In every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without actively retconnng away the previous story. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

Today, we look at the changing history of who was the first Green Lantern to come from Earth.

When Abin Sur first crashed on Earth in Showcase #22 (by John Broome, Gil Kane and Joe Giella), it was sort of implied that Hal Jordan was the first person from Earth to be made a member of the Green Lantern Corps...

However, in Green Lantern #149, there was a back-up story by Paul Kupperberg, Don Newton and Dan Adkins that was literally titled "Earth's First Green Lantern," about a sheriff in Wyoming who met Abin Sur in 1873 when the alien Green Lantern was badly injured and needed time to recuperate. He lent his ring to Daniel Young temporarily, who ostensibly became Earth's first Green Lantern...

Of course, this being comic books, that retcon was, itself, retconned a number of times in the years since.

The first one was in Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #2, in a story by Gerard Jones and Tim Hamilton. Set in the early 1800s, Waverly Sayre was a man whose wife died along with their child in childbirth. He was haunted by memories of his dead wife and child and so when he saw a vision of his dead wife, he thought that the spirits were calling him to join his family in the afterlife. In reality, it was the widow of the previous Green Lantern of Sector 2814 who was out looking for a replacement. Sayre was it...

The weird thing about Sayre is that we really don't know anything more about him. Young was explained away the end of the story by the fact that he had to give the ring back to Abin Sur. Sayre, though, ends the story still as the Green Lantern of this Sector. So, well, what? How has this not been touched on in the years since? That there was a Green Lantern on Earth in the early 1800s and we don't know anything about his adventures. I believe that the conceit is that since Earth was not yet overly industrialized, then Sayre likely spent most of his time on other, more developed planets. But who the heck knows? We know that eventually the ring went somewhere else as Abin Sur was the Green Lantern by the end of the century and we saw who Abin Sur got the ring from, so there is this whole chunk of time that is unaccounted for.

Anyhow, that would turn out to not be the FIRST Green Lantern of Earth anyways...

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='So who was it?']

In 2001, the classic creative team of Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy got together to write Green Lantern: Dragon Lord, a three-issue prestige format series that sure SEEMED like an Elseworlds story but it was not. Set in 640 A.D., a young man named Jong Li was given one of the earliest versions of the Green Lantern rings (so it was much more powerful than the later rings)...

Currently, Jong Li is Earth's first Green Lantern. But hey, who knows how long before we learn that there was a caveman Green Lantern?

If anyone has a suggestion for a future Abandoned Love, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!