Kyle Rayner is a Green Lantern who occupies a strange place in the mythos. He is a third generation lantern as he was created in 1994 in the aftermath of the Emerald Twilight arc. Kyle’s role in the mythos has changed a lot over the 30-odd years because he is hard to write for in the modern age. I will first tell the history of his character, examine the reasons behind the inability of most writers to find a good use for him, and provide some ideas about how Kyle can truly relight his torch again. It is such a shame that unlike all the other mainline Lanterns, Kyle has not found his niche; doubly so since Kyle is my favorite Earth Lantern.
Emerald Twilight was the arc which turned Hal Jordan from a hero into the villain Parallax, wiping out the entire Green Lantern Corps and nearly all the Guardians. This change and Kyle’s subsequent introduction constituted an in-universe clean slate for the next era of Green Lantern. Kyle was the sole Green Lantern protecting the entire universe, but primarily Earth like all human Lanterns. This was his status quo until 2002 when Kyle first became the nearly divine entity Ion. Beyond his immense strength, he no longer needed a ring to use his powers as he absorbed the latent willpower from Earth’s sun. This was a power spike which made him the most powerful Lantern of all time. While eventually giving up much of this power, he was still alone in the universe.
This was until 2006 when the Geoff Johns’s Rebirth project brought back Hal Jordan from the dead, alongside the whole Lantern Corps returning to protect the universe again. In this reborn corps Kyle’s role was to be the ‘Torchbearer’, a singular Green Lantern who was both role model and contingency for the entire Corps. In his largely solo 2006 Ion run, Kyle took the mantle and full power of Ion once again. This status confirmed his role as the torchbearer and uniquely powerful. Soon after, in 2007, Johns retconned the Ion power to be from the emotional entity Ion, created entirely by willpower rather than just latent willpower energy from Earth’s sun. In the Rebirth continuity it is revealed that this entity bonded with Kyle to give him his power. This symbiosis also accounted for his altered personality while acting as Ion.
At this time Kyle was back to his previous level of immense power. But largely was disconnected from the day-to-day events of the Green Lantern primary storyline. His Ion run was rather insular and he did not appear in major arcs like ‘Revenge of the Green Lanterns’, and only made appearances in huge universe spanning arcs like the ‘Rann Thanagar War’ which also featured characters like Hawkman, Hawkgirl, and Adam Strange (notably less important characters for Green Lantern compared to Kyle). His limited important actions in early Rebirth runs primarily consisted of being the person to actually collect Hal’s body from the sun and discover the Parallax plot. A lot of the early issues focused on characters like Hal, Guy, and various new Lanterns characters rather than giving Kyle new stories other than his dedicated Ion series.
The only thing differentiating Kyle from other main Lanterns was his Ion power, but in mid 2007 that power was taken from him. During the universe spanning conflict of the ‘Sinestro Corps War’ Kyle was taken over by the Parallax entity, the same one that caused Hal to destroy the entire Corps in 1994. Since he was infected with Parallax for most of the arc, Ion had to go to another lantern.
The Ion entity was given to Green Lantern Sodam Yat, and Kyle became a normal Lantern with a normal ring once again. This new, and frankly unfortunate, status quo continued until the New 52 revitalization of the DC universe in 2011. Kyle was given his own comic run called ‘New Guardians’. The premise of this comic was that Kyle had been ‘chosen’ by rings from the six other corps. The further hook of the series is that one member from each of these corps go with him to solve the mystery of why this happened, thus creating an interesting multichrome team.
This storyline continued until a soft reset after issue #12. The direction of this run then changed drastically. The focus became the story of how Kyle would master all the colors of the emotional spectrum. This culminated in issue #16 with him becoming the White Lantern. This version of Kyle is even more powerful than his time as Ion, being able to control the power of life itself and all the spectrum emotions. I personally think that this era of Kyle’s story is the most interesting and evocative. While it is true that the quality of this White Lantern Saga was varied, I can say with absolute conviction that it is what really got me truly into Kyle and his character.
This status quo with Kyle as the White Lantern continued until the end of the New Guardians in May 2015. Then after a few appearances in various arcs of Green Lantern and Titans he totally disappeared and lost his White Lantern powers. This absence from the comics continued until recently in the Jeremy Adams run of Green Lantern which started in 2023.
