Guardians of the Universe

<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The Guardians of the Universe are a fictional group of little blue aliens that is part of the back story of the comic book superhero Green Lantern. Green Lantern is owned by DC Comics. They first appeared in Green Lantern #1 (1960). According to an article by Leah Finkelshteyn, entitled "Thwak! To Our Enemies", published in Hadassah Magazine, June/July 2003 Vol. 84 No. 10, artist Gil Kane based the look of the "large-headed, balding Guardians of the Universe in DC's Green Lantern on David Ben-Gurion".

The Guardians of the Universe are an ancient race evolved from the blue skinned people of the planet Maltus, said to be the first sentient beings in the universe. They are immortal, ten billion years old, and have striven to provide the sentients of this universe a measure of security and order for about five billion of those years.

The Guardians see fear as the source of evil and chaos, and so have purposely distanced themselves from emotions in their task. They relocated to the planet Oa, located in the center of the universe. There they created the emotionless robots the Manhunters to patrol the universe and serve as their law enforcement agents. They soon found that, without emotion, the Manhunters could not exhibit mercy, understanding or loyalty, and were ultimately a failure.

Their next attempt was the Green Lantern Corps. The Green Lanterns were sentient beings recruited from different worlds, each with the potential to overcome fear. They divided the universe into 3600 sectors, and assigned each Green Lantern the patrol of a sector. They were armed with power batteries and the power ring weapons that worked through willpower, and were powered with the green energy that came from the Guardians themselves, and stored in a giant central Power Battery on Oa. The green energy is the embodiment of willpower, which the Guardians see as the opposite of fear.

Legend has it that the Guardians once considered Kal-El of Krypton as a possible Green Lantern, but bowed to his greater destiny.

This was successful, and the Green Lantern Corps has been active for about three billion years. During that time, the Guardian managed to capture the Parallax entity, an ancient energy creature who is the embodiment of fear that all sentient beings share. Thinking of no other way to hold it, they imprisoned it in the Power Battery, since the green power seemed to be able to hold it. The knowledge of Parallax and what he represented was buried with him, and became known as the "yellow impurity" in the Green Lantern's power, making it very difficult for Green Lanterns to affect anything yellow. When Parallax escaped from the battery, with the help of the renegade Green Lantern Sinestro, it infected Green Lantern Hal Jordan of Earth. This led to him going on a killing spree, murdering almost all of the Guardians and many of the Green Lantern Corps members as well. For a while an Earthling, Kyle Rayner, was the only Green Lantern left in the universe, and the Green Lantern Corps was no more. Eventually, possessed with the being Ion, a manifestation of the Guardian’s will-power, Kyle was able to restore the Guardians, who have since brought back the Green Lantern Corps twice as powerful as before. Now there are two Green Lanterns assigned to each space sector instead of just one.

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