This past spring I started poking around in what I called “Could, Would, Does” — as in, “this is how [Concept X] ‘could’ work, ‘would’ work, or ‘does’ work.” The differences between the categories depend on the amount of reality involved. Basically, the Coulds and the Woulds address flaws, often offering patches or retcons. Batman “could” work if he wore body armor and tried to keep the cape from getting snagged. Peter Parker “would” make a skillion dollars off his web-fluid formula. “The Anatomy Lesson” and the Silver Age Multiverse are Could explanations. Watchmen, Supreme Power, and the anti-Marvels miniseries Ruins are all Would stories.

The “Does” stories assert themselves most strongly against the influence of the real world. Where the Coulds and the Woulds try to fit fantastic concepts into the real world, the Does stories start with the fantastic and work “outward to reality.” Just as Bill Watterson never explained (and never felt the need to explain) the mechanics of Hobbes’ relationship to Calvin, so there is at the heart of every Does story some unquantifiable, irrational, creamy nougat.

The Green Lantern Corps is a classic Does premise, because it practically begs to be dissected but resists analysis pretty strongly. Back in April I wrote

What kind of nanotechnology is in the rings? How much of a charge do the individual batteries hold? Is the Central Battery like a cosmic cell-tower, beaming energy invisibly throughout all creation? Mustn’t that energy therefore travel faster than light? Couldn’t it be intercepted? These, I feel, are the kinds of questions around which Geoff Johns could construct the last GL epic anyone would ever need or want, involving Sinestro’s ultimate attempt to destroy his old masters by striking at the very supply lines of their power …

… but once Johns does that story, laying bare all the details of How The Rings Work, then every GL writer who follows Johns, and every GL fan, will be charged with that knowledge, and if anyone wants to change The Rules, he or she might be looking at another 5-part miniseries to explain the changes.

Indeed, Johns and (outgoing) Green Lantern Corps writer Dave Gibbons have overlaid a certain amount of process onto the post-Rebirth Corps, and in that respect have supposed how the Corps “could” be a practical intergalactic police force. However, the Green Lantern titles have since explored “how the rings work” in a much more indirect manner, by making the Sinestro Corps an equal, analogous counterpart to the Lanterns, and showing that the basic mechanics of mass-produced power rings are no longer the exclusive province of the Guardians.

Naturally, in the old days, everything began and ended with the Guardians. They fed the Central Power Battery, which fueled the personal power batteries, which charged the rings. The rings then maintained full power for 24 hours, regardless of use. Furthermore, if I remember right, the Guardians built (and now maintain) their Oan citadel themselves, with no “worker bees” or subcontractors. There was no division of labor among the Guardians in any respect. The Guardians even created their first agents from scratch, but the Manhunters’ rebellion led directly to the recruitment of outsiders.

Nevertheless, the Guardians remained solely responsible for the Green Lantern equipment. To be sure, a Lantern can change its ring’s shape in minor ways, from simple re-sizing to the “F-Sharp Bell” modification.* However, Green Lanterns don’t make their rings themselves, don’t maintain them, and don’t crack open the back panel for customizing. (It would void the warranty.) That knowledge lies with the Guardians; and as far as we know, they’re not in the mood to share it. True, Kyle Rayner had a ring that could make other rings, but he got that following an encounter with Hal Jordan/Parallax, during the period when most of the Guardians were dead.

Thus, because the Guardians were ultimately responsible for the GL Corps’ physical and organizational infrastructure, you couldn’t have a Corps without them. Of course, you could still have a Green Lantern, because since 1941 the basic Green Lantern concept has been simply a ring and a battery. In fact, the Corps is a kind of “Could” version of the original premise, with the Guardians’ mental energies replacing “magic” as the power source. Later retcons connected that magic back to the Guardians in what strikes me as a kind of nerd Mobius strip. Again, everything goes back to the Guardians.

This is not to say that there weren’t “alternative” power rings prior to the Sinestro Corps. Sinestro’s original yellow ring, made by the Weaponers of Qward, charged itself by siphoning power from Oan rings. Back in the day, it was considered more than a match for an average GL ring, because it had no impurity and no 24-hour limit. One can’t help but imagine a common technology underlying both the Sinestro ring and the Oan rings, but that’s where the analysis seems to stop. The Green Lantern rings appear to work “just because” they come from the Guardians, and Sinestro’s old ring worked “just because” it was based on the Oan rings. If such a connection were made explicit — say, because the Weaponers were able somehow to reverse-engineer an Oan ring — that would be a “Could” explanation for what are now “Does” instrumentalities.

