GREEN LANTERN #23

Silver Age Green Lantern with notable spine wear including a chip/loss at the top spine edge and general spine stress lines running the length of the book. Corners show blunting and some whitening, particularly at the lower left. Cover has moderate surface wear and slight discoloration/soiling but colors remain reasonably bright; a vertical crease is visible near the fold on the left side. The book is in a protective sleeve which may obscure minor edge defects; interior and back cover were not assessed.

Green Lantern #23 (DC Comics, September 1963) arrived during the height of John Broome and Gil Kane's celebrated run on the second Green Lantern title, the book most responsible for defining the character's Silver Age cosmology of the Guardians of the Universe, the power battery mythology, and Hal Jordan's rogues' gallery. Kane's dynamic figure work and Broome's tightly plotted space-opera scripting were the engine of the series' critical reputation, and this issue is a representative example of that creative partnership rather than a landmark issue in its own right. It carries no first appearance, origin story, or death scene that collectors and price guides single out as a key moment in Green Lantern history.

Market data reflects that status: with 149 Universal copies on the CGC census and sales recorded across nearly every grade tier, the book trades as a well-collected but unspectacular mid-run Silver Age title. Values sit flat through the mid-grade range, where multiple grade points cluster at similar FMVs, before rising sharply above 9.0 as the population of true high-grade survivors narrows to a handful of copies. That steep curve at the top end is typical of Silver Age comics on brittle, lower-quality paper stock, where a handful of exceptional copies command outsized premiums over the broader population.

Demand for this issue comes primarily from Green Lantern and Silver Age DC completists building a run of the Broome-Kane era rather than from key-issue investors, which keeps raw low- and mid-grade copies affordable and liquid. High-grade certified copies are a different market entirely: with only two 9.8s and three 9.4s recorded on census, a top-graded example is a genuine rarity that will draw competitive bidding whenever one surfaces, while mid-grade raw copies will continue to move steadily among run-builders at modest, stable prices.