TO MARK THE MOMENTOUS OCCASION, HERITAGE IS OFFERING EVERY ISSUE FROM THE CELEBRATED SUPERHERO’S GOLDEN AGE RUN
By Robert Wilonsky | June 17, 2025
Three panels into All-American Comics No. 16, covered-dated July 1940, Alan Scott is holding a green lantern – “the green flame of life,” specifically, which spares the engineer from a bridge explosion that derails a train and kills all of its passengers. The book, written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger and illustrated by art-school grad and theater aficionado Martin Nodell, is then quick to the lantern’s origin story, explaining in prolonged flashback the story of the ominous, chatty green meteor fashioned by “Chang, the lamp maker” into a magic lamp after it promises death, life, then, finally, power.
‘All-American Comics’ No. 16 (DC, 1940) features the origin and first appearance of the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott. This copy of the book, graded CGC Apparent VG- 3.5 Moderate (C-3), is available in Heritage’s June 26-29 Comic & Comic Art Signature® Auction.
As if the backstory weren’t obvious enough, Nodell told comics creator Jim Steranko for 1970’s essential History of Comics, “We needed a name for his alter ego, so naturally I thought of Aladdin and his magic lamp.”
Scott inevitably turns the lantern into a ring, takes his first flight after discovering the mystical green light can be controlled by willpower and needed a recharge every 24 hours, pretends to be a ghost, discovers he’s vulnerable to wood (“Guess I’m only immune to metals!”), then shrugs it off when the bridge’s saboteur dies of shock. It’s a lot.
This copy of ‘Green Lantern’ No. 1 (DC, 1941), the book that started the character’s eight-year solo series, is available in Heritage’s June 26-29 Comic & Comic Art Signature® Auction, alongside every issue from that Golden Age run.
Scott doesn’t suit up as the Green Lantern until the story’s final panel. “If I must fight evil beings,” he reasoned, “I must make myself a dreaded figure! I must have a costume that is so bizarre that once I am seen I will never be forgotten.” At which point he dons an early version of the costume Scott continues to wear 85 years later: billowing red top with matching boots wrapped in yellow straps, baggy green pants held up by a brown belt, flowing purple-and-green cape topped by a black mask. There’s a green lantern on his chest, too, of course, surrounded by a yellow circle.
Someone once called it “one of the more garish outfits from the Golden Age,” and it’s hard to disagree. Nodell moved to New York City “to work in its thriving theater scene,” according to DC Comics’ Green Lantern: A Celebration of 75 Years. He’d designed a costume you could see from the back row.
Villain Vandal Savage made his debut in ‘Green Lantern’ No. 10 (DC, 1943).
Green Lantern, of course, would become a founding member of DC’s Justice Society of America, its first superhero team, and a star of All-Star Comics, as well as a regular in both All-American Comics and Comic Cavalcade. But just a year after his debut, Scott got his own book, too – one of the few fledgling DC heroes to merit such a distinction, alongside Superman, Batman and the Flash (Wonder Woman debuted in October 1941’s All-Star Comics No. 8).
“The same lure that made ancient eastern potentates plot to possess Aladdin’s lamp drew readers towards the iridescent glow of the Green Lantern Power,” Steranko wrote in his two-volume history. “Power, pure and simple.”
‘Green Lantern’ No. 30 (DC, 1948) introduced the superhero’s canine companion, Streak the Wonder Dog.
As Heritage Auctions Vice President Barry Sandoval notes, “Even the few characters who had their own books tended to have multiple individual stories within a given issue. Not so with Green Lantern, whose story in Green Lantern No. 2 is a 52-pager.”
Heritage’s June 26-29 Comic & Comic Art Signature® Auction features every single issue from that Golden Age run of Green Lantern comics – a historic event for a hero about to have his moment(s). Not only is there a Green Lantern in James Gunn’s Superman (Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner), but HBO is in production with Lanterns, starring Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart.
Here, too, is a rare copy of the issue of All-American Comics where it all began.
‘Green Lantern’ No. 3 (DC, 1942) features a cover by Martin Nodell, Green Lantern’s originator.
There’s long been magic in that lantern – and in the character. Green Lantern became a bestseller and would spend the 1940s in top titles tussling with mortal enemies, among them the gentleman thief The Gambler (introduced in Green Lantern No. 12) and Sky Pirate (first seen in Green Lantern No. 27), and such supernatural villains as the immortal Vandal Savage (who debuted in Green Lantern No. 10) and the undead Solomon Grundy (who rose in All-American Comics No. 61).
Perhaps the most memorable moment in any Green Lantern comic – then or now – came when Scott had to recharge the ring and utter the oath needed to complete the deed. There were myriad iterations in the early GL tales, and countless others to follow in the Silver Age, but the most famous – and most enduring – debuted in Green Lantern No. 9, credited to science fiction writer Alfred Bester:
“In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight! Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power, Green Lantern’s light!”
Green Lantern’s sidekick, Doiby Dickles, appears alongside the superhero on the cover of ‘Green Lantern’ No. 8 (DC, 1943).
Alan Scott’s successor, fearless test pilot Hal Jordan, would resurrect the oath when he inherited the mantle of Green Lantern in 1959’s Showcase No. 22. Because it was too good to let go.
“The ceremony of the ring charging its power by the god-like glow of the lantern was almost religious in content,” Steranko wrote. “The man was compelled to have a communion with the lantern to establish his power and identity and to insure his safety and security. Then too, Green Lantern’s pledge could easily have been a prayer. And didn’t the lamp, forged from a meteor, have the divine right over life, death and power. The psychological implications seemed to work, the strip was a hit.”
Until it wasn’t. Eventually Scott got a sidekick – cab driver Charles “Doiby” Dickles, the comic relief who “spoke” like every American who pretended to be from Brooklyn – and a canine companion, Streak the Wonder Dog, who debuted in Green Lantern No. 30 and would eventually hog the green spotlight from the titular hero.
‘Green Lantern’ No. 37 (DC, 1949) was the second to last issue of the series and the only issue of the final five to feature Green Lantern on the cover.
Nine years after GL’s debut, the green flame died out. It took another decade for Jordan to take flight, in a tale that eschewed magic for straight-up sci-fi when a pink-skinned alien, Abin Sur, crash-landed on Earth and chose the test pilot as his successor.
To generations of readers, Jordan is the Green Lantern – especially the hard-traveling hero drawn by Neal Adams who crisscrossed the country with Green Arrow in the 1970s battling racism, poverty and drug addiction. But there would be no Hal without Alan, just as there’d be no brightest day without the blackest night.