That brings me to plok/pillock’s mention last week of Tolkien:

[O]ne of the things about [Tolkien’s] world-creation that I think usually gets overlooked is that magical power is also natural power — not that magical power stems from its connection to “Mother Nature”, necessarily, but that the elves are intrinsically Elvish, the dwarves are intrinsically Dwarvish, and so on and so forth, and that means something. Middle-Earth is just plain not rationalizable according to (ugh) Clarke’s Law — it just doesn’t work: how come Feanor can’t just make some more Silmarils? Has he forgotten how to do it? Did he not write down his process? Clearly not; clearly his knowledge is not that sort of knowledge, and his “skill” isn’t teachable in the ordinary way. Same with the “skill” used to make the Rings of Power: Sauron “instructs” the Elf-smiths, but in what, exactly? Is the relationship of the Rings of Power to the One Ring really analogizable to power circuits and computer programming, just building stuff in? I’d suggest not, if only because very little else in Tolkien’s world works that way either. Innateness is everything, and qualities themselves create their own paralogical force.

Seems like a Does-oriented sentiment to me, and it fits the GL Corps pretty well. I think Johns is exploring the same kind of “innateness,” consciously or not, both with the Sinestros’ fear-based rings and with the Star Sapphire Corps and the other “colors of emotion” to which he’s alluded. (Of course, the Sinestros and the Zamarons are both offshoots of an Oan family tree.) His re-interpretations of Parallax and Ion have even been fairly Morrisonian in their audacity. On one level he’s boiled fundamental concepts like “fear” and “willpower” down to a battle between a yellow space-bug and a green space-whale, but on another that kinda sorta works within the context of magical wishing rings that run on determination. It strikes an odd, but not unworkable, balance between explaining the rings’ mechanics and keeping them flexible enough to serve a number of stories.

Again, however, Johns and Gibbons have overlaid this “innateness” with process and jargon. The old-school Green Lanterns worked in relative isolation from each other, so it was a big deal for them to get together. Today, each Lantern has a partner and functions within more of a hierarchical structure. There are clear differences between rookies and veterans, and there are more specialized groups (i.e., the “Corpse”) within the Corps. The rings seem “smarter” (for lack of a better term) and more chatty too. These days they chirp mostly about their declining power levels and their searches for new owners, but I’m sure that will change before too long.

Such process-oriented innovations are also capable of being reproduced by the Lanterns themselves, as opposed to being the sole province of the Guardians. Put another way, you might need a Guardian to make a power ring, but not to draw up an organizational chart. Accordingly, the Guardians’ authority over the individual Lanterns has been diluted or diffused to a certain extent by the interposition of, say, Guy Gardner or Kilowog. The Guardians have therefore allowed the creation of middle management.

Too much process, though, and too much exploration of the rings’ inner workings, takes away the mystique and the “innateness.” It’s one thing to create alternate versions of the GL Corps, but it’s another entirely to say that the GL Corps is just one group among many. The Could and Would approaches trade plausibility for a certain amount of trust in the storytelling; whereas the Does stories require more suspension of disbelief.

The distinction is important to me because the Does stories are really the only source of new material. Consider: the Coulds and the Woulds work to fit what is already present in fiction to what is presently understood to be fact. Their explanations can also be limitations. The Does stories, though, must (almost by definition) be more inventive, in order to entice us past the point of incredulity. There’s a fine line between telling a good Does story and “making it up as you go,” but the right side of that line can be very exciting.

Could and Would stories can be fun, exciting, vital, and important too — it’s just that eventually, they brush up against the walls of reality. I see Johns’ and Gibbons’ work on Green Lantern as Does-influenced because it takes the existing in-story GL rules and extrapolates from them. They’re not putting the stories in a box, they’re showing how big the box can be.

More importantly, they’re preserving — at least for now — the mysteries at the heart of the mythology. We readers may never learn all the dark secrets of the Guardians, but at least we’ll have the fun of exploring them.

[* It's also possible that the bell was just a construct of Rot Lop Fan's ring, and the ring never changed shape, but I am going with a more expansive reading of the story.]

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Comic Books, DC Comics, Grumpy Old Fan, Version 1.0 Blog@. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.