I have a love-hate relationship with genre. I love horror, but I find reading anything after Lovecraft tedious, unsurprising, mirthless, and generally not very horrific.

I love fantasy, but as a kid I got burned out on the culture, and now I loathe to pick up any book with hulking sword-brutes and large-chested elfin princesses on the cover.

I love science writing of all kinds, but most science fiction softer than Gibson is masturbatory hyper-Kurzweil-ism—which can be pretty scary stuff, full of utopias I would not want to live in.

I love comics, but they’re the most hit-and-miss medium I’ve ever explored; so unless a friend puts a comic in my hand, I sure ain’t buyin it. Overall,  I’m sure there’s good stuff out there. I just don’t have time to sift around and find it.

That said, my heart has a special place for werewolves, undead sorcerers, cyborg-cities, and of course for spandex-clad bad-asses with unconscionably bizarre powers. So, though I know little about Green Lantern—though I have in fact never bought a Green Lantern comic in my life—I was delighted when my friend Eric sent me a link to this Wikipedia page outlining the many different color-based Lantern Corps, the synesthetic-Freudian heroes and villains of the comic-cosmos.

For those who know even less than me about this phenomenon: In the universe of DC Comics, there are various, variously colored “power rings,” each fueled by a different affect, each giving its wearer the ability to fly and do pretty much anything else she can think of, provided the ring is sufficiently charged with the appropriate emotion.

The good guys and bad guys have naturally organized themselves into ring-mafias, the primary iteration of which, the Green Lantern Corps, functions as cosmic police (and is sometimes cosmic corrupt, and presumably has a good cosmic retirement package).

Here’s the ring-roster:

• Green – powered by will, originally susceptible to wooden objects. (!!! I know, Gentle Reader, I know: An ultimate weapon, powered by will = scary shades of the Reich. But apparently, these are the good guys. The green rings seek out strong-willed moralists, somehow. Personally, sounds like a recipe for disaster, letting a metal bauble invest a particular human with nigh-infinite power…) [Also, secret weakness = wood? Really?]
• Yellow – powered by fear.
• Orange – powered by avarice. (This corps is run by someone named “Larfleeze,” who looks like a flaming horse-skull guy. Highly awesome. I would work for that dude.)
• Red – powered by hate.
• Blue – powered by hope. (But these only work in conjunction with green rings, as hope requires will to affect change… at least, according to the Philosophy Department at DC.)
• Indigo – powered by compassion.
• Violet – powered by love.
• Black – powered by death.
• White – powered by ???. (The white ring is the most mysterious and may be the most powerful. In comics, as part of the constant recolonizing of the minds of our youth, black tends to be bad and white good. Here, interestingly, it seems the cool colors = good and the warm colors = bad, with white and black thrown purely in for chromatic balance.)

Given my longstanding interest in how different literatures use different colors, particularly red and blue, I now feel an obligation to read about the exploits of these Corps. Blue to me is not “hopeful,” per se, though red could certainly be “furious.” Orange as avarice strikes me as random, but there is something fearful about yellow. I’m intrigued.

That said, I can’t help but think of other possibilities for these emo heroes, who must crap forth certain affect in order to fly through the dark void, doing battle and looking muscular (except as imitated below). I imagine rings powered by minor affects (confusion over which line at Whole Foods is shortest; fear that a speck in your tea is a dead bug and not just a loose particle of tea; love-hate, the feeling of the frenemy; &c.). Rings powered by dream affects (lust for objects; total reversal of normal affects; lack of fear; fear of self). Rings powered by winks, by kisses, by jokes…

The possibilities are staggering, as are the color combinations. (The red-orange ring with the gray band, for instance, is powered by haughtiness tinged with lack of surprise.)