The Only Kind Of Jewelry For Me

Back before we got married, Vicki and I had "the ring discussion." She likes jewelry and therefore rightly expected to wear a wedding ring that we would buy for that purpose. I have no use for jewelry (unless it serves some other function, such as telling me the current time) and therefore didn't want to waste any of our money on the "traditional" wedding band that most men wear in our culture. I did say at the time, though, that I'd happily wear a Green Lantern ring if Vicki could find one for me. Unfortunately you have to be born without fear and be in close proximity when a current Green Lantern dies in the line of duty in order to get one of those suckers, and since I quake with terror every time I watch the Rangers blow another lead, my chances were pretty poor.

However, with this year's Blackest Night event from DC Comics, though, the publisher has been giving away promotional plastic rings made in the design of the various "colour corps" that have sprung up in the DCU recently. Each of the 8 rings was tied to one particular issue of a DC comic, and you'd get that ring if you bought that issue. I told my friendly comic store owner that I'd like each one and would therefore reserve each of those comics. As of a couple weeks ago, the last one in the set came out, and I now have all eight rings. There's slightly more to this story than that, though.

Pictured to the left are the 8 rings. Clockwise, starting at the top, you can see the rings of:

• the Black Lantern Corps (death)
• the Red Lantern Corps (rage)
• Agent Orange (avarice)
• the yellow Sinestro Corps (fear)
• the Green Lantern Corps (will)
• the Blue Lantern Corps (hope)
• the violet Star Sapphires (love)
• the Indigo Tribe (compassion)

It makes for a lovely set of matching merchandise for any DC fan.

However, as the rings were being produced, mistakes would happen. So, for example, there would be the odd red ring that would bear the insignia of one of the other groups rather than that of the Red Lanterns. Once word of this got out, then it became something of a lark to try to find such "variant" rings, each of which would fetch $10 to $20 on eBay due to its novelty. Around the middle of the promotion (when half of the rings had come out but half were yet to arrive), I mentioned this to the owner of the comic store, and he and I began sifting through his supply to see if he had any. In fact, out of the dozens that he had in stock, I found one orange ring with the wrong design on it (I think it was the Star Sapphire insignia). The owner wasn't about to let me swap my regular orange ring for it, mainly because the store's brand colour is orange and he thought that a variant of that shade would be a good marketing tool. Instead, he promised me the next irregular that came in, since we still had several more rings ahead of us.

And sure enough, the next week he presented me with a blue ring that was incorrectly cast with the yellow ring's design. If you look at the picture above, you'll note that those two are the closest in appearance, and so it took me a moment to even recognize that it was "wrong." I proceeded to buy a regular blue off of him (so that I'd have the complete set of normal rings) but particularly cherish my variant that somehow, inexplicably, combines hope with fear.

It's things like this that really bring out the geek in me.