The Spectrum of Light in Absolute Green Lantern Explained

Three things set it apart from the main DC universe:

• Two layers. Readers first meet four colors, which turn out to be only the outer spectrum. Four more make up an inner spectrum.
• Different colors. Some of the colors are not the ones you know from the mainstream universe, and each has its own name: Qard, Rao, Sur, Aur, Qwrd, Nos, Vohc and Zur.
• No Lantern Corps. Each color has Abin (guardians and controllers), Ain (initiates) and Tomars (anomalies who reached a color by unconventional means).

That also means the mainstream "Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum" label doesn't fit here. The in-universe name is the Spectrum of Light.

The outer spectrum is the original four-color set, running from chaotic action to total understanding. Each color carries an Oan principle, the idea it stands for, plus a different set of abilities depending on whether you are an Ain, an Abin or a Tomar.

Read top to bottom, the list is a ladder: chaos, then restraint, then correct action, then understanding. Sur is the color the Green Lantern runs on, and it is the one most readers will recognize.

The Oans take gold to be total understanding. The Blackstars see it differently, as a retreat from the physical universe.

Gold is tied to understanding, like Zur, but the Yellow Aliens call it the signifier, not the signified. One way to read that is to treat gold as facts. Sinestro, working with gold, was able to directly impart "knowledge" into others, such as "you are hurt" or "I am more powerful than you." That knowledge was not necessarily true, but mastering gold let him put the ideas straight into people. Yellow, by contrast, would be searching for the truth regardless of what you are told.

Per the chart, gold Ains understand the outer spectrum, while Abins can understand the inner spectrum. That may make gold the best color for piercing the boundary between the two.

The Oans call green the color of Correct Action. It is also the main color in Absolute Martian Manhunter.

Green may be closer to righteousness, since it depends heavily on each person's idea of right and wrong. That would explain why Jo, Jessica and Abin Sur all use it for different purposes. So far it seems able to do more than the other colors, and the chart puts no stated limit on what its Tomars can do.

Red is the color of restraint. That means total bodily control, and also the power to restrain others, as Tomar Re discovered. Sinestro claims it is a very limited color, with only so much you can do at the red level, and nothing we have seen has really contradicted him yet.

Qard and Qwrd together spell Qward, the center of the anti-matter universe in the mainline continuity and a play on "backward."

The Oans say black is chaotic action of one's self, or pure will. The Blackstars claim it is the truest understanding of their universe. Users tend toward selfishness, acting on their own desires, and Abins have more control over the "black hand" that every user can manifest.

Their Tomars are said to have complete cellular transmutation instead of the Abins' regeneration. That may show that black Tomars adapt to the will of others instead of manifesting their own.

The inner spectrum is the hidden half, and each of its colors has an entity behind it. These are different from the entities in the mainstream universe.

Mind the spelling. Qard (black, outer) and Qwrd (monochrome, inner) are two different colors with names one letter apart.

Nos is tied to love, and it goes beyond the binary thinking of Qwrd. It is protective and healing, and it is described as reciprocal: you do unto others as you are done to.

So far we have only seen Tomars of this color, Aurakles and Hal. It has been called a feel-good story and the first hero story, and Hal describes it as chaotic action for the sake of others. Hal reaching an inner color shows these colors are not simply closed off to people.

Still, a few details point to a darker side. "Loving Authority" comes from Golden Age Wonder Woman, where those in charge act out of love for the people in their care. The tagline in Absolute Green Lantern #20 is reportedly "Love is the Law, Love under Will."

That tagline is borrowed from the occultist Aleister Crowley. In Thelema, the religion he founded, "love is the law, love under will" is one version of its central law. The other version is "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

On the surface, that sounds a lot like the Qard ethos of chaotic action and pure will. The difference is that in Thelema the mundane ego is an obstacle, something you have to sacrifice in order to understand your True Will. Will, in that sense, is not just doing whatever you want.

Love and will as a pair also have a Green Lantern precedent. In Grant Morrison's run on The Green Lantern, love and will combined as one was the only way to operate the Cosmic Grail, the multiversal source of the emotional spectrum.

