The idea of a magical object that you can use to wish things into existence goes back all the way to the tales of Aladdin and the genie in One Thousand and One Nights. So it should come as no surprise that it was those very tales that inspired the introduction of the Green Lantern ring in the early 1940s. At the time, the ring was very much a magical item, akin to the magic lamp of Aladdin, which is why Green Lantern's secret identity was originally Alan Ladd -- it is disputed why they changed the name. Some say it was because of the actor of the same name, while others say it was just decided that the name was too spot on, so Alan Scott was chosen instead.

When Green Lantern was rebooted in the late 1950s, the magical aspect was dropped but the ring itself remained. Now it was more of a scientific object, the weapon used by the members of the famed Green Lantern Corps to patrol the galaxy. It remains one of the most powerful weapons in the DC Universe, powered by the will of its user, able to do many amazing things. However, as well as amazing things, the ring can also do some rather disturbing and gross things, as well. Here, we will take a look at some of the more unsavory (and sometimes outlandish) aspects of the Green Lantern power ring.

20 KEEPS DEAD PEOPLE ALIVE

Following Crisis on Infinite Earths, Sinestro teamed up with a Sentient Space Sector to travel the universe killing whoever was foolish enough to get in their way. One of the people who tried to stop them was Driq of the planet Criq. Driq then paid for his bravery with his life as he was killed be Sinestro and the Sentient Sector 3600. Then a weird thing happened -- Driq's ring would not let it die! It determined that Sinestro's threat was so great that it could not afford to allow Driq to die until Sinestro was stopped.

The ring literally would not allow a person to die in peace for the sake of the Green Lantern Corps.

Over the course of the storyline, Driq began to decompose, but his ring kept him alive throughout it all. When his body was actively destroyed, the ring would just reform him. Can you even imagine how disturbing that is? The ring literally would not allow a person to die in peace for the sake of the Green Lantern Corps. Finally, when Sinestro was defeated, and the Green Lantern Corps broke apart, Driq was allowed a "final" death (quotes because he was later revived with other dead Lanterns during Blackest Night. Luckily, his bizarre previous experience allowed him to control his resurrection better than others).

19 CAN FEED YOU

One of the most confusing aspects of Green Lantern history is the idea of whether or not the Green Lantern power ring could give you food that you could gain sustenance from eating it. It is clear that the Green Lantern ring could create food. That's simple. It's no different from creating any other sort of construct like a giant hammer or a giant tweezer or whatever construct that you can think of creating. The issue is that Green Lantern ring constructs then fade once you stop thinking of them.

With that in mind, then, how can you create food that is able to be digested by your body? Do you have to sit there and just concentrate on the food that you just constructed as it gets digested through your body? That's a long time to concentrate on something like that. On the other hand, there have been times when Green Lanterns have been forced into situations where they were suck at posts for days on end and in those instances, the rings clearly were able to supply sustenance, so perhaps it is just a side effect of the ring that does not get discussed that often and is just a given.

18 CAN GIVE YOU DRUGS

Now, if you take the idea that a Green Lantern ring can construct food that you can gain sustenance from, then it opens up all sorts of different avenues. One of the more disturbing has actually been explored decades ago, back during the original Hal Jordan Green Lantern run. In one issue, Hal was in tremendous pain and he used his ring to construct a powerful pain reliever.

Do you need to have a degree in chemistry to make an effective pain reliever with a power ring?

Again, the concepts involved in the creation of food would have to be at play here, only perhaps to even greater degree. In order for the drug to have an effect on a person, the Green Lantern theoretically would have to concentrate on it long enough for it to have the effects of the drug kick in. That, though, brings up the idea of how does the ring bearer know how to make a drug in the first place? Do you need to have a degree in chemistry to make an effective pain reliever? The Green Lantern Corps did briefly break up in the late 1980s, perhaps it was due to all of the coke that they were doing!

