Warning! Spoilers for Green Lantern #4 ahead!
The Green Lantern Corps have been going through a lot recently, but it seems like things may be getting even worse for DC’s Emerald Guardians with recent developments hinting that they’re being hunted by none other than the Main Man himself: Lobo. The Green Lanterns are the ultimate symbols of law and order throughout the cosmos, while Lobo is a renegade bounty hunter who likes to play by his own chaotic rules. It’s no wonder that the two forces would naturally butt heads.
This conflict couldn’t come at a worse time for the Lanterns, with their Central Power Battery destroyed and fan-favorite Lanterns all across the universe missing or dead. But the latest issue of Green Lantern by Geoffrey Thorne, Tom Raney, and Marco Santucci confirms that the Lanterns weren’t simply killed by the loss of their powers. The Green Lantern Corps is being hunted, and there’s no better hunter in the DC Universe than Lobo.
Green Lantern #4 finds fan-favorite John Stewart going up against a group of slavers called the Qinoori. When Stewart confronts his pursuers, he questions how they could track his ring, only for the slavers’ computer database to reveal that a bounty has been placed on the heads of the 1,001 surviving Green Lanterns – and 300 bounties have already been closed. With that many bounties on the table, it’s hard to believe that Lobo has nothing to do with that kill count. In “The Book of Guy” backup by Ernie Altbacker and Clayton Henry in Future State: Green Lantern, the Main Man arrives to cause a little chaos for Guy Gardner who’d spent the last few years bringing peace to an alien world. This was played as a comedic reveal, especially because of their past interactions during Guy’s time with Justice League International, but it’s more than possible that Lobo sought out a powerless Gardner in the hopes of collecting on that Lantern bounty. Meanwhile, in Justice League: Last Ride by Chip Zdarsky and Miguel Mendonça, Lobo and the GLC are once again at odds in the near future, as the Lanterns imprison and plan to try Lobo for the murder of the New Gods in order to regain their standing as galactic law enforcement – actions that would have even more of an impact if he were also responsible for more than a few Lantern corpses.
There’s no bounty hunter in the DC Universe more prevalent than Lobo, so the odds that he’s had something to do with these Lantern deaths seem pretty high. He’s tangled with the Lanterns, including Guy Gardner and even Hal Jordan, on more than one occasion, so he has no qualms with accepting bounties on the GLC. With powers rivaling Superman, Lobo is one of the few being powerful enough to go up against multiple Green Lanterns and live to tell the tale.
But even if the baddest "bastich" in the universe has been hunting the Lanterns, that doesn’t mean he’s the mastermind behind their ongoing troubles. While Lobo is a cold and calculating killer whose brash and crude personality hide just how cunning he can be, all-out war against the Green Lantern Corps isn’t his style. And there’s no way he would put up an open bounty on so many Lanterns when he could simply kill them himself.
Regardless of who’s been targeting the Green Lanterns, it’s hard not to expect Lobo hasn’t collected one or twelve of the bounties. The Main Man is a near-unstoppable killer, and with his recent interactions with the Green Lantern Corps, DC’s favorite space cops are certainly on his radar. But if the remaining Green Lanterns are smart, they’ll stay of Lobo’s crosshairs.