Green Lantern #63

Green Lantern #63 (On Sale: July 11, 1968) features Neal Adams' first Green Lantern cover. In a few years Neal, along with Denny O'Neil, will take over this strip creating some of the most important comics of all time (certainly some of the most reproduced comics of all time).

"This is the Way... the World Ends" is written by, speak of the devil, Denny O'Neil in his first of two Green Lantern stories, and drawn by Jack Sparling and Sid Greene. While visiting his brother Jim Jordan is California, Hal Jordan is suddenly teleported to another planet. He uses his power ring in an attempt to contact other Green Lanterns or the Guardians, but he finds no trace of either. He then has a vision of a little girl telling him to return to Earth.

Green Lantern arrives on Earth which is now a barren wasteland. He finds one living person on the planet, a woman named Teira. After rescuing her from some gaseous yellow cloud creatures, he brings her to her father Gracchus.

Gracchus explains that Earth was destroyed by a recent attack, but Green Lantern doesn't believe him. He then demands the truth. Gracchus tells him that he was a scientist from Ort, a planet consumed in a perpetual state of war. Gracchus wanted to end the war, but his people did not. He then fled to Earth, but found that war was a constant plague there as well.

Now he has brought Green Lantern back in time before life exists on Earth to prevent it from ever developing. Yep, now that is a Denny O'Neil plot! Never reprinted.

Edited by Julius Schwartz.