changed Corps. Was there a huge upset over Guy being a Red Lantern and Kyle being the White Lantern? I remember their books being well liked during that era. DC has this inherent fear of too much change even when the changes themselves are well received by fans and it does huge harm to the characters. There should be a limit of two human GLs with the others being part of other Corps (maybe have John Stewart go back to being a Guardian? certainly makes him cooler and unique than another GL)

This new book isn't part of the problem though, seems to be its own independent thing.

[LP22]

I like the big 4 best baz and Jessica are fine but now possibly having a 7th lantern is a little bit to much if it was up to me ill put them like this:
Hal/John on JLA
Kyle on Titans
Guy baz and Jessica on a corps book

you can give all of them solos or mini books and see who sells I mean just look at the bat books

[Ironmonk]

I'm looking forward to the Far Sector story. It may be an Earth lantern but it ain't on Earth. No lantern has to be deleted in order for them to all get some space to shine. Hell a GLC book with a rotating main lantern each story arc could be something nice to do. Or an alternative could be cutting one of that bat books because batman never gets time to shine./s

[failo.legendkiller]

What I don't understand is the obsession DC has with forcing John, Guy and Kyle back into Green Lanterns after they've changed Corps. Was there a huge upset over Guy being a Red Lantern and Kyle being the White Lantern? I remember their books being well liked during that era. DC has this inherent fear of too much change even when the changes themselves are well received by fans and it does huge harm to the characters. There should be a limit of two human GLs with the others being part of other Corps (maybe have John Stewart go back to being a Guardian? certainly makes him cooler and unique than another GL)

This new book isn't part of the problem though, seems to be its own independent thing.

Guy in Red Lanterns was perfect, the book under Charles Soule was splendid. You're right there was no need totake him back on GLC.
Kyle as White Lantern wasn't perfect but it was a direction for him.
Anyway Rebirth HJ and GLC book was enjoyable, I was upset when it ended. There was room for everyone.

[Vic Vega]

Multiple Earth Lantern's work if you think of them less as Space Cops and more as Space Sheriffs, with deputies and such.

One Lantern gets tasked with Space Patrol, The other one gets to watch Earth with his (or her) helpers.

And another GL gets put in the GL Honor Guard (the defacto GL team book).

[Vampire Savior]

Some of these solutions/excuses don't work for me, such as...

There are never too many Earth Lanterns.
This doesn't work because every time DC adds one, they diminish all the others and take away the mystique of their franchise. The concept of one man being chosen over ALL other Earth people to represent his entire space sector in an intergalactic peace keeping force sounds cool. When there are 10 of them, and when it was never set up to be like that initially, the special-ness of being a Green Lantern goes away. Also, any excuse anyone ever wrote about Earth needing a lot of Green Lanterns is just a hand waving tacked on "reason" for this out of control situation. I believe it simply weakens the narrative to have so many. It waters it down.

Just utilize them so they matter.
This can't be done. There are like 10 of them if you count Jade. Panel time is a resource, and there is only so much of that resource to go around. Someone...a lot of someones are going to get the shaft. And sticking one of them on Justice League isn't good enough because Justice League will not be able to give them much attention usually.

Put some of them in different Corps.
What's that going to do? They're still not going to get any focus, they will just have the Green Lantern name stripped from them in favor of something a lot less cool (seriously, Indigo Tribe?)

[jetengine]

Also realistically we should take Alan out of rhe equation since he's barely a Corpsman.

[Toreador]

The outrageous number of Earth Green Lanterns has destroyed my interest in Green Lantern besides talking about how much I think Green Lantern sucks. It started with Baz, but when Jessica came along, I had enough, and it just gets worse and worse.

Both Simon and Jessica came to be Green Lanterns due to certain circumstances. When Hal and Sinestro died and their rings fused this new ring (probably dis functioning) sought out a new ring bearer and focused on the closest one, Simon.

Jessica became the unwilling wearer of Power Ring's ring when he died and focused one the closest one whose fear it could feed on. Overcoming her fear and learning to control the ring proved she was capable of becoming a Green Lantern.

If either previous ring wearers died far out in space and the ring traveled to Earth for a host then that I think would be a more credible complaint for too many Earth GLs.


Also we don't really know if there are more other GLs that are that are from the same planet. The writers haven't done much focus on the alien GLs. It'd would be interesting to see a brother and sister GL duo (the ring found both to be equally suitable for wearing the ring and when it couldn't decide duplicated itself for both to have a ring) or a family of GLs (one official GL who made lieutenant GLs from its family to help patrol a sector).

[Vampire Savior]

Both Simon and Jessica came to be Green Lanterns due to certain circumstances. When Hal and Sinestro died and their rings fused this new ring (probably dis functioning) sought out a new ring bearer and focused on the closest one, Simon.

Jessica became the unwilling wearer of Power Ring's ring when he died and focused one the closest one whose fear it could feed on. Overcoming her fear and learning to control the ring proved she was capable of becoming a Green Lantern.

If either previous ring wearers died far out in space and the ring traveled to Earth for a host then that I think would be a more credible complaint for too many Earth GLs.


Also we don't really know if there are more other GLs that are that are from the same planet. The writers haven't done much focus on the alien GLs. It'd would be interesting to see a brother and sister GL duo (the ring found both to be equally suitable for wearing the ring and when it couldn't decide duplicated itself for both to have a ring) or a family of GLs (one official GL who made lieutenant GLs from its family to help patrol a sector).

Most of them became GL's due to certain circumstances. John was hand picked by the Guardians in his original introduction. Guy was selected by a group of renegade Guardians that disagreed with the others about how to approach the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Kyle was originally chosen at random out of desperation. You can always contrive some reason to have a new Earth Green Lantern, but I question whether doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again is a good idea.

[Lee Stone]

The problem you get with a regiment of Lanterns on one planet is that you have to come up with reasons that they haven't cured the world's various ills with their combined power. True, that's an issue for any large shared-verse, but but having it all in one franchise is a bit much.

If Ice was a permanent GL, the world would already be rid of diseases and crime.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

On the other hand, I couldn't connect with Kyle (even though I was a freelance artist living in NYC), but he was the only option. The bad premise lead to one option for stories and since I didn't connect to him, I was left with zero GL stories for many years.

I have grown quite fond of Kyle nowadays. He's the Springsteen of the GLs. I love all the new layers that were added to him later on. The Ron Marz Peter Parker of the DCU was good, but I still had a sour taste in my mouth from how piss-poor a story Emerald Twilight was, when it could have been great. Broome & Mosaic had already laid out the path for a very compelling take on Hal as a bad guy.

Hal was the badguy as early as the 1960s, with Hal's transformation into Pol Manning, Solar President of the 58th Century AKA Doctor Strangehate!