Mogo the Living Planet

So today is the 18 year anniversary of Badass of the Week.  And, now that the website can now legally drive a car, smoke cigars, vote, drink beer in Europe, register for the draft, and be tried as an adult in criminal court, I'm going to write about some kooky off-the-wall shit that is probably only interesting to me, and I’m going to do it in a way that probably won’t accurately convey how awesome, hilarious, and badass I believe it to be. But I shall endeavor to try, nonetheless. Here we go.

One of the more interesting aspects of TV and Film these days are how the success of the more mainstreamy heroes – The Captain Americas and Bat Men and Men-Bats – have gradually opened up the doors for the weirder, more obscure, and, quite frankly, more fucking acid-trippy shit that appears in the depths of the lore of various comic book creators.  Like, hey, it's cool that the Unwashed Masses didn't immediately check out at the first mention of intergalactic planar gateways to other galaxies!  Let's try TIME TRAVEL!  How about extraplanar travel shit?  Oh, you weren't scared off by Guardians of the Galaxy?  How about we introduce the concept of the Multiverse to mainstream mouth-breathers?  How about fucking Doom Patrol?  DO YOU LIKE THIS, CIRCLE YES OR NO?!

Back when I first started doing Badass of the Week – an endeavor that began exactly 18 years ago today --  I was good friends with a guy named Lucius Diamond, who, among other things, loved to create proto-memes in MS Paint he liked to call "ULTIMATE SUPERHERO BATTLES", and he'd pit beloved heroes against some of the more bonkers-ass shit from the annals of comic book history.   Stuff like "Wolverine vs. Galactus – WHO YA GOT" not only as a fun thought exercise (that particular one got into some of the intricate nuances of Mutant Healing Factor and ended up becoming a weird Jonah and the Whale thing, if you mixed that Bible passage with the Thanos Ant-Man theory), but also as a way of kind of highlighting the absurdity of some of the weirder shit in the lore of even the more mainstream comics publishers like DC and Marvel.  Because, I mean, it turns out that when you give a bunch of mind-altering substances to horny 20 year old artists living in studio apartments and then give them hundreds of dollars to draw whatever the fuck comes into their minds, it turns out you're gonna end up with some pretty weird shit. 

To wit – here's Mogo the Living Planet.  It's a sentient talking Death Star with the powers of telepathy and faster-than-light travel that not only wields a Green Lantern ring but has also rearranged arranged all of the forests on its planetary surface so that they draw the symbol of the Green Lantern Corps as a Tramp Stamp across his torso.  His primary enemy is a flying city of space pirates and his main power is that he shoots a beam of green energy that destroys planets and incinerates his enemies into fiery infernos of cauterized flesh and ionized vapor.

Nowadays it shares its name with a mortgage app., a Detroit bicycle rideshare, and apparently as abbreviations for both "music of Ghanaian origin", and "multi-objective genetic optimization," but Mogo's first appearance was in Green Lantern #188 back in May of 1985, when he was the subject of a short story written by Alan Moore.  The genius decision to craft Mogo came after Moore created Swamp Thing, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta but before he did Watchmen and The Killing Joke, and it's kind of disappointing that even among his legion of fanboys nobody seems to realize that the idea of a planet the size of one of the bigger Moons of Jupiter wielding a Power Ring and getting into hand-to-hand combat with space pirates is almost certainly the most badass thing he's ever dreamt up.  It's kind of fitting that this guy is a self-described Anarchist, because because that's what a lot of his story concepts end up turning into.

The fateful story that brought a literal Planet-Sized Superhero into existence was amazingly titled "Mogo Doesn't Socialize," and it's about an intergalactic bounty hunter named Bolphunga the Unrelenting who travels to the planet of Mogo looking to kill the Green Lantern that lives there.  Balls-fun-guy searches around looking for the Power Ring, can't find it, then double-checks his maps and realizes that the entire equatorial forest band of the planet he's currently standing on is actually just a big drawing of the Green Lantern Corps logo, and so, realizing he probably doesn't have great odds in hand-to-hand combat against a celestial body, this foremerly-badass wannabe alien Boba Fett fucks off out of there and flees the entire DCEU forever, never to be seen again in any body of work ever again.  The episode is played primarily for a joke (I think?), as it then cuts back to the Corps on their home planet of Oa, where they're like, "Anyways, that's why Mogo doesn't come to our AA Meetings, because even though that motherfucker loves free coffee he also knows that if he got too close to our planet then his gravitational pull would fuck up the oceans and kill us all and suck us into his gravitational core where we'd all be melted in fucking green magma all day forever."  The whole thing is kind of poking fun of the fact that the Corps has a lot of weird-as-fuck members, but from that point until today there aren't many pieces of art depicting the Corps the don't have at least one hemisphere of Planet Mogo peeking up from the edge of the page like balls from the short-short pant legs of an overzealous gym coach.