17 CAN TAKE CARE OF YOUR WASTE

During Crisis on Infinite Earths, four heroes ended up leaving the universe as the New Earth (post Multiverse) was created, being four of the only people (outside of the Anti-Monitor's pawn, the Psycho-Pirate) to remember the existence of the Multiverse. These four people were Alexander Luthor Jr. from Earth 3 (the world of the villainous Justice League and the heroic Lex Luthor), Superman and Lois Lane of Earth 2 and Superboy from Earth Prime (which was ostensibly "our" Earth, so Superboy thought that all of these characters were fictional comic book characters). Over the years, Luthor and Superboy slowly went mad. During Infinite Crisis, Superboy Prime killed many people in the pursuit of "fixing" this universe.

After Infinite Crisis, the Green Lantern Corps imprisoned Superboy Prime and began to guard him day and night. The Green Lanterns assigned to guard duty could never leave, so this is the point where we discovered that, quite grossly, a person's Green Lantern ring can actually take care of a person's waste for them so that they can stand put for days on end. How the ring does this is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps teleportation? Maybe there is a Space Sector with a whole lot of waste floating around.

16 CAN MAKE YOU DO THINGS IN YOUR SLEEP

Along the same lines of the Driq scenario, it is disturbing to see what level of control the Green Lantern ring can sometimes have over its bearers. In Green Lantern Corps #23, Guy Gardner was asleep when the Honor Guard (the top level members of the Green Lantern Corps) were called to duty. Rather than, you know, waking him up, the ring instead decided to just pull Gardner to duty on its own.

That really makes you wonder how much sentience the rings have.

There is a certain amount of sense to give the rings a sort of "auto-pilot" function when the ring bearer is flying a far distance and wants to get some sleep along the way, but this seems to be taking things a good deal further than that. This was listening to an order, processing it and then responding to that order, all while the ring bearer is asleep. That certainly suggests that the rings can make other decisions for their ring bearers -- what happens when the ring some day conflicts with the decision of its bearer? What then? You would like to believe that the bearer would automatically win that argument, but who knows what kind of autonomy these rings have?

15 DO WE REALLY WANT TO KNOW YOUR EVERY THOUGHT?

An area where ring bearers have a great deal of freedom with their rings is when they are creating ring constructs. They can be as creative as they want with these constructs, but it does make you wonder about the disturbing nature of having a ring that accesses your thoughts and transforms your thoughts into literal physical constructs. This leads down some disturbing paths that you can see present in this sequence, where Kyle Rayner takes Donna Troy out on a picnic and he had lost a contest to her so he had to be her "slave." He instead says that he can use his ring to create a slave instead.

First of all, it sure does make you wonder about Kyle's thought processes that this is the direction he goes in with that prompt. On the other hand, it is disturbing and more than a little gross when you consider the realistic depiction that there is in the construct. If a construct can be that realistic, who is to say that Green Lanterns don't use their constructs to create... companions for them. We've already seen situations where Guy Gardner creates scantily clad female constructs to massage him -- what's stopping him from going one step further?

14 CAN READ MINDS

The power of Green Lantern Corps rings can hit some rather bizarre levels at times; one is when you get into the area of the mind. The Green Lantern rings apparently have the ability to read minds. Telepathy is already a disturbing tool for someone who is trained in the area of mind-reading like Jean Grey or Charles Xavier. When you suddenly are walking into a situation where Guy Gardner can read the minds of everyone in a room, then you're really going into some strange territories.

In a lot of ways, it is the great equalizer among the many races of the universe.

That said, it has some less disturbing angles, though, when you consider the fact that the Green Lantern Corps is made up of aliens from all over the universe, aliens that have all sorts of different ways of talking and even of expressing themselves, so when you have an alien who cannot actually express themselves vocally, it make sense to have them be able to communicate telepathically. In a lot of ways, it is the great equalizer among the many races of the universe. That doesn't make it any less unsettling to know that a Green Lantern can use his/her/its ring to read your mind when you don't want them to.

13 MIND-WIPES, GALORE!

As disturbing of an invasion of privacy it is for a Green Lantern to read your mind without your permission, it pales in comparison to the violation that comes from the vaunted Green Lantern mind-wipe. We saw in the image above for the example of mind-reading, where Abin Sur, as he was laying dying, read Superman's mind and let him know that he couldn't pick him because he wasn't from a planet in that Sector (that was not even a rule that we knew that the Green Lantern Corps had, by the way). Not only that, but he was going to have to wipe his memory of the event.

