Black Lantern Corps - Powers and Abilities

Powers and Abilities

The Black Lanterns are corpses reanimated by black power rings, which are fueled by the power of death. Corpses reanimated by black power rings are reconstructed if damaged, keeping the body in working order at all times. Black power rings are capable of regenerating typically fatal injuries inflicted upon their users (including decapitation and complete dissolution). The rings generate black tendrils to "root" themselves into the corpses, making it impossible to remove them by physical force.

The first black power rings possess no charge, but each time a Black Lantern kills someone and removes their heart, .01 percent power is restored to every ring in the Corps. In Blackest Night #3, Indigo-1 solidifies this theme by explaining that those who rise feed off emotion. Even at low power levels, black rings enable their user to fly and create black energy constructs. They are also unaffected by magic. In "classic" zombie fashion, the bite of a Black Lantern induces a slow-acting necrosis that eventually turns the victim into a fellow Black Lantern. It's unknown if this power can work on any living being, or only those characters who have been reanimated from death before (such as Superman, Green Arrow, and Donna Troy).

Black Lanterns are able to read the emotions as colored auras that correlate to the emotional spectrum. Multiple emotions read as a multi-colored aura, while unreadable emotions come out as white. Furthermore, demonic and underworld dwellers (such as Etrigan) are read with a black aura, apparently as unreadable as the white one due to their dead nature. A state of profound suspended animation is enough to fool a Black Lantern by making the target of suspended animation invisible to the senses of the Black Lantern. Emotionless hearts such as the Scarecrow's render their bearers equally invisible to the Black Lanterns. When facing beings with warped mental states, or otherwise addled minds (such as Bizarro), the correlation between the emotion detected and the actual color that the Black Lanterns see is inverted. In addition to the abilities granted to them by the rings, Black Lanterns retain any superpowers they may have had in life.