ABSOLUTE GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW
By Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams
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Hal Jordan was a second generation test pilot when a dying alien named Abin Sur, a member of the Green Lantern Corps, had his power ring go and find a man without fear and Jordan got the powerful weapon. Now a member of the GLC and working for the Guardians of the Universe he faces down evil with the ring that can make constructs through his willpower. The only limit is Hal’s imagination - and the colors gold and yellow, the built-in safety catch. He protects and defends the Earth against all threats in his assigned sector, our solar system, Sector 2814.
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Oliver Queen was a billionaire playboy who was stranded on a desert island and had to learn archery to survive and pass the time, becoming a master archer. When he finally got off the island and returned to his home in Star City he donned his costume to become Green Arrow, a modern day Robin Hood, fighting crime. Even after he lost all of his money he continued to fight against injustice using his fighting skills and trick arrows to defeat evildoers.
But there comes a time in every superhero’s life where they begin to doubt that they’re making a difference. You can save the world from invading aliens, shut down some criminal’s scheme, or just have another tussle with a super villain, but a walk in the sun amongst the people you protect and serve can tell a different story.
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For Green Lantern Hal Jordan that moment comes when he sees a bunch of young folks attacking a guy in the streets of Star City. This seems pretty cut and dry until Oliver Queen/Green Arrow shows up to reveal the truth…
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…that the guy being attacked was a greedy landlord and the people attacking him were his angry tenants since he planned to evict them to make the tenement into a parking lot. The reality that the conservative Green Lantern now sees is further hammered home by an elderly black man who shows him who he should have been using his power to help this whole time.
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When Hal gets sent out on some meaningless busywork out in the solar system by his bosses the Guardians he finally figures out that he should be doing something more meaningful. When Ollie challenges the Guardians with all of the problems facing society on Earth and in America in particular at the time…
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…an agreement is reached that one Guardian will travel with the two heroes in a pickup truck on a mission to find America.
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So it becomes a road movie as the two men face the evils of society. Ollie’s girlfriend, superhero Dinah Lance/Black Canary gets beaten up by bikers when trying to look for him and falls under the influence of a Charles Manson-type cult leader. Can Ollie get her out of this evil guru’s clutches?
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Then Hal and Ollie are at odds over lumber rights that a Native American tribe have been tricked out of by greedy white guys. Hal tries to find out if anything can be done legally and finds a conspiracy afoot while Ollie thinks that there will have to be more immediate vigilante action taken. This clash of ideologies finally comes down to a fistfight between the two heroes.
Then when an accident aboard a ship carrying toxic waste causes the Guardian to save Hal instead of preventing the chemicals from polluting the water.
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Hal, Ollie, and the Guardian are whisked off to a planet where a deranged judge holds court and wants to execute the three for damaging the environment.
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Then Hal, Ollie, and Dinah are taken to another planet where massive overpopulation has led to a myriad of quality of life problems and women like Black Canary are targeted for killing. They don’t really solve this because we can’t really ethically solve this in real life so they can only try and find the source of the problem on the alien planet.
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Then Ollie suddenly gets attacked by harpies while trying to give flowers to Dinah back on Earth, which ends humorously when he tries to use a gas arrow against the creatures while they’re all in the same tiny room. Meanwhile Hal gets snared in a trap that only Green Arrow can save him from. A confrontation between some amazons from another dimension who have been wronged by a man and Black Canary leads to a battle between the empowered women since Dinah is a master of judo and jiu-jitsu. I thought that she had some sort of sonic scream ability, but here she’s just a master martial artist.
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Then Hal and Ollie investigate a strange school where the order-obsessed cook uses a young girl with supernatural abilities to reign over the place with an iron fist. Because Adams drew the cook and the girl like then-President Richard Nixon and then-Vice President Spiro Agnew they actually got in trouble for the satire and couldn’t do it again.
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Then consumerism is skewered as Hal helps out a small town from getting flooded. The mayor (who’s drawn to look like someone I don’t know on the cover and inside, but must have been another tool from the time) runs a business that makes useless plastic toys to distract the townsfolk from how fake and polluted their plastic town is. It’s up to a pretty late Green Arrow to save him.
Then this storyline gets real as Ollie gets attacked in the street by junkie juvenile delinquents and this sets the two heroes on a path to fighting the war on drugs in their own fashion. Then suddenly it’s revealed that Green Arrow’s sidekick Roy Harper/Speedy is a heroin addict!
