Origin

The Black Lantern Power Battery was created from the corpse of the Anti-Monitor at the end of Sinestro Corps War. The symbol on the Black Lantern Power Ring is the same that was worn by the Green Lantern villain Black Hand, alluding to a possible return of Black Hand to the DCU. Hand did, in fact, return to the DCU as the first recruit of the Black Lantern Corps.

It is shown that when a Black Lantern Ring is presented to the deceased it either has no charge or is fully drained of power by resurrecting its bearer, therefore, the rings constantly demand for flesh and are recharged by killing living beings and removing their hearts. Each heart they remove restores the Ring's power by one percent. Black Lanterns can also read the emotions of the living as a colored aura that correlates with the emotional spectrum. It is also shown that the rings wear the bodies they appear on and they only have memories of the person up to their time of death.

When Barry Allen tried to remove Black Lantern Firestorm's ring, he noticed this and that the ring was like a plant that wore the body. When the rings started going after him and Hal Jordan, they were able to keep up with them until Barry carried them both two seconds into the future and the connection was lost.

Powers & Abilities

As a conduit of power from the black range of the emotional spectrum, the Black Power rings have a number of abilities akin to those of other Lantern Rings.

• Reanimation: Black Power Rings attach to corpses and animate them, whether they are regenerated or simply mobile corpses is unknown.
• Animation: A Black Lantern can will objects to move how he or she wants.
• Artificial Intelligence: The ring acts as an "on-board computer," telling the wearer what they need to know. It can either respond out loud, or silently directly to the wearer's mind. The ring also translates nearly every language to and from the wearer, which is why the Corps can communicate with each other.
• Burglar Alarm: A Black Lantern can coat anything with the rings beam and thus, if anyone other than himself touches it, his ring will glow, alerting him to the possible theft.
• Communicator: The rings can act as a personal communicator between Black Lanterns. They have also been seen connected to telephones.
• Costumes: The wearer of the ring may create any costume they choose, based on their personal preferences, whenever they choose. The ring projects the costume over any clothes already worn at the time.
• Energy Projections: The rings can also project beams, form protective bubbles and force fields, and fire destructive blasts. Sometimes, depending on the wearer, the beams and blasts make sounds.
• Energy Constructs: The rings can construct anything the wearer can imagine from hard-light energy, as long as they are willing to make it. The more determined the wearer is, the more complex and intricate these things can be. The constructs can even be so complex as to form working machines, computers, and even people.
• Flight: The rings allows the wearer to fly in atmosphere or in space, and can achieve incredible speeds, moving from planet to planet in a matter of hours.
• Invisibility: The rings can make the wearer or anything else invisible.
• Matter Manipulation: A Black Lantern can use their ring to manipulate nearby matter, such as water, for various purposes such as a construct that acts like an energy construct but can block something yellow and may serve a purpose that an energy construct couldn't perform.
• Mind Control: The wearer of the Ring can use it to plant post hypnotic commands or control a person.
• Mirages: The rings can create mirages/illusions.
• Phasing: The rings allows the user to go through walls.
• Probing: The rings can probe the Lantern's or another person's mind, allowing him to uncover memories or the person's thoughts.
• Temperature Control: The rings can increase or decrease the temperature of anything, even something as large as stars, or even create bubbles of intense heat or cold, even down to Absolute Zero.
• Transforming: The rings can transform anyone or anything, be it into an animal, altering their state of appearance, or their size.

Unique Powers & Abilities

Each new Lantern Corps Ring has unique abilities. For Black Power Rings, these abilities include:

• Reanimation: Black Lantern Rings descended upon the worlds and claimed the loved ones that have been lost. They will forever hunger for those who still feel. When the Blackest Night began, the Black Lantern Rings found their bearers, and when the Black Lantern Corps is ready...the dead will rise.
• Emotion reading: Black lanterns can read emotions of each individual living being as a colored aura (Red = rage, violet = love etc.). When a Black Ring was worn by Superboy Prime, it scanned his entire body to find what emotion filled him the most.
• Restoration: A Black Lantern Ring can restore the body of its host if the body is destroyed or damaged as long as the ring is in tact.
• Weakness: A peculiar weakness of the Black Lantern rings and their host is that beings who are incapable to feel emotions, or unwilling, will be completely invisible to the Black Lanterns up to and including Nekron himself, Scarecrow, Cyborg Superman, Renee Montoya and Lady Shiva managed this feat. Unnatural beings such as Etrigan were also proven to be invisible. Also, the Black Lanterns will be abandoned by their rings if forced to feel emotions themselves, or come into contact with the energies of Dove, resulting in the Lanterns self-destruction. Finally the powers of the Red Lanterns proved to be one of the few things that could damage a Black Lantern beyond repair.

An odd event occurred when Superboy Prime put on a Black Ring and it scanned his body for all the colors of the Emotional Spectrum, and when he reached to the red of rage, the Black ring turned into a Red Ring of Rage.