I guess before I get too hardcore into this, I should give a little bit of background on the history of the Green Lantern Corps for people who don't know / don't give a fuck about any of this shit yet are still reading it anyways.  The short version is that there's this council of Space Cops on the Planet Oa, and they have divided the known universe into 3600 Sectors – and then they made these cool green rings that give you magic powers, distributed those rings the a couple Great Heroes in each sector, and then tasked these Chosen Ones with defending their territory against all things Evil and Bad by blowing anyone they didn't like into another fucking planet of existence.  Because each Sector houses various weird types of Alien Life, there are a lot of really fucking out-there weird creatures that inherited the Green Lantern Rings – it might come as a surprise, but Mogo isn't the weirdest of these.  There's a Green Lantern called Leezle Pon that is a sentient smallpox virus that absorbed the ring into its body, and this single-celled organism's arch-enemy is a Yellow Space Amoeba or some shit.  The fabled hero Ch'p of H'lven is a Space Squirrel who wore the Power Ring, but then got run over by a yellow Space Truck, died, was re-animated as an evil Necromancer by alien space wizards, and then eventually got disintegrated into space dust by a beam of energy fired from a Red Lantern ring.  If that shit's too mainstream and basic for you, there's also a fucking sentient mathematical equation named Dkrtzy RRR that wields a Green Lantern Ring and fights, I dunnow, yellow geometry or something?, and I really can't wait to see how Zack Snyder's three and a half hour origin movie about how that shit came to be and how he manages to shoehorn blonde girls in low-cut tops into that particular equation. 

Anyway, Mogo is the only Green Lantern that is also technically a Sector also, and maybe that doesn't even sound that weird anymore after all that other stuff I just threw at you.  So he does have that going for him. 

I know this might not be the first question on your minds right now, but, as with most things in comics, there are various different versions of the story on how Mogo got his Green Lantern Ring.  The version I remember best is that Hal Jordan just buried the ring under some dirt on the planet's surface and turned it into Space God Verde, but I'm not sure if that's canon in the current continuum anymore (mostly because "canon" when you're talking about this sort of thing is completely subjective, constantly changing, heavily debated, and generally just impossible to identify).  My second favorite version is that Hal was walking around on the planet and he just saw some random-ass bird wearing it.  Hal was like, "is this where you hide the most powerful ring in the universe?", and Mogo was just like, "Uh… yeah.  This is a cool bird.  What the fuck else am I gonna do with this shit, y’know? It’s not like I have fingers or anything."

A lot of people think Mogo is the Green Lantern homeworld, which is totally understandable seeing as how it's got the fucking logo tattooed across his equator, but it's not.  What it does do, however, is use it's intergalactic telekinesis powers to distribute the Power Rings to various heroes.  Like, if a Green Lantern dies (which happens shockingly-often considering that their rings are among the most powerful artifacts in the known universe and these guys are supposed to be the most elite fighting force in the galaxy), the dead Lantern's ring just kinda flies off his finger and hurtles off through space at light speed until it catapults into the hands of the next hero dubbed "worthy" by this sentient flying green planet that lives millions of light years away.  In Green Lantern Corps canon, that passing-of-the-torch is orchestrated by Mogo, using his various telekinetic and telepathic powers, which have no limits or restrictions.  Like he apparently has a Google Maps Family Tracker on every person in the galaxy and then just kind of figure out the closest dude or chick capable of lifting Thor's  Hammer, so to speak.  I know I mixed a lot of fucking metaphors here, but hopefully you get the idea.

Mogo also has occasionally served as a place where rookie Green Lanterns (the folks he sent his rings to) can visit and train and work on their powers withing getting their balls punched in by supervillains.  Because any evildoer, taxi cab, or otherwise Yellow and/or Evil thing that comes within five parsecs of this motherfucker gets Green Beamed into goddamn oblivion.

Ok, so let's talk powers for a minute.  Aside from 1.) Being fucking huge and 2.) Being a fucking planet, and 3.) Whipping Green Lantern Rings at random alien strangers every time they help an old lady cross the road, Mogo is also telepathic, telekinetic, and capable of faster-than-light travel.  He talks, he can generate humongous gravitational planetary pull whenever he feels like it, and on his planetary surface he can change the weather, geography, climate, and gravity at will.  He can also create holograms that walk around and fuck with people, like one time when he created a holographic merchant to go buy some of Lobo's Space Dolphins so that they'd eat the yellow space debris that had been stuck in Mogo's gravitational pull and was kind of throwing off his feng shui (the primary weakness of a Green Lantern is the color yellow, which doesn't make much sense to me, not just because it's weird as fuck, but also because you literally need the color yellow to create the color green).  Oh, right, and he wears a Green Lantern ring, which, according to the comics, is capable of "generating anything your imagination can think of, as long as you have the willpower to will it into existence". 

Which is great, except Mogo mostly just imagines a giant ass beam of green energy that disintegrates his enemies and rips their flesh from their bodies. 

