I was
just in time to be too late.
That’s
what it felt like, anyway. I had
just started buying a fascinating superhero comic-book title, only to discover
that the first issue I bought was also the last issue: the title, as the magazine
itself announced, was being discontinued.
This bit of information aggravated me no end because it was, to me, the
best comic book I had ever read up to that time — and it remains one of the
best today.
The year
was 1972, and I was 12-years old. Before
then, I had bought comic books sporadically, but I never really collected them
in any serious fashion. I grew up
with superhero comics and never remember them not being around me. I guess any kid would be intrigued by
the idea of a superhero: we were learning how to get along in a world that we
barely had any control over, while these costumed crime fighters could bend
that world to their own demands (via their super powers) and were often praised
for it in the end.
I was
also drawn to comics because I drew myself — drew pictures on paper, that
is. In these three-color
ink-and-paper stories, I saw the kind of rendering of the world that I wanted
to achieve in my own drawings. In
fact, my first ambition as a kid was to become a professional comic-book
artist. So, by the time I turned
12, I had decided to collect comics in earnest — I decided to collect comics
with an eye towards studying them as a means of eventually entering the
profession myself. (Like today,
the two major companies in superhero comics back then were Marvel and
D.C.) And one of the first comics
I bought with this new purpose in mind was the D.C. publication Green
Lantern/Green Arrow
#89.
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| The cover of ‘Green Lantern’ #9 (1961) |
I was
already familiar with the superhero Green Lantern. An intergalactic green-masked, leotard-clad do-gooder, Green
Lantern fought science-fiction nemeses who endangered the Earth, and he did so
with a “power ring” that could … well … that could do anything. One reason why Green Lantern was never my favorite title
before then was because, with only a few paltry exceptions, there wasn’t
anything that his ring couldn’t do.
The usual Green Lantern adventure had the hero fighting some equally
super-powered foe, and it was only a matter of time (i.e., by the end of the
story) before G.L. would have his power ring shoot a green beam of light that
could take absolutely any form and use it as a way to defeat his adversary. The stories didn’t contain much
suspense because the all-powerful abilities of the power ring could, in the
end, do whatever was needed to vanquish the super-powered foe.
 |
| ‘Green Lantern/Green Arrow’ #89 (1972) |
But Green
Lantern/Green Arrow
#89 was different. This was the thirteenth issue that D.C. had paired G.L. with Green Arrow, a mortal superhero
whose only “power” was his skill as an archer shooting scientifically equipped
arrows (in other words, Green Arrow was Batman with a quiver full of gadgety shafts instead of a utility belt).
So, the idea of teaming the near-omnipotent Green Lantern with a partner
sans superpowers appealed to me: Green Arrow’s governance by the known physical
laws of the universe leavened the contrivance of Green Lantern’s power
ring.
With a
story titled “…And Through Him Save a World,” this comic book was unlike any
other I had ever read up to that time.
The featured heroes, Green Lantern and Green Arrow, were both costumed
crime fighters, but they didn’t fight some similarly powerful super
villain. Instead, the antagonist
of the story was a human vandal with a radical environmental agenda, an
injudicious but well-meaning activist whose anti-industrial mischief angered
the blue-collar workers whose jobs he imperiled. The story evoked the pressing real-life issue of
environmental pollution, making the flawed activist/vandal a sympathetic
character. To put it mildly, this
wasn’t your average superhero adventure.
Woven into this story was an obvious but intriguing allegory of the
biblical crucifixion story, comparing the vandal’s tribulations with the
passion of Jesus Christ — and equating the need to save ourselves by reversing
our pollution of the environment to the Christian idea of “saving” ourselves
via the forgiveness of sin.
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| The concluding pages of ‘Green Lantern/Green Arrow’ #89 |
Green
Lantern/Green Arrow
#89 was an eye-opener, a compelling sample of a comic-book title definitely
worth collecting. However, it was
also, it turned out, the last issue of the title to be published for some
time. The adventures of
Green Lantern and Green Arrow were to continue as a back feature in the comic The Flash, a back
feature that ended up running for only three issues.
In other
words, I had just missed out on an incredible string of superhero stories. For the previous eleven issues (#76-87,
not counting a reprint), Green Lantern/Green Arrow, starting in 1970, had taken Green Lantern, a
costumed hero known for his otherworldly exploits, and immersed
him in the dilemmas of this world. And
the stories would usually raise some current social problem seldom encountered
in superhero stories. For the
first time in superhero comic books, a title made a sustained effort to be relevant regarding current events of the
day, to evoke social dilemmas faced by us non-superheroes in the here and
now.
 |
| Denny O’Neil in a recent photo |
The
writer who authored the twelve social-problem Green Lantern/Green Arrow issues was Denny O’Neil, who was
given the task to revamp Green Lantern’s image in the face of slumping
sales. He hit upon the idea of
using serious social issues in the comics by drawing on his past as a
journalist. As O’Neil put it,
referring to the team it would take to produce the new Green Lantern comic:
We would dramatize [contemporary social] issues. We would not resolve them. We were not in the polemic business. I was smart enough to know enormously complex problems couldn’t be dissected within the limitations of a 25-page comic book and humble enough to know that I didn’t have solutions anyway. Still, I cherished the notion that the stories might be socially useful: I could hope they might awaken youngsters, eight- or nine-year-olds, to the world’s dilemmas and these children, given such an early start, might be able to find solutions in their maturity. My generation, and my father’s, had grown up ignorant; my son’s didn’t have to. Maybe I could help, a little.