During the Silver Age, it seemed like mind-wiping was done with a shocking lack of forethought. It was just what you do, whenever you felt like it. There was a storyline where Iris and Carol both figured out the secret identities of their significant others and they both swore that they would not reveal it to anyone else. In fact, they clearly were not planning to do so, but that was not enough for Barry Allen and Hal Jordan and Hal still wiped their memories. Wouldn't you be worried about causing brain damage?

12 THE RING HURTS

Over the years, a number of revelations have been made about the Green Lantern ring from different writers, but few creators revealed quite as many new facets about the ring as Geoff Johns, who brought the Green Lantern Corps back into business in Green Lantern Rebirth. In that story, there is a moment where Green Arrow is forced to use the ring. Do note that over the years a number of civilians have used Green Lanterns ring. There was a whole storyline in the original run of Green Lantern about strangers using the ring. So Oliver Queen is far from the first person to use a Green Lantern ring who was not chosen for the honor.

You have to use up so much willpower that it actively hurts your brain to do so!

However, Oliver was the first person in the comics (because it was a retcon introduced at that point) to reveal that it actually hurts to use a Green Lantern ring. You see, the Green Lantern ring works off of willpower and in order to make it go, you have to use up so much willpower that it actively hurts your brain to do so. Naturally, this is the sort of pain that you can inure yourself to over the years, but every time a Green Lantern uses their ring, it hurts them a little bit.

11 THE RING CAN KILL YOU

Something that you would never really accuse the Guardians of the Universe of being are softies. They are the types of beings who have a goal in mind and don't care how it gets achieved so long as it gets achieved. If they have to blow some heroic people up along the way to achieve their goals, that's fine by them. This came up with the creation of the first Green Lantern rings a billions of years ago, when the Guardians first started up a group of heroes (not even a Corps just yet) to take down the evil Volthoom.

The "First Seven" included one of the earliest Kryptonian explorers, an earnest and brave young woman named Jan-Al. She was one of the First Seven, but she soon saw the drawback of being a pioneer when she learned that the rings that the Guardians had created were highly unstable. The bearers had to figure out how to control their willpower and not be too willful. Alas, that's just what happened to Jan-Al. Her ring overloaded on willpower, bringing it to absurd levels of charging, causing her ring to explode, killing her right at the start of what would become the Green Lantern Corps.

10 WHAT IS THIS GUNK?

It is amazing to think that it has been almost 60 years since the Green Lantern Corps has been introduced and we still don't understand what, precisely, the Green Lantern ring's constructs are made out of. It certainly appears as thought they are some sort of hard light construct, sort of like a solidified hologram, but at the same time, they clearly are more than just solid objects. We have already examined the confusing aspects of whether you can eat objects created by your ring, so now we look into the similar concept...

Can you drink constructs created by the Green Lantern ring?

Normally, we would simply compare it directly in the sense that if you created a ring construct of, say, a hot dog versus a ring construct of a glass of water. However, look at the above panel used for this example. That's a whole spigot filled with water pouring over a group of people. So in this instance, Kyle Rayner is simultaneously imagining all of those drops of "water" to make a consistent deluge of liquid over those people? That seems almost disturbing to think of the concentration needed for that... in theory, as it sure seems like it was easy for Kyle to do. That suggests there is another angle to this, like perhaps rings are just designed to be able to replicate liquid automatically.

9 CAN CREATE DUPLICATES OF PEOPLE!

Editor Julius Schwartz was famous for his usage of editorial footnotes in his comics. The editorial note was not actually a common part of comic books until Schwartz began using them constantly during the 1950s, to the point where other editors soon followed suit (especially Stan Lee over at Marvel Comics in the 1960s) due to them now becoming a common sight during comic books. Schwartz would most famously use his footnotes for interesting pieces of science in the comic (Schwartz was fascinated with science), but he would also use the footnotes to sometimes explain aspects of the comic to the reader. Sometimes, these footnotes could be shocking in their crassness. For example, there was the time that Hal Jordan was being bossed around by Carol Ferris, and the footnote let us know not to worry, she wasn't really his boss, her father was just away for a while and left her in charge.

