Green Lantern/Characters/Black and White Corps

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The Black Lantern Corps

Emotion: None (Death)
Leader: Black Hand
Base of Operations: Ryut
Entity: Nekron

The blackest night falls from the skies,

 The darkness grows, as all light dies,

We crave your hearts and your demise,

By my black hand-- the dead shall rise!

Per the Blackest Night prophecy, the emergence and conflict among the other colors led to the stirring of the Black Lanterns. Their Power Battery is made from the corpse of the Anti Monitor. Their leader is the Black Hand, a long time Green Lantern enemy and necrophile. They have their own Guardian, Scar, an Oan corrupted during the war with Sinestro. The being behind it all is Nekron, the avatar of Death, who claims that the natural state of the universe is eternal darkness and death absent of time and that the light of creation and life is but a temporary disturbance of that state; and to that end, death has stirred to restore this "peaceful" state of rest.

The Black Lanterns devour the light of all other Lanterns (whose lights are supposed to collectively represent Life). They've been manipulating heroes and Lanterns to make them experience pure extreme emotions which they can feed upon. Their rings animate the dead, giving them whatever abilities and memories they had in life (though the souls are absent) along with flight and ridiculous levels of regeneration.

Though Nekron was defeated, the consciousness of the Black Lantern Firestorm remained in the Firestorm Matrix; soon splitting off and naming himself Deathstorm. Deathstorm then claimed the White Lantern and used it to recreate more Black Lanterns, who served the Anti-Monitor until the real Firestorm intervened and destroyed them.

Notable Black Lanterns and Associated Characters

Nekron

Homeworld: The Land of the Unliving

The Death Entity. The universal personification of oblivion--the absence of all light, life, and emotion. Nekron is the shadow cast by the light of life and emotion. For eons, he was trapped in the Land of the Unliving, a kind of limbo dimension where dead souls linger before judgment, but the death of the immortal Krona brought the universe of the living to his attention. He seeks to bring an end to all life, extinguishing the light of emotion and bringing the universe back to its original state of being: darkness and death.

Several times since his existence was revealed, Nekron attempted to enter our universe and destroy all life, but each time he was repelled by its heroes, most notably the Green Lanterns. However, Nekron had a plan: the Blackest Night. By engineering the creation of a tether to the material universe--William Hand--and the construction of his own power rings and Power Battery on the decimated planet Ryut, Nekron was able to create the Black Lantern Corps, who brought him physically to Earth. Nekron attempted to destroy his opposite, the Entity, and thus end all life in creation, but the combined forces of all seven lights of emotion with the Entity itself revived Hand, cutting Nekron's link to the material plane and banishing him back to the void.

Black Hand

AKA: William Hand
Homeworld: Earth

The son of a funeral parlor owner, William Hand, even at a young age, had an unhealthy obsession with death. Atrocitus predicted that he would become a threat to life itself, and tried to murder him, only for Hal Jordan and Sinestro to rescue him. In the aftermath of the battle, William stole Atrocitus' weapon (a rod that could absorb energy and channel it into energy blasts) and became a supervillain, Black Hand.

Eventually, he found his true destiny. By committing suicide, he rose from the grave as the first Black Lantern, providing Nekron with a tether to join the living universe. He led the Black Lanterns as Second-In-Command, until the power of the White Light restored him to living, breathing flesh and blood, taking away his powers and Nekron's link. He was last seen in custody of the Indigo Lanterns, being forcefully converted into one of them.

Deathstorm (Black Lantern Firestorm)

During the Blackest Night, the Black Lantern of Ronnie Raymond, aka Firestorm, stood out among his colleagues as one of the most sadistic and twisted, turning the girlfriend of the current Firestorm, Jason Rusch, to salt and forcing Rusch to help. Ronnie was later returned to life by a White Ring, but the Black Lantern consciousness remained in the Firestorm Matrix, eventually separating from Firestorm and calling itself Deathstorm. Deathstorm was able to claim the White Lantern Battery and bring it to the Anti-Monitor before Firestorm arrived, foiled the Anti-Monitor, and destroyed Deathstorm with the White energies.