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| Green Arrow in ‘More Fun Comics’ #91 (1943) |
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| Neal Adams |
Another
reason why the G.L./G.A. series grabbed my attention was because it was illustrated by my favorite
comic-book artist, Neal Adams. I
had become interested Adams’ art ever since his late-1960s work on the D.C.
character Deadman and the title The Brave and the Bold (which teamed Batman with a
different superhero every month).
I was impressed by the hyper-realistic (for comic books of the era)
look of the characters he drew: where drawings by other comic-book artists maintained
a highly stylized or somewhat simplistic rendition of their characters, Adams’
lifelike illustrations made an effort to reproduce proportions, facial
features, and gestures like those seen in the real world. “If superheroes existed,” Adams is
reported to have said, “they’d have to look the way I draw them.” No argument here. But Adams also viewed his characters on
the page from cinema-like angles, unusual for comic books at the time: extreme
high angles, extreme low angles, extreme close-ups, and everything
in-between. Every so often, he
would even play with the sequencing of panels, sometimes having a drawing
beginning on one page and continuing over onto the next. All of these are familiar conventions
in comics these days, but they were quite unusual at the time. Adams’ involvement in the G.L./G.A. series is one more reason for my
continuing interest in it.
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| From ‘Green Lantern/Green Arrow’ #76 (1970) |
The first
G.L./G.A. story (issue #76) observed the law-enforcer Green Lantern coming to
the defense of a portly middle-aged man being roughed up by another man on the
street. G.L. intervenes on the
middle-aged man’s behalf, sending his assailant to jail. But shortly afterwards, the brash,
excitable Green Arrow — clearly on the side of the underdog — informs his
by-the-book colleague that the man he rescued was a slumlord, and the man he
sent to jail a soon-to-be-evicted tenant.
After viewing the miserable conditions of the tenement, G.L. realizes
that upholding the law doesn’t necessarily serve justice. In the end, the slumlord is arrested
for his underworld connections and for trying to have G.A. murdered. The final pages conclude with the
archer making a speech strange to see in a comic book at that time: after
evoking the assassinated Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, G.A. says,
“Something is wrong! Something is
killing us all! Some hideous moral
cancer is rotting our very souls!”
As a
social-problem story, Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 isn’t exactly
compelling. For one thing, the
narrative’s motivating problem — the slumlord evicting his impoverished tenants
— is never really addressed: the slumlord is delivered to justice because of
his underworld connections, not because he is a slumlord; and the tale leaves the fate of his hapless tenants unresolved. Also, the 20-plus-page comic book doesn’t have the room to
develop the characters in a truly satisfying way, so they still come across as
stock figures. But for a
mainstream superhero comic book of the late 1960s/early 1970s, this was
startling stuff. Confronting a
super-powered hero, one used to battling villains from outer space, with very
real terrestrial problems brought an unusual social consciousness into an art
form usually noted, at the time, for its lack of worldliness. This made Green Lantern/Green Arrow seem a bit surreal.
But,
alas, the relevance and realism — and awards — that O’Neil and Adams brought to
the title didn’t rescue its sales figures, and it was discontinued after two
years. After I bought my first
issue of Green Lantern/Green Arrow (the last one to be published), I did what I could to get
my hands on #76 and those other eleven previous issues, not an easy thing to do
back in those days before comic collecting became the relatively high-profile
activity it is today. It took a
few years, but I eventually acquired all eleven by the time I was in
college. By then, I had given up
collecting comic books as a hobby, and I aspired to achievements other than
drawing them. But the Green
Lantern/Green Arrow
series of the early 1970s continues to fascinate me because of O’Neil’s
infusion of social problems into superhero stories and because of Adams’
excellent artwork. Fortunately, their twelve issues of Green Lantern/Green Arrow have been critically praised in many quarters as the greatest run of superhero stories in comic-book history, and they have been reprinted numerous times over the intervening years.
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| A ‘Green Lantern/Green Arrow’ reprint edition from 1983 |
Furthermore,
Denny O’Neil’s transformation of the character of Green Arrow from a non-entity
to a cantankerous liberal firebrand has made him one of the more popular and dynamic
superheroes in the D.C. Universe.
In 1976, the comic title Green Lantern/Green Arrow was resurrected by other writers and artists, but without the
socially conscious themes. When
the title switched to solo Green Lantern adventures, Green Arrow moved to his
own solo stories, one of the most notable being the adult-oriented limited
series Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters in 1987.
Today, Green Arrow can be seen as the main character in the popular CW
series Arrow.
Of
course, Green Lantern/Green Arrow was published back in the days when comic books weren’t
as varied as they are today. Back
then, all comics (at least as far as I could tell) had to be approved by the
Comics Code Authority and thus had to contain family-friendly content
(otherwise, they would need to switch to another format, like Mad and Creepy). With the burgeoning of a post-adolescent readership over the
decades, comics began to include more adult content and edgier material, with
some titles eschewing CCA approval altogether. And after the early 1970s, the proliferation of shops
specializing in the sale of comics and graphic novels has created different
book formats and a different marketing environment than when the 7x10
three-color newsprint magazines were relegated to one corner of the drug store
or the 7-11. With today’s wide
variety of “funny books” and graphic novels, a title like Green
Lantern/Green Arrow,
among comic-book aficionados, would have a harder time standing out from the
overabundance of choices. But I’d
like to think that the current environment of comic books as a serious medium
for adult readers was shaped in part by Green Lantern/Green Arrow’s startling juxtaposition of
otherworldly superheroes confronted by urgent real-world problems — even if we former youngsters haven’t, as Denny O’Neil hoped, grown up to solve them.
Trailer for the CW series ‘Arrow,’ based on the Green Arrow
