Green Lantern (Volume 2) #63 is an issue of the series Green Lantern (Volume 2) with a cover date of September, 1968.
Synopsis for "This Is The Way The World Ends"
Hal Jordan is visiting his brother Jim, his wife Sue, and their son Howie for Howie's first birthday. When Hal blows out Howie's birthday candle, he suddenly finds himself transported to a black void, where a booming voice tells him he must stop Gracchus or the human race is doomed. Hal finds himself on what appears to be a decimated planet Earth, and he changes into Green Lantern. After calling in some of his fellow Green Lanterns, he is shocked when his power ring informs him that they have all vanished. Deciding to go to see the Guardians on the planet Oa, Green Lantern notices that some of the star clusters look different and that Oa does not exist. He suddenly sees a phantom image of a little girl playing jump rope telling him to go back to Earth.
There he finds a woman who is being attacked by creatures made out of yellow gas. With his power ring useless against them, Green Lantern fights them off with his bare hands before sealing the cracks they came from with his power ring. He revives the girl and learns that her name is Teira, and learns that she is the daughter of Gracchus, the being he has come to stop. Teira tries to convince Hal that her father is a good man and takes him to their ship. There Gracchus tells Hal that they are from the planet Ort. He claims that Earth was attacked and seeded with the gas creatures, and that he has come here to stop them. When Teira tries to get her father to tell the truth, he silences her.
Hal, catching the lie, attacks Gracchus and forces him to tell the truth: Gracchus tells of a war between the planets Ort and Tro. He tried to make the two warring worlds learn peace, but they rejected this notion and a disgusted Gracchus fled in a ship with his daughter to find a new world. Landing on Earth, he would scan the planet's future and find that it too would eventually spawn a race of beings that would constantly be in conflict. Gracchus would then decide to not let this come to pass by preventing the human race from ever existing. When he tries to hypnotize Hal into doing his bidding, Hal manages to shake control thanks to the appearance of the apparition of the little girl jumping rope.
Hal then engages in a battle against Gracchus. The two end up in space, where Hal battles the would-be conqueror in his flying saucer. During the fight, Gracchus's ship is severely damaged, and Gracchus is mortally wounded. Green Lantern takes Gracchus back to Earth to spend his final moments with his daughter. He dies telling Green Lantern that he is a fool to think that humanity can ever find peace. Green Lantern then sends Teira back to Ort before returning to his own time period.
Later, Green Lantern travels to visit the Guardians of the Universe to tell them of what happened, and they inform him that they had sent him to the past secretly and that their only means of communicating to Hal in the past was using a modern-day Earth girl who unknowingly had the ability to subconsciously send messages into the past.
Appearing in "This Is The Way The World Ends"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
Antagonists:
- Gracchus (Single appearance; dies)
Other Characters:
- Tiera (Single appearance)
- Annie (Single appearance)
Locations:
Items:
Vehicles:
- Gracchus's Starship
Notes
- This issue is reprinted in Showcase Presents: Green Lantern Vol. 4.
- The letters page includes a missive from future Green Lantern writer Marv Wolfman.
See Also