Similarly, when the writers of the Green Lantern comic book came up with some really outlandish ideas, Schwartz was right there to tamper the idea down a little bit. For instance, in Green Lantern #6, Hal Jordan just flat out makes an exact copy of himself with his ring and Schwartz quickly jumped in to explain, "Well, note that this was only because of this one specific situation." Still, the fact that the ring could ever make an exact double of its user is still amazing... and disturbing.

8 CAN IMPRISON PEOPLE INSIDE IT

An astonishing aspect of the power ring is it seemingly has unlimited storage space within it, sort of like a twisted version of the Tardis from Doctor Who. For instance, when Kilowog's home planet, Bolovax Vik, was destroyed during Crisis on Infinite Earths, he was able to save the 16 billion people who lived on the planet (which made it one of the most overpopulated planets in the universe) by storing them within his ring. He later was able to find another world for them to live on and released them from his ring on to this new world... where they were promptly killed again. He couldn't save them the second time.

Similarly, Abin Sur faced off against a powerful magician by the name of Myrwhydden and Sur's only solution to stop Myrwhydden's powerful magic was to send him into Sur's own power ring, into a new alternate reality that Sur created within the ring. Years later, Myrwhydden grew powerful enough to try to escape from within the ring so Hal had to actually shrink down and travel to another reality within his own power ring to stop the villain! How creepy is that? There's a whole other world within the ring!

7 CAN CREATE BEINGS

Green Lanterns are famous for their willpower, which both leads to them being chosen as Green Lanterns and demonstrates how they power up their rings. However, in the case of the Green Lantern by the name of Flodo Span, he took willpower to a whole other level. You see, Flodo Span was, at his heart, a gaseous being. He was not actually corporeal.

When he was chosen to become a Green Lantern, he used his willpower to literally create a body for himself so that he could wield a Green Lantern ring!

This distinct set-up led to Flodo Span having his own personalized Green Lantern oath, "Once there was but darkness / full and forever / but then came the light / of the Green Lantern / and then myself / to do it justice!" Flodo Span was one of the Green Lanterns who fought against Sinestro and the evil sentient Space Sector. Span was the one who finally defeated the Sector by expanding himself so that he could cover the entire expansive Sector and then use his willpower to shrink the Sector down to a small mass. As you might imagine, expanding oneself that far almost drove Span insane, but he kept it together. Until the Green Lantern Corps later disbanded and he ceased to exist.

6 CAN MESS WITH YOUR BRAIN CHEMISTRY

In a notable issue during Steve Englehart and Joe Staton's Green Lantern Corps run, Guy Gardner felt bored during a New Year's Eve celebration so he used his ring to alter the water supply of the Green Lanterns at their base so that the water would effectively act like an intoxicating liquor. The Green Lanterns all got wasted and this led to Salaak seeing pink elephants, Dumbo-style. The problem (besides the breach of everyone's privacy) is that Salaak then used his ring to turn the pink elephants into reality and they started wreaking havoc on the city. The tipsy Green Lanterns had to try to stop the threat. Guy realized that he needed them sober, so he used his ring to alter all of their brain chemistries so that they would instantly sober up.

The idea that it can alter your brain chemistry is a lot grosser than that.

We know that the ring can read your mind and we know that the ring can literally wipe information from your mind, but the idea that it can alter your brain chemistry is a lot grosser than that, as it suggests that the ring can do things to you that might seem otherwise unnoticeable. For instance, if the ring can instantly make you drunk or sober, who is to say that the ring can't alter your morality? Perhaps it could turn an otherwise good being into a villain with a simple exercise of ring power. That's worrisome.

5 MIGHT BE DESTROYING THE UNIVERSE

In the early 1980s, Marvel Comics released the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. The series served as both a basic history lesson for fans about the major characters within the Marvel Universe as well as an attempt to come up with quasi-scientific explanations for the various superpowers in the Marvel Universe. One of the most common ideas was the notion of explaining how characters were able to produce matter out of thin air, which we know is scientifically impossible. The explanation for all of these things is that the characters tap into another dimension and take the energy and/or mass from that dimension when their powers activate. It's an odd explanation, but sort of a catchall one, as well.