Scar

Homeworld: Oa (formerly Maltus)

During the final battle of the Sinestro Corps War, one of the female Guardians of the Universe was burned by the touch of the Anti-Monitor. This fundamentally changed her, to say the least. She soon began exhibiting suspicious behavior, including goading her fellow Guardians into increasingly dubious decisions regarding the GLC and emotion, manipulating other Corps into conflict with the Green Lanterns, and dispatching agents to locate the corpse of the Anti-Monitor. All the while, she secretly began composing a "Book of the Black", chronicling those who would play a role in the upcoming Blackest Night. It was evenutally revealed that she had been killed by the Anti-Monitor and was now Nekron's agent in the land of the living. She was destroyed during the Blackest Night by Hal Jordan and the New Guardians, who combined their individual lights into white light, obliterating her.

The White Light

Emotion: All (Life)
Base of Operations: Earth

During the battle with Nekron, he revealed that Earth was home to a White Entity, a being similar to Ion and Parallax but one that sparked life itself in the universe. In order to fight Nekron and protect the entity, Sinestro bonded with it, only to be proven unworthy; Hal Jordan then bonded with it, briefly turning himself and other previously resurrected heroes into White Lanterns. White Lantern rings also revived a handful of other metahumans that had perished, starting with Black Hand and thereby making Nekron unable to exist in the physical world.

After the battle, only one of the resurrected heroes, Deadman, still had a white ring. A white Power Battery has also appeared, but nobody has yet been able to lift it.

  • Earth Is the Center of the Universe: ...Yeah.
    • Not literally, but close enough.
    • Specifically, Oa is at the center of the universe. Earth is at the "center" of the Multiverse, with the Earth of the main DC Universe sitting at the base of the multiverse supporting the other 51 earths.
  • Life Energy
  • Only the Chosen May Wield: Hal and Carol even compare it to the Sword in the Stone while they and Sinestro try to lift the battery.

Notable Characters Associated with the White Light

The Entity

Homeworld: Earth

The Life Entity--the living embodiment of the White Light of Creation, the being who represents life itself and, indeed, brought life into existence. The Entity came into the universe through unknown means and found itself on Earth, where the process of evolution was sparked. Over the eons, its progeny--the lesser entities of the emotional spectrum--manifested, while the Entity itself slept in Earth's core. The Entity is the opposite of Nekron, the yang to his yin.

It has revealed to Deadman that it is dying from Nekron's attack, and that a replacement must be found.

  • All Your Colors Combined: The White Entity seems to be made from pieces of the other entities. It has Butcher's tusks, Ophidian's spine, Parallax's limbs, Ion's face, Adara's wings, Proselyte's hair, and Predator's chest.
  • Good Is Not Nice: Has no problem manipulating villains to do dirty work on its behalf, and gave heroes their lives back without telling some of them that theirs was a temporary arrangement.
  • Manipulative Bastard: We'll have to see about Magnificent Bastard...
  • Our Angels Are Different: In appearance, at least, the Entity resembles an alien angel.

Deadman

AKA: Boston Brand
Homeworld: Earth

Boston Brand was originally a trapeze artist who went under the stage name of "Deadman". Unfortunately, the stage name became literal when he was killed by a mysterious hook-handed man during a show. He spent the next several years as a ghost under the Hindu goddess Rama Kushna, solving crimes and aiding the superhero community from the other side.

In the wake of the Blackest Night, none were more shocked than he was to find himself back in the land of the living. He realized that he alone still wore a White Lantern ring, which soon spoke to him. It began bringing him to different places, allowing him to witness the other resurrectees (unseen and unheard, not unlike when he was a ghost) and asking him to help them before delivering him to Red Oni, Blue Oni team Hawk and Dove. The three are now working together to try and unravel the mysteries of the White Light.

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