In the modern continuity Kyle is primarily a Green Lantern, but has this uncertainly defined emotional PTSD from his time as the White Lantern. His mastery of the entire emotional spectrum becomes an issue when the nature and balance of the spectrum is thrown out of balance. He can utilize his White Lantern powers for limited time, but they need to recharge every time he uses them. This powerup is rarely used and ultimately not a critical part of his character beyond the big cinematic moments where he uses it. Despite this, Kyle is pretty much back to being a normal Green Lantern with this special power.
Regarding the issues coming out at time of writing, Hal is gone on some secret mission and Kyle has become the protector of Earth as a Green Lantern. From here we do not know what Jeremy Adams will do with Kyle, but one can imagine that he is just keeping Earth warm until Hal returns and then will hopefully go on his own interesting journey. (Fingers crossed)
So why is this the case? Why is Kyle so hard to write and why has he gone through so much change as compared to his more static comrades? Primarily because Kyle as a character only truly works to his full potential in solo or small group adventures. This is because his introduction was as a replacement for Hal Jordan; and once Hal came back this role no longer really worked. In addition, all the things that actively differentiated him in powers during his ‘Torchbearer’ era were stripped away by the end of 2007.
Lanterns like Guy and John have specific narrative traits and uses which allow for them to have their own unique stories. Examples like Guy’s appearance in ‘The Dark Side of Green’ examine his role as the Green Lantern’s hatchet man and his internal morality. The same is true with John’s appearances in the aftermath of Xanshi’s destruction. These type of moments appear often for John and rattle his self-confidence.
Kyle’s major traits are that he is an artist, melancholy, has lots of superheroine girlfriends, and is generally more plugged in with pop culture than other Lanterns. These are consistent parts of his character and certainly make him entertaining, but do not constitute a truly unique narrative role (other than making him a ripe subject for intense tragedy, but that card can only be played so many times). Even his second time as Ion and the Torchbearer is not significant enough to truly differentiate him within the universe since his power level is not as planet shattering with thousands of other Lanterns running around. Additionally, he does not really have many outings during this era, which complicates examination.
This is to say that his journey to becoming the White Lantern is the best and most significant change to his character since his inception. I feel I must again tip my hand a bit and say that I find ‘New Guardians’ is one of the most interesting and engaging of the New 52 runs. This is because the run is genuinely additive towards Kyle’s character in an enduring way. Tapping him to be the multichrome man is a direction that differentiates him from his peers enough to rekindle the flame of independence within the universe that he needs to truly come into himself. This facet of his character has largely remained a part of his nature ever since, which indicates to me that it has significant staying power as compared to things like him being the Torchbearer within the revitalized Corps.
An additional problem is that when Kyle was the lone Lantern in the universe his depth and thematic relevance was more impactful given the absence of the Corps, and specifically Hal. When put back with a full Corps his characterization and relevance looks lesser by comparison which can his appearances feel less enjoyable. One of these critical emotional journeys has been overcoming his fear of not living up to Hal. This journey culminated in Kyle leading the funeral for Hal after he died.
Despite Kyle becoming his own independent Lantern, the shadow of Hal Jordan would cover his entire run prior to Rebirth. After Hal returned it seems to me that writers did not truly want Kyle to outshine Hal and thus relegated him to being a second string Lantern. Giving Kyle his due power and stories where he can flex it would complicate the overall narrative goal that Rebirth was trying to achieve; this being the return of Hal Jordan.
Rebirth has a lot of narrative and thematic similarities to the post ‘Crisis on Infinite Earth’s’ Green Lantern Corps series. At that time the focus shifted from purely the Earthbound Lanterns to a far more cosmic space operaesque style. The run followed a larger group of Lanterns, primarily aliens, who solved as many galactic issues as terrestrial. Rebirth has this same style (even with many of the same Lanterns) and focus on the Corps as a whole rather than only singular Earth stories. This is another element of Rebirth that is stacked against Kyle, since as stated before he does not really play well in groups narratively.
