What Are the Manhunters in Lanterns? Their Powers and DC Lore Explained

⚠️ Spoilers for Episode 2 of Lanterns. Comics background is marked as a

separate continuity throughout.

Episode 2 of *Lanterns* hands John Stewart some bad news. An alien called Antaan tells him a Manhunter destroyed his people's world, was taken into Green Lantern custody, and was never punished for it. Antaan believes that Manhunter is in Rushville, Nebraska, right now, living as a human being.

If you don't read comics, that name means nothing. Here's what it means.

What are the Manhunters in DC Comics?

The Manhunters are robots the Guardians of the Universe built to police the galaxy, long before the Green Lantern Corps existed.

They were an early attempt at policing the universe. The Green Lantern Corps is what replaced them after that attempt went badly wrong. That's why a Manhunter turning up in a small town matters more than another alien threat would. They aren't outsiders. They're the Guardians' own mistake, still walking around.

Who created the Manhunters, and why?

[COMICS] The Guardians are among the oldest beings in the universe, and they've spent most of their existence trying to impose order on it.

Their reasoning was simple enough. Police make bad decisions because they feel things. They show favouritism, they lose their temper, they let people off. So build police that feel nothing at all, give them a code, and let them apply it the same way every time.

Their code was five words: "No Man Escapes the Manhunters."

It worked for a very long time. Then it stopped, and how it stopped is the whole story.

What powers do the Manhunters have?

It depends which comics you're reading, but the recurring abilities are consistent enough to summarise.

• Robotic bodies. Stronger and more durable than a person, and they don't tire, hesitate or feel fear.
• Energy weapons. Different versions use energy guns or built-in weapons. Dangerous, but nowhere near as versatile as a Green Lantern ring.
• Infiltration. The important one. Manhunter operations have repeatedly hidden agents among ordinary people. Some were androids, others were humans working for them.

[TRAILER] Lanterns goes further and gives its Manhunters actual shape-shifting. That's the show's own addition rather than a standard comics ability, and it's the most significant thing it has told us about them so far.

Why did the Guardians shut down the Manhunters?

[COMICS] The Manhunters reasoned that crime comes from emotion, emotion comes from living things, and so order means removing living things.

They went to Sector 666 and killed almost everything in it. Five beings survived.

Why they reached that conclusion is told differently in different comics. The older version is a straightforward malfunction. Later stories blame a rogue Guardian called Krona, who reprogrammed them deliberately to prove that police without feelings are dangerous. Both accounts are still in circulation.

Either way, the Guardians shut them down and started again.

How are the Manhunters different from the Green Lantern Corps?

Having built an army of identical machines and watched it commit genocide, the Guardians replaced them with individual people. The Corps runs on willpower, and its rings generally choose bearers capable of overcoming great fear.

DC never spells the comparison out, but it's hard to miss. A ring generally chooses an individual bearer instead of a factory turning out identical units. Power sits with thousands of separate minds rather than one machine intelligence copied across a fleet. And the entry test is whether you can overcome fear, not whether you feel it, because the last force that felt nothing wiped out a sector without pausing.

The Corps is a confession in institutional form.

How the Manhunters connect to Atrocitus and Hal Jordan

[COMICS] One of the five Sector 666 survivors was called Atros. He was made to watch his wife and children die. He renamed himself Atrocitus and went on to found the Red Lantern Corps, powered by rage.

He also killed Abin Sur.

In Green Lantern: Secret Origin, Abin Sur is transporting Atrocitus to Earth. Atrocitus breaks free, mortally wounds him, and leaves him aboard the ship as it goes down. That crash is how Hal Jordan gets the ring.

So the chain runs: the Guardians build the Manhunters, the Manhunters destroy Sector 666, a survivor kills a Green Lantern, and a test pilot finds a dying alien in a crater.

Ep 1 Lanterns has moved Abin Sur's crash to Rushville, and Hal says outright that he never believed it was an accident. The show hasn't joined those dots. It's worth knowing they're there.

Can a Manhunter look human?

Yes, and there's precedent for it.

[COMICS] Millennium, a 1988 crossover, revealed that Manhunters had been hiding among people on Earth for centuries. Some were androids. Others were human agents, willing or controlled. Characters readers had trusted for years turned out to be working for them.

So the show's setup, one hidden Manhunter and no way to tell, isn't invented for television. The comics have run that idea before.

Manhunters vs Martian Manhunter: what is the difference?

"Manhunter" is one of the most overloaded names in DC, and searching it will bury you.

The Martian Manhunter is not one of these. J'onn J'onzz carried that title in the 1950s, decades before anyone linked the two, and the connection was added later. Mark Shaw is a human who took their colours. Only the robots are relevant here.

What Lanterns has established about the Manhunters

Not much, and that's worth saying plainly.

Antaan's claim about a Manhunter in Rushville comes from a character rather than from anything we've been shown, and he has every reason to sound certain. The show has said nothing about Sector 666, Atrocitus or Krona.

What it has done is take a name with a great deal behind it and use almost none of that weight so far. Whether it reaches for the massacre and the Guardians' part in it, or keeps the Manhunters as a small-town mystery with a science fiction answer, is a question for the rest of the season.

We're tracking every open question in the series on the Lanterns Mystery Board, updated after each episode.