Arisia Rrab

26 years ago - Arisia Rrab is born the daughter of the Green Lantern of Sector 2815.

21 years ago - 5-year-old Arisia's father dies on duty, and her uncle becomes the new Green Lantern.

13 years ago - 13-year-old Arisia is chosen as a new Green Lantern, and is assigned by the Green Lantern Corp as an apprentice to Hal Jordan who works in his neighboring sector. She is saved from Thaal Sinestro when Tomar-Re sacrifices himself to protect her, and works with Hal to stop him.

8 years ago - 18-year-old Arisia & Hal Jordan begin an unsanctioned relationship, combining their work across sectors. She helps Hal stop Bito Wladon's incursion into the countries surrounding Modora.

7 years ago - 19-year-old Arisia & Hal Jordan are attacked by Star Sapphire when Carol Ferris is unable to protect herself from the crystalline symbiote. Having the symbiote removed leaves Carol in a coma.

6 years ago - 20-year-old Arisia is attacked by Arthur Light, who attempts to download light manipulation data from her Green Lantern Ring. Hal Jordan traps him in a phased state.

5 years ago - 21-year-old Arisia ends her relationship with Hal Jordan, who later becomes Parallax and destroys the Oan battery, depowering the Corp. Arisia continues protecting her sector using weapons and technology built & collected by her new partner Tigorr.

4 years ago - 22-year-old Arisia & Tigorr join Kyle Rayner as he fights Hal Jordan, trying to stop him from breaking time.

2 years ago - 24-year-old Arisia & Tigorr help Adam Strange return to Rann to save it from the Starbreaker.

1 year ago - 25-year-old Arisia & Tigorr help Kyle Rayner restart the Oan Power Battery. She returns to the Green Lantern Corp, and reclaims her role as Green Lantern of her home sector. Tigorr continues to help her, but starts regularly working alongside Adam Strange on Rann.

There are a lot of classic Alien Green Lanterns. Tomar Re was the earliest, Killowog is probably the most popular. Katma Tui blew everyone's mind by being *gasp* a woman... and of course there are tons of weirdly shaped aliens; jellyfish and crystals and mushrooms and so on.

But I would argue that of all of them, Arisia is the most important. No other character has had such a profound impact on who the hero, Hal, is, and how we perceive him. In the process she's undergone a series of unpleasant stories... which really sucks, because she's such a likeable part of the larger mythology. So it falls to us to try to preserve her role in the story and her huge contribution to it, while hopefully not putting her through the narrative wringer.

Arisia's Comic History

Arisia was introduced in 1981, in the standalone miniseries Tales of the Green Lantern Corps by Mike W Barr. It was a huge crossover, bringing together all the existing Lantern characters while introducing lots of original ones. Arisia arrived right in the first pages, introducing herself to Hal, the brand new Lantern of sector 2815, right next to his, and daughter of the previous Lantern.

Clearly, Arisia was being introduced to give readers a viewpoint into the world of the Green Lanterns, and cues were being taken from Kitty Pryde, who had been introduced a year earlier for exactly the same role over in the X-Men, but in the same way that Kitty has always been Chris Claremont's favorite character, Arisia was also clearly deeply loved by her writer. It's no accident that her last name happens to be Mike Barr's name backward.

Arisia would become a regular part of the ongoing series, appearing regularly and continuing to be the audience surrogate. This was actually a rough time in the Green Lantern comics, where they struggled to find an audience, and the book really leaned on the presence of this sprightly, likeable young character to keep the voice of the series going. She became a surrogate little sister to most of the Corp.

From the very beginning, Arisia was depicted very distinctly as a teenager. Her relationship with Hal was always based on the fact that she had a schoolgirl crush on him, which by itself would be way more tolerable if she wasn't also being put on display a little too much in her skintight costume... to have those two things happen at the same time made it all a little awkward to read. Still, the story remained a likeable one about Hal and his adorable teenage sidekick.

Enter Steve Englehart.