Anyway, here's the part of the article where I just list a bunch of random shit Mogo did, with very little context, as a way of highlighting what makes this dude one of the most hilarious and awesome and badass comic book characters ever devised.. 

In 2000 they had a comic series called Green Lantern vs. Aliens, where the Green Lanterns transferred a bunch of H.R. Geiger Xenomorphs to Planet Mogo to be "protected," which I guess was fine for a while until obviously some space ship crash landed on Mogo's surface, the Aliens went berserk and started eating everyone on the ship, so Green Lantern had to go down there and kill them all. 

In 2005, during Infinite Crisis, Superman is in the middle of fighting alternate-world Evil Superman from the Murder Dimension, and they're fighting in space, and so Mogo flies out there and crashes into Dark Superman, and then there's a big fight on Mogo's surface where Evil Superman is eventually defeated. Cool.

In 2009 a bunch of Green Lanterns become evil necromancers known as Black Lanterns, and they take over the Green Lantern world of Oa, so Mogo flies over there and creates a huge gravitational pull that sucks all the Black Lanterns off Oa, through space, and up into Mogo's burning hot core, where they are then melted to death by molten magma forever.  That was pretty cool, but then a few years later the dark core of the planet allowed Mogo to be possessed by an evil Guardian and then he sent out a bunch of evil rings to evil Lanterns to build another army of dudes with similar powers to Green Lantern except evil, so John Stewart (the Green Lantern, not the Daily Show guy) had to shoot a fucking big-ass Black Lantern bullet into Mogo's core and blow him up.  Mogo exploded (that must have been a hell of a gun), and his blown-to-shit exploded fragments got caught in orbit around the planet Oa, but then Stewart flung those pieces into the Sun as a funeral pyre.  Because this is comics, of course, Mogo didn't die from this, and then there was this whole multi-issue side-mission multi-issue arc where John Stewart had to fly around fighting Space Pirates looking for Mogo's Twin Souls and disembodied consciousness(es), and then they just rebuilt Mogo again as a new planet like nothing had ever happened.  Gotta love this shit, you know? Even a planet being detonated at its very core isn’t permanently fatal — MOGO LIVES ON.

Funnily enough, for being a Giant Planet Comic Book Character that is known for blowing the shit out of superheroes, moons, other planets, asteroids, space squirrels, etc., that isn't the only time Mogo gets his big bulbous multi-mile-wide ass blown the fuck up.  In Injustice, the alternate-reality comic where Superman is actually Space Hitler, Mogo uses his Death Ray to incinerate half of the evil Sinestro Corps but then Superman gets a a Yellow Power Ring and punches Mogo into the Sun.  But that's Superman for you, that guy's so OP it's not even funny.  I'm not sure if Mogo comes back to life again after that, but, hell if he does it wouldn't be the first time this tough old bastard came back from having 90% of his planetary surface hurled into the goddamned sun, so who knows.

Mogo's arch-enemy is Ranx the Sentient City, which, uh, is a giant sentient city full of criminals and space pirates and stuff.  How a city and a planet fight each other as often as these two do is one of the beautiful things about the world of comic books, because at various times they've been at odds with each other, generally while in close orbit to everything from Planet Oa to the skies above Metropolis.  Like once time Ranx got magically enlarged to planet sized and tried to drill some planet-exploding bombs into Mogo’s crust, but Mogo still managed to defeat Ranx using a combination of giant-ass green lasers and an army of Power Ring wielding motherfuckers, most of whom died in the process, because all Green Lanterns who aren't from Earth are completely worthless and function primarily as cannon fodder to get Worf Effect-ed into oblivion and further illustrate how Humanity Rules and everyone else can Get Fucked.  Another time Ranx planted a killer yellow virus (but not that killer yellow virus with the Yellow Power Ring that fights the Smallpox Lantern) on Mogo's surface that was designed to infect and kill the Lantern Corps trainees, but Mogo dealt with that shit like a boss – by flying himself into the path of a gigantic quasi-planet-killing asteroid and then having that asteroid slam directly into the source of the virus.  If only our lame planet could have dealt with Covid the same way, we'd all be able to go drink beers at Maple Leafs home games right now.

Mogo flies around doing crazy shit, Deus Ex Machina-ing his way through the known galaxy, popping up occasionally to save dudes like Adam Strange and Starfire when their starships run out of gas in deep space, but according to a few different Prophecies and Time Travel timelines, the fun isn't going to last for the Lantern Corps' giant flying green laser-testicle – according to most intergalactic magical prophecies, Mogo will eventually suffer the heat death that all planets are destined to succumb to thanks to the laws of Entropy, and when he dies, there's no one to distribute Green Lantern Rings, and that's the end of the Corps.  Which, is kind of awesome – he doesn't just die, he brings the entire Military Order down with him.

Which I can appreciate.

Links:

Alchetron

Bleeding Cool

Bookriot

Comic Book Resource

DC Database

Wikipedia