Vohc is the color of the Anti-Love. The Yellow Aliens give it that name in AGL #19, set in brackets in the lettering, while Baron Blitzkrieg says it without them. It is often described as the color of cold metal, and it "doesn't get it," with "it" probably meaning life.

Control is the thread running through Vohc. It shows up repeatedly: checking in on the other colors and how they operate; assigning universal control, and controllers, to the universe; working through "Control," who becomes Uncle Sam; and being described as controlling by the Yellow Aliens.

That is enough to say that controlling others is a major part of what cyan is. The Manhunter creed fits the picture: it casts the Manhunters as a face of steel, with a cold gaze that tempers the will of their enemies, presented as justice revealed and promising that no man escapes them.

One reading is that Vohc puts the self over others, "logically," which would make it the mirror image of how Hal uses magenta. Justice in the Absolute Universe has so far been tied to Darkseid and his way of doing things, so Vohc may also be the most direct enforcer of his will within the spectrum. The Yellow Aliens put the contrast this way: if OA is collective, then Manhunter-Mind is not.

It is also interesting that Vohc and Rao are both names of Kryptonian deities on Earth-0. There, Rao is the red sun god, and Vohc is one of his children, a builder who later turned heretic as Vohc the Breaker.

Zur is the inner yellow, which Thaal describes as the "brighter gold." The Yellow Aliens are trying to explain things to Control, and the color is labeled higher knowledge, so Zur looks like understanding. It is not empathy, but gaining more knowledge.

Because yellow is what gold signifies, the distinction may be that gold is the knowledge obtained, while yellow is the seeking of it.

The Yellow Aliens also keep repeating "It's a piece of [@&%#]..." when they explain their color. That might suggest they understand the Absolute Universe has been corrupted by Darkseid.

We don't yet know what the split between the inner and outer spectrum means. It is not simply a question of who can wield which color, since Hal reached Nos. What the Yellow Aliens do say in AGL #19 is that green is an outside color, and a bit too complex to start off with.

Darkseid is at the center of things in the Absolute Universe. Even so, in AGL #17, OA tells Thaal that Mu, the black circle and the hole in things around which everything revolves, is explicitly not part of it. OA is the ring of light.

The Yellow Aliens lift several quotes from the metaphor scene in Absolute Martian Manhunter #7, specifically the magenta, cyan and yellow ones, so that issue is worth reading alongside AGL. It has also been mentioned that the Absolute Universe writers frequently talk through the cosmic forces so their books line up, which makes the overlap look deliberate.

Instead of a corps per color, each level has three ways to hold its light:

• Ain are the initiates, the people just entering a color.
• Abin are the guardians and controllers of that color.
• Tomars are anomalies who reached a level through unconventional means.

The chart suggests these tiers stack. Black shows it most clearly: an Ain gets uncontrolled, chaotic partial transformation, an Abin gets the same power under control, and a Tomar reaches "Obsidian," total cellular transmutation. Red and green follow the same pattern, with the Tomar listed as getting everything below them plus more.

Gold and yellow sit at the top of the two layers, and Absolute Green Lantern #19 is where the series explains how they differ. The Yellow Aliens lay it out as a strict hierarchy of sign and meaning:

• Gold is material. It is a purely physical substance, the signifier.
• Yellow is immaterial. It is a conceptual force, the signified.

The two are linked, but they are not equally reachable. Gold can have immediate effects on green light. Yellow is extremely hard to access, even for someone as devoted as Paul Kirk.

Read alongside the charts, this makes yellow the pure idea behind the highest outer tier, with no physical form of its own. It fits with Zur, the yellow of the inner spectrum, being labeled higher knowledge rather than given a list of abilities.

The series has promised to trace how the split between material and immaterial really works. The stakes, as one outlet frames them: if a villain learns to separate the signifier from the signified, the basic rules of the Absolute Universe could come apart.

Several gaps on the chart are still open. Sur's Tomar abilities are left as an unfinished "all of the above plus...", Aur's Tomar abilities are listed as unknown, and Qwrd has no named entity behind it, unlike Nos, Vohc and Zur.