The Problem

Englehart took over the series in 1986, starting with the issues crossing over with the Crisis of Infinite Earths, and then on past issue #200 as the book redefined the Green Lantern Corps so that instead of a cast of thousands, it was a group of a few named characters that all lived on Earth together. One of the first things that happened was the characters all redesigned their costumes. Arisia wasn't exactly NEW to being drawn a little too sexually than would seem appropriate, but now it was accompanied by dialogue that seemed determined to convince us that it was okay to sexualize her.

The website Comic Book Resources did a story that covered this pretty thoroughly, but the short version is that Arisia used her ring to age herself to adulthood in an effort to date Hal... and then Hal started sleeping with her.

The book worked so hard to convince us that this was okay... but boy, was it not okay. Their relationship continued through the rest of that series, and on into other appearances as Green Lantern became the primary story in Action Comics as it became a weekly Anthology series. Because this was a comic being published in the late eighties it was made thoroughly, abundantly clear that these two were sleeping with each other.

Eventually they broke up. She would appear later in a short story in the first issue of Green Lantern Corps Quarterly in 1992 that showed how much trauma this teenage girl who had artificially aged herself into a sexualized adult in order to have an adult relationship without ever actually growing up had undergone, and even in the comic, it was clear that everyone was aware of just how incredilbly messed up this all was. Arisia would continue to appear in the pages of Guy Gardner: Warrior through the 90's before she befell the same fate as Katma Tui and Kyle Rayner's girlfriend Alex; she was murdered brutally by Major Force in an act of textbook fridging.

Arisia would appear again years later in the Geoff Johns era, brought back along with tons of previously dead Lanterns. She had a few moments where her return was treated like a big deal, but from then on was almost always little more than one more background character.

The Missing Chapter

I wanted to pull this bit of Arisia's comic history out and make it it's own thing, because this is often not part of her narrative, and frankly it really deserves more attention. Guy Gardner: Warrior is a 26 issue series that ran from 1994 - 1996 that followed the adventures of Guy Gardner during the Kyle Rayner years. it's possibly one of the most 90's comics in DC's lexicon, a big dumb explosion of muscles and guns and scantily clad girls. Arisia works at Guy's bar the whole time, and is regularly part of the nonsense.

Here's the thing, though; I love this series. It's wildly fun, and despite the fact that her go-to heroic costume is now inexplicably a purple swimsuit, Arisia is absolutely a bad ass through all of it. She's constantly drawing blaster pistols and joining in the fight, and for a character that was so diminished in her earlier appearances, she's actually gloriously empowered through most of this series. The fact that this version of the character exists is absolutely something we want to point out.

Of course, this part of Arisia's story ends with her completely unnecessary murder just to 'send a message' to the heroes. I just don't know why the Green Lantern stories used this wretched trope so often.

Our Arisia Story

We've embraced the idea of Arisia being Hal's protege. He's one of the few characters in the original Justice League to not have a sidekick, and Arisia fits that role perfectly. She wasn't on Earth where she could join the Teen Titans because she had her own sector to patrol, but still, she was there. We even made her the exact same age as Dick Grayson and his contemporaries in the original Titans.

Now, part of Hal's character has always been that he's a narcissist, and having him start dating his former protege & sidekick once she grows up certainly feeds into that, but for the love of god, we can wait until she's an adult before we have that happen. It's already pretty creepy. It's an early glimpse into the character of a man that could one day become Parallax.

But in the meanwhile... We really want to lean into the idea of Arisia's spacefaring adventures once she loses her ring. Rather than have her be on earth she's going to be in her home sector, which makes way more sense. Also... in the Guy Gardner series, she regularly teamed up with a character named Tiger-Man, which gave us a visual cue to make her partner with Tigorr of the Omega Men.

Of course, there's no way we could bring back the Lanterns and not give her her ring again, but now she gets to be a Veteran member of the Corp. We really want to let her be an awesome hero in her own right.

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