Well, decades later, the DC Universe decided to go with a similar explanation for the various Lantern Corps, revealing that they are actually powered by a finite source from another dimension that they drain a little bit every time that they use their powers. A leftover from a similarly destroyed universe, a being known as Relic tried to stop the Lantern Corps from draining all of the energy and dooming this universe, as well.

4 LETS YOUR DREAMS DO SOME WEIRD THINGS

As we established, the power ring can make you do things while you're asleep that you aren't aware of, which makes it scary to think that the ring might have a mind of its own. However, perhaps even scarier is the notion that the ring might do things while you are asleep based on what you are thinking. Think about it, when you're asleep, you are dreaming and all sorts of weird things are flying through your mind. Now, imagine that while you were dreaming, you had essentially a magical wish ring that could make things you dreamed about come true -- that would be really scary, right?

Hal Jordan was asleep when his ring turned his best friend into a seagull!

That idea of a dream becoming a nightmare came true in Green Lantern #7 when Hal Jordan was asleep when his ring was activated and abruptly turned his best friend, airplane mechanic Thomas Kalmaku, into a seagull! How dangerous is that? You are just minding your own business when your best friend can just turn you into a bird because of some crazy dream that he's having? That is not a good thing at all! At least Tom was able to work through his body horror to help his friend stop some bad guys and get Hal to realize what he has done and fix it (that's perhaps the scariest thing - that Hal didn't even realize what he had done!).

3 MAKES CLOTHES WHERE THERE AREN'T ANY CLOTHES

When Hal Jordan first became a member of the Green Lantern Corps back in the late 1950s, he originally just took the costume that Abin Sur wore off of Sur's dead body and began wearing that. Soon, however, it was clear that the easiest way to have Hal transform into Green Lantern was for him to use his ring to turn his clothes into his Green Lantern uniform. Over the years, that has led to a number of interesting plot points where it is clear that Green Lantern rings can either alter your regular clothes and turn them into different looks (like when Kyle Rayner used his ring to create his distinctive looking "crab face" Green Lantern costume) or it can actually create a costume for you out of seemingly thin air.

That latter set-up can lead to some awkward situations, however, when you use your Green Lantern ring to supply all of your clothes, as what if your ring runs out of power? Normally, you just constantly refresh it before it gets to that point, but early on in the Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps series, Guy Gardner was captured by Sinestro and his ring was completely drained, revealing that Gardner used his ring to make all of his clothes. Thus, without the ring, he was just in his birthday suit!

2 CAN PUT A RING ON A VIRUS!

Over the decades, there have been a number of interesting alien Green Lanterns introduced in various Green Lantern titles. However, things took a whole other leap in the mid-1980s when one of the most inventive minds in all of comic book history, Alan Moore, wrote a few Green Lantern stories and he introduced a number of concepts so outlandish that it took decades for later writers to actually put his concepts onto the printed page. Moore's stories would often just drop these amazing ideas into asides in the middle of his main story.

One of these clever and outlandish ideas the notion of Green Lantern Leezle Pon, a sentient smallpox virus!

Yes, the Green Lantern Corps had as one of its members an actual smallpox virus. That opens up whole new ideas of how the Green Lantern ring can exist, if it is able to power up a smallpox virus, it shows that it can alter its size and shape to absurd degrees to the point where it can arm a virus, with barely any mass at all. It makes you wonder what kind of weird and gross other things that are somehow Green Lanterns.

1 THAT WHOLE FEAR ENTITY THING

As we have noted, the Guardians of the Universe have never been the most forthcoming beings and quite often make their members wonder whether they even really have the best interests of their Green Lanterns at heart, as they keep secrets that you really would hope that they would tell their members about. Part of this, of course, is just the way that comic books work, where writers retcon story ideas into character histories so that "everything that you think you know is a lie" about seemingly every other character in comics. The Guardians are great fodder for something like this, as they've always been extremely autocratic.

Thus, it was not a total shock when it was revealed that there was a giant yellow fear entity known as Parallax that was just living in the Green Lantern Corps Central Power Battery and that it essentially transferred to every Green Lantern ring whenever you powered up from the battery. That is why Green Lantern Corps used to not work against yellow; the effects of the yellow fear entity living in their rings without Green Lanterns even knowing anything about it. That's all kinds of gross and quite messed up, as well.