When writing a character with such immense power, one needs to either make him a blundering moron or create equally intense and powerful threats. If this powerful character is alongside less powerful ones, this complicates the necessary power dynamic calculus to the point of near infeasibility unless specific narrative actions are taken to weaken the powerful character. Since Kyle has no kryptonite this second option becomes harder and thus it is far easier to simply write solo stories.
Funnily enough, the end of New Guardians created a cheeky solution to this problem by creating a literal equal and opposite evil Kyle named Oblivion for him to fight. This somewhat necessitated Kyle to have a small group surrounding him, so that he could eventually defeat his dark counterpart.
While I largely dislike the modern take of Kyle as this strange mystic of the emotional spectrum, I am just glad he is back. Jeremy Adams seems to primarily want to put Kyle back in his post-Ion status quo with a sprinkle of White Lantern here and there. I think that this is a reasonable choice under the assumption that Adams does not want to specifically focus on Kyle rather than other Lanterns and developing his character any further. Keeping him in this limbo+ state does not truly degrade him, but nor does it improve him.
My solution for the problem of Kyle is, I think, rather interesting and effective while still preserving the existing lore to a good degree. To start he needs his own run once again. (Clearly since he can not really have a solo run within the larger Green Lantern run) I will first go over some important context from previous Kyle stories and then explain where I think he should go.
In the 2013 ‘Wrath of the First Lantern’ mini-event, there is a ‘post-credits sequence’ where the end of life stories of major characters are revealed. Kyle’s is particularly interesting since he becomes space Jesus until he dies, healing the blind, magical benevolence, and hair.
During the Lights Out Event (later in 2013), Kyle supposedly sacrifices himself to defeat the villain Relic. The major plot of this arc was that we learn that Lanterns are draining the finite emotional reserves of the universe by using their colorful rings. Kyle’s sacrifice refills these reserves and he manages to somehow return from beyond the Source Wall which is the giant wall at the edge of the universe. When he is spat out again, he comments that he had some level of sentience while beyond the Wall.
I think that an interesting run for Kyle would be going back beyond the Source Wall to once again find the Life Equation and grow to become Space Jesus as seen in Wrath of the First Lantern. Rather than fighting tons of space enemies Kyle’s journey would revolve around his fear and anxiety about the immense power that he has to reshape the universe. Seeing him reckon with his mistakes and the gravity of imperfection would also play into him eventually creating new life on barren worlds across the universe. The pertinent subtext is that he would recreate life destroyed by his own failures and the violence inflicted on the universe by all the wars of light.
Thereby Kyle’s actions exist as a type of counterpoint to the ‘Dark Knight Returns’ faux grit that has been the prevailing nature of most comics since 1986. Green Lantern has always been an inherently optimistic and hopeful comic, and returning to that thesis with Kyle as an unapologetic force for life and good would be deeply resonant thematically. Given the calm and introspective nature of this idea Kyle would likely need to be alone with cameos being the primary narrative mechanism through which other characters are able to interact with him.
Kyle being alone and above the issues of the Corps would also solve the Hal Jordan problem since Kyle would be the first being in the universe to do these things, and he would only have to live up to his own internal ideal self image; which would be a major emotional core.
That is as much as I can really go into it without veering into heinous levels of fanfiction, but I nonetheless think it is the direction that Kyle should go. Despite Jeremy Adams revamping the emotional spectrum saga I do think that the overall trend should be to wind down from that focus and back towards a status quo more akin to the Grant Morrison’s Green Lantern focused Green Lantern. Kyle does not fit into either the current status quo or the future ones, so now is the perfect moment to remove Kyle from his limbo and actually make use of his character productively.
Despite my personal conviction regarding this matter I do admit that this outcome is unlikely since in the past all the Earth Lanterns tend to come back together despite their own interesting detours adding considerable depth to their characters. Notably Guy is no longer a Red Lantern, Jessica is no longer Yellow, and most unfortunate of all Kyle is Green once again.
Right now Kyle is a the empty-handed Torchbearer since his narrative role is clear and he should be the one leading the path forwards, but in modern continuity he has become a shadow of his former self with only marginal importance to the bigger story of the galaxy. The cause being ambivalence only makes it worse; but there is a way out, a way for Kyle Rayner to reclaim his torch.
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