Watching Lanterns? Here Are 5 Green Lantern Comics You Can Jump Into Without Knowing the Lore

Lanterns has brought the Green Lantern mythos into the pop culture landscape like never before. While Warner Brothers tried in the early ’10s with Green Lantern and Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Lanterns is able to capture the feeling of the comics while also being something very different from what everyone expected. It’s a pretty good primer for the basics of the Green Lantern Corps, but to really understand what makes the show work so well, it’s important to go to the source material. There have been 86 years of Green Lantern stories (although that’s a bit of a misnomer; the character sat things out through the ’50s into the early ’60s) and that can be pretty daunting for anyone who explores further.

Over the years, there have been numerous Green Lantern tales, ones that depend on the continuity of previous events to really see how cool they are. However, there are also plenty of other stories, ones that you can read with zero context. All you need to know is the basics of the characters to understand them and you’ll get a fantastic story from them. These five Green Lantern stories can be enjoyed with no context, perfect for Lanterns fans who want to know more or people who want to have a little experience with the property before they watch the show.

5) “Hard-Traveling Heroes”

“Hard-Traveling Heroes” is the greatest team-up comic ever, bringing together two of the greats of the comic industry for a story that brought real world politics and problems to Green Lantern and Green Arrow. Green Lantern (Vol. 2) wasn’t doing well saleswise and it was decided to combine his book with Green Arrow, with writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams bringing the two heroes together in issues number #76-87. O’Neil wrote Green Arrow as the ultimate liberal of the ’60s and ’70s and Jordan as the conservative law and order type of the day for stories that changed the way they looked at the world and each other, transforming both of them in the years to come. Anyone expecting Ollie to be more like the Arrowverse of the character is going to be in for a surprise, but other than that, you can walk in this story knowing nothing about the characters and come out of it loving both of them.

4) The New Frontier

The New Frontier, by writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, is technically a DC story, starring the various heroes of the Silver Age as the world changed around them. However, Hal Jordan is the main character of the book. We meet up with him flying a fighter jet after the Korean War, following him after he gets a job with Ferris, and is finally given the Green Lantern ring. From there, he’s dropped into the middle of the mystery of the Centre, a mysterious force that brings together the new superhero community for the battle that would chart its future. This story is one of those comics that DC does so well: an out of continuity look at the heroes of the DC Multiverse, presenting their universe at its beginning and showing readers what’s so amazing about the greatest superheroes of all time. Hal Jordan plays a key role in the book, forming the narrative glue for the various heroes and the main plot.

3) “Secret Origin”

Hal Jordan is the greatest of the Earth’s many Green Lanterns, helping grow the mantle of Green Lantern since the Silver Age. Over the years, we’ve gotten several reimaginings of his origin, but the best of them came from the landmark Geoff Johns run on the character, “Secret Origin”. The story ran through Green Lantern (Vol. 4) #29-35, from Johns and artist Ivan Reis, this time concentrating mostly on Hal Jordan’s training under Sinestro, all while introducing Atrocitus, before he became a Red Lantern, as a catalyst for the whole situation and tying Black Hand, who was about to become a major part of the DC Comics in Blackest Night, into everything. Johns’s run is going to show up on this list several more times and this origin story is one of its finest moments. It gave readers the basis of the most important relationship in Green Lantern history, adding new layers to Jordan and Sinestro’s history. It’s also just a plain great Green Lantern story, full of everything that has made the character an icon.

2) Green Lantern: Rebirth

So, in the mid ’90s, DC made Hal Jordan into a villain that destroyed the Green Lantern Corps, keeping him as a villain for a few years before making him the Spectre. This is where 2004’s Green Lantern: Rebirth, by Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver, found the character. When Green Lantern stuff starts happening, Hal, John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner are pulled into a scheme by their greatest enemy to finally end the legacy of the Green Lantern Corps. This six-issue series lays out everything you need to know about the characters and their world within its pages, laying out the sometimes tangled continuity of the Green Lantern Corps in an easily understandable way. Most fans don’t remember that Johns started teasing this back in Day of Judgment and he paid it off fantastically, giving readers a story that brought back the greatest Green Lantern and the Corps with a style and aplomb that can be hard to find nowadays. It would have gone down as the greatest Lantern story ever if it wasn’t for the next one.

1) “The Sinestro Corps War”

“The Sinestro Corps War” is the best Green Lantern story ever, building on the changes made to the Green Lantern mythos in Green Lantern: Rebirth. The story ran through Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special, Green Lantern (Vol. 4) #21-25, Green Lantern Corps (Vol. 2) #14-19, and the Tales of the Sinestro Corps specials starring Parallax, Cyborg Superman, Superboy-Prime, and Ion, from Geoff Johns, Pete Tomasi, Dave Gibbons, Ivan Reis, Ethan Van Sciver, and Patrick Gleason. The story saw the Sinestro Corps unleashed on the Green Lantern Corps, leading to some of the coolest fights that you can imagine. This is another story that can seem daunting walking into it, but as long as you know the basics of Green Lantern history – basically just how it all works in barest detail – this story will give you everything else you need to understand it. You won’t be disappointed by this one; the writing and art are truly fantastic. This comic is everything you could want from a Green Lantern epic.

10 Best Green Lantern Covers That Changed Comic History