Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #1
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeTales of the Green Lantern Corps #1 marks the first time in DC history that all 3,600 members of the Green Lantern Corps were assembled on the page as a unified force, shifting the franchise's focus from Hal Jordan as a lone hero to a genuinely cosmic police organization. As the opening chapter of what was only the fourth comic-book miniseries ever published by DC, it helped define the limited-series format as a vehicle for epic, self-contained storytelling in superhero comics. The issue introduced Arisia Rrab — a Corps legacy character who would anchor a decade of Green Lantern mythology — and planted the seeds for Nekron, the Lord of the Unliving, a villain whose conceptual DNA runs directly into Geoff Johns's 2009–2010 event Blackest Night. Its editorial back-matter, recapping Corps history issue-by-issue, also modeled a reader-education approach that would become standard practice in event comics.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The miniseries was plotted by Mike W. Barr, who conceived it as a sweeping Corps-wide epic, with Len Wein — co-creator of Swamp Thing and Wolverine and one of DC's most experienced hands of the era — handling the actual scripting. Interior pencils were supplied by Joe Staton (breakdowns), with Frank McLaughlin completing and inking the finished art throughout all three issues. The cover of issue #1, like all three covers in the run, was painted by British artist Brian Bolland, whose presence gave the series a prestige visual identity well above the average DC release of 1981.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover date: May 1981, published by DC Comics; part of a three-issue limited series (the complete run shipped May–July 1981).
- Story titled 'Challenge!'; plotted by Mike W. Barr, scripted by Len Wein, penciled by Joe Staton, inked by Frank McLaughlin, with a cover by Brian Bolland.
- First appearance of Arisia Rrab (Green Lantern of Sector 2815, from Graxos IV), created by Mike W. Barr, Len Wein, and Joe Staton; her name is a nod to the planet Arisia in E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman novels, and her surname 'Rrab' is 'Barr' spelled backward — a detail added by later writers, not Barr himself.
- First appearance of the Green Lantern Honor Guard, an in-universe distinction within Corps hierarchy.
- The premise deploys all 3,600 Corps members simultaneously in a single story for the first time, establishing the Corps as a true ensemble cast rather than background dressing for Hal Jordan solo adventures.
- Villain Krona — a renegade Guardian — detonates the Central Power Battery on Oa, forcing the entire Corps to operate on a 24-hour power reserve while confronting an existential cosmic threat; this issue lays the groundwork for Nekron's first appearance (which occurs in issue #2).
- The series was among the earliest DC limited series, cited by at least one publisher-adjacent source as only the fourth comic-book miniseries DC had ever produced at that point.
- The complete three-issue miniseries was collected in DC's trade paperback Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Vol. 1 (2009, ISBN 978-1401256739), bundled with Corps backup stories from Green Lantern issues of 1981–1983; the final issue of the miniseries was also reprinted in one of DC's 'Year's Best' digest collections.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Flash #54 (1982), Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #1 (2009), Cover Story: The DC Comics Art of Brian Bolland #[nn] (2011)
Key issues in Tales of the Green Lantern Corps
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