The color yellow is Green Lantern’s primary weakness, but he was able to use it to save the Justice League. In 1960’s Brave and the Bold #30, the Justice League confronts the android Amazo for the first time. Amazo steals the team’s powers, including Green Lantern’s and when he tries to use his ill-gotten powers it backfires on him spectacularly–all thanks to Green Lantern’s weakness to the color yellow.
A Green Lantern ring is one of the most powerful objects in the DC Universe. It can create hard light constructs of anything its user can imagine and allows them to fly through the vacuum of space; it can translate nearly any language as well–in short, its power is only limited by its users' willpower. In the Emotional Spectrum, from which all Lantern Corps derive their powers, green represents willpower and its opposite is the yellow light of fear–wielded ruthlessly by Sinestro. Fear and willpower are opposing sides, and thus Green Lanterns can be susceptible to the color yellow. As mentioned earlier, Sinestro was one of the first to weaponize this weakness, waging a campaign of terror against the Green Lantern Corps and the DC Universe as a whole. Yet, Green Lantern Hal Jordan was able to weaponize the ring’s weakness to yellow in a truly mind-bending fashion.
Green Lantern Turned a Weakness Into a Win
In the story “The Case of the Stolen Super-Powers,” written by Gardner Fox and illustrated by Mike Sekowsky, the Justice League encounters a foe unlike any they have faced before: Amazo, an android capable of stealing their powers. Amazo takes the League down, one member at a time, stealing their powers and carrying them off to Professor Ivo’s headquarters; Ivo keeps the Justice League captive in tubes filled with chlorine gas. Ready to unleash the last stage of his plot, Ivo releases the League members, but the smell of the chlorine gas irritates him, so he orders Amazo to blow it away. Next, Amazo, under Ivo’s orders, uses Green Lantern’s stolen powers to wipe their memories. Confident in his win, Ivo celebrates–but is suddenly interrupted by Green Lantern, seemingly unaffected by the mind wipe. Green Lantern reveals that when Amazo blew the chlorine gas, he breathed in as much as possible. Chlorine has a yellowish color, and when Amazo used the stolen Lantern ring, Hal breathed the chlorine out; the yellowish gas helps neutralize the effects of the stolen ring.
The color yellow has proven to be a debilitating weakness for Green Lantern–but here he weaponizes it, using it to save himself and his teammates from a hellish fate. When Ivo created Amazo, he gave the android the ability to steal the Justice League’s powers, but in his hubris neglected to realize Amazo would inherit their weaknesses as well. He also failed to account for Green Lantern’s quick thinking; Hal knew all too well what the color yellow could do to a Green Lantern, and was able to use this glaring weakness to score a huge victory.
Over the years, the nature of the Green Lanterns' weakness to yellow has changed. When The Brave and the Bold #30 hit stands in 1960, it was described as an “impurity” that had been introduced by the Guardians in the distant past, but is now understood as the color of fear. Regardless of its origin, it has defeated many a Green Lantern over the years, but Hal Jordan was able to use it to save his comrades in the Justice League.