Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about the Green Lanterns of Earth before Hal Jordan. Reader Jim S. wrote in to ask if I could elaborate and show all of the Green Lanterns that existed in Sector 2814 before Abin Sur.

Let's go in reverse order. Obviously, let's quickly get Abin Sur out of the way. He was the Green Lantern of this Space Sector for long enough that he was able to temporarily give the ring to an Earthling, Daniel Young, in 1873, as shown in a back-up story in Green Lantern #149 by Paul Kupperberg, Don Newton and Dan Adkins...

In Legends of the DC Universe #20 (by Steven Grant, Mike Zeck and Klaus Janson), Abin Sur tracks a villain to Earth in 1882 and Sur reveals that many years ago (prior, of course, to 1873) he was given his Green Lantern ring from a Green Lantern named Starkaor...

We have never learned, exactly, how Starkaor received his ring or even if there was a Green Lantern between Starkaor and the next Green Lantern on the list, but as far as we know, the next Green Lantern of Sector 2814 was Waverly Sayre, who was introduced in Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #2 (by Gerard Jones and Tim Hamilton). 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...

So this, of course, means that there is a whole lot of time unaccounted for during the mid-1840s. The fact that there apparently was a Green Lantern on Earth in the early 19th Century sure seems like it would be fodder for a great number of comic book adventures (heck, you could easily just kill of Sayre and give it to someone else on Earth if you wanted to avoid using that specific character because of the whole Gerard Jones taint on the character). In any event, the introduction of Sayre also introduced us to the PREVIOUS Green Lantern on Sector 2814, a being known as Laham. Like a lot of other Green Lanterns that were mentioned in the 1980s and 1990s, we never actually got a chance to actually SEE Laham until many years later after Geoff Johns took over the Green Lantern titles. Johns made it a point to give us a glimpse of most of the Green Lanterns of the past who were only referenced before (Alan Moore, in particular, was famous for casually coming up with crazy ideas for Green Lanterns that would not be actually shown).

This section showed Fallen Lanterns...

Here is a detail of Laham (#53)...

Okay, once Laham is done, then there is a HUGE gap in time!

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Going way back in time']

In 1991's Green Lantern #19, Gerard Jones and Martin Nodell (co-creator of the original Green Lantern, who was celebrating his 50th anniversary that year) and inker Romeo Tanghal introduced us to Yalan Gar, the Green Lantern of Sector 2814 circa a few years B.C. The Guardians liked him so much that they touch away his yellow weakness, but then he went power mad and they made him vulnerable to wood...

He was then transformed into the basis for Alan Scott's Green Lantern battery, so Alan Scott was kind of sort of connected to the Green Lantern Corps retroactively. That means that there are roughly 1800 years unaccounted for, unless Laham was Green Lantern of Sector 2814 for all of those years.

The earliest Green Lantern of Sector 2814 that we know of was introduced by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy in Green Lantern: Dragon Lord, a three-issue prestige format series that was set in 640 A.D. and gave us a young man named Jong Li that given one of the earliest versions of the Green Lantern rings (so it was much more powerful than the later rings)...

Presumably Yalan Gar took over soon after and was the Green Lantern of the Sector for a few hundred years.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim! If anyone else has any particular bit of comic book history that they would like to see me cover, just drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!