Comic Book Questions Answered – where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

My buddy Stephen Gerding (Senior CBR Editor here) asked me this one a while back - can Green Lanterns create food with their Green Lantern rings that they could then eat?

The answer really seems to have been resolved years ago in Green Lantern #69 (one of the last issues before Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams revamped the series), in a story by Green Lantern creators John Broome and Gil Kane, where Hal Jordan was stuck in a stasis field that was causing him tremendous pain. He used his ring to create a highly effective painkiller...

Now, obviously, for the painkiller to work, Hal would have had to absorb the medicine into his body. It is pretty strange to believe that Hal Jordan knows how to create the medicine in a painkiller, but this is one of those areas where we just have to trust that the ring itself is aiding Hal in some way to make sure that he could create something that Hal wouldn't normally know how to make. After all, we've seen Hal (and other Green Lanterns) make all sorts of other elaborate ring constructs over the years, it shouldn't be too hard to imagine that the ring has been helping them out over the years.

Anyhow, if the ring can construct a painkiller that could be absorbed into the body, then it certainly stands to reason that the ring could also create a food item that would nourish the body. Of course, since the ring constructs disappear when the Green Lantern stops concentrating on them, it definitely does open up the question of "If you created a hamburger, ate it and then got the nourishment from it and then you stopped concentrating and it disappeared, what does that mean if you've already received the nutrients from it?"

How can a Green Lantern actually derive nutrients from food created by his/her ring?

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Luckily, the answer seems to have been answered for us decades later during Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis' run on Green Lantern. CBR List Editor Steve Paugh let me know that in Green Lantern #13, Guy Gardner is punished for insubordination by being assigned to "Prime duty." Prime duty, of course, is a 24 a day/7 days a week assignment where a bunch of Green Lanterns guarded Superboy Prime (fat lot of good that did, as he later escaped).

Anyhow, as part of this assignment, Guy was told that the ring will supply nutrients to its ring wielder...

Therefore, if the ring can supply nutrients to the holder of the ring, it only stands to reason that the ring can also transmit nutrients to the ring bearer if the ring holder creates, say, a green pizza and eats it. So the answer to the question is a resounding YES.

Thanks to Stephen Gerding for the question and thanks to Steve Paugh for the head's up about the Green Lantern issue that dealt with the topic head on.

Okay, folks, if anyone else has anything that they'd like to know about comic books, just drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!