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More of the tolls of drug addiction are shown in unglamorous detail as another kid OD’s on smack and Roy’s drug use seems to be Ollie’s fault for mot paying attention to him this whole time. I couldn’t understand this, but from what he says it sounds like he was depressed and was medicating with heroin. A Spider-Man comic had talked about drug abuse before this, but it was more impact when this was a cover story here. It’s pretty dark and real for superheroes to confront this and that makes it groundbreaking.
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Speaking of groundbreaking stuff in the next issue Guy Gardner, the next fearless man on Earth and his successor should he be incapacitated gets severely injured, prompting the Guardians to find a new Green Lantern on Earth. The man picked is John Stewart, an African American ex-architect with “a chip on his shoulder the size of the Rock of Gibraltar!” because of a lifetime of facing racism head on. When Hal assigns him to protect an openly racist political candidate it seems like trouble’s about to explode! Actually this is another major comic event as the third Green Lantern, John Stewart, was the first black superhero without the word “black” in his name. He’s just another member of the Green Lantern Corps (Blade had not been created yet.)
Meanwhile Ollie is offered a chance to run for mayor of Star City and after getting caught up in a riot between cops and black people that ends in tragedy, he becomes adamant to do it. He doesn’t become mayor in this collection, that would happen decades later when militant liberal comics writer Judd Winick was writing his comics in the 2000’s.
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The Hal and Ollie find themselves at odds again when tracking down a Christ-like activist who is targeting Ferris Aircraft, Inc., Hal’s girlfriend Carol’s failing business. When they finally try to save the hippie from his self-crucifixion protest an angry mob chain them up to the other planes Calvary-style. A bit heavy-handed (even for this collection), but there is a good payoff with the straight-laced Green Lantern at the end, who has an investment in the company because of Carol, but is filled with disgust at what went down.
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Then things get really heavy as Green Arrow accidentally kills a guy trying to shoot him. Even though it was accidental self-defense he’s a shattered man and goes to seek solace in a monastery after effectively killing his superhero persona.
So I asked my brother Andy about some stuff here as he actually watches the TV show Arrow to see if they ever got into any of this social justice stuff to see if it made it into the show.
Anyway, back in the story, Hal and Dinah face off against a xenophobic organization who hate the “aliens” a.k.a. superheroes to take a shot at bigotry. Then out of nowhere Dinah is critically injured in a car crash and Hal needs Ollie to come back to civilization for a blood transfusion. This whole time Ollie has sworn off the world and it takes a monk to put him back on track to use his master archery for good again.
Superheroes have been social justice warriors since the beginning, except other than most SJWs today they actually do something about it instead of just giving it lip service on the internet. By injecting the ills of society into a comic for these heroes to face off against you get relevant stories. These stories are very much of their time as people argue about much different stuff these days - which I have no interest in participating in. They at least tried to make these stories have a deeper meaning here and since these comics were first published most writers and artists took the hint and added much needed subtext to their stories to make people care about what they’re reading. Thank goodness these stories matter a lot more than just being funny books for kids.
By Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams
Hal Jordan was a second generation test pilot when a dying alien named Abin Sur, a member of the Green Lantern Corps, had his power ring go and find a man without fear and Jordan got the powerful weapon. Now a member of the GLC and working for the Guardians of the Universe he faces down evil with the ring that can make constructs through his willpower. The only limit is Hal’s imagination - and the colors gold and yellow, the built-in safety catch. He protects and defends the Earth against all threats in his assigned sector, our solar system, Sector 2814.
Oliver Queen was a billionaire playboy who was stranded on a desert island and had to learn archery to survive and pass the time, becoming a master archer. When he finally got off the island and returned to his home in Star City he donned his costume to become Green Arrow, a modern day Robin Hood, fighting crime. Even after he lost all of his money he continued to fight against injustice using his fighting skills and trick arrows to defeat evildoers.
But there comes a time in every superhero’s life where they begin to doubt that they’re making a difference. You can save the world from invading aliens, shut down some criminal’s scheme, or just have another tussle with a super villain, but a walk in the sun amongst the people you protect and serve can tell a different story.
For Green Lantern Hal Jordan that moment comes when he sees a bunch of young folks attacking a guy in the streets of Star City. This seems pretty cut and dry until Oliver Queen/Green Arrow shows up to reveal the truth…
…that the guy being attacked was a greedy landlord and the people attacking him were his angry tenants since he planned to evict them to make the tenement into a parking lot. The reality that the conservative Green Lantern now sees is further hammered home by an elderly black man who shows him who he should have been using his power to help this whole time.
When Hal gets sent out on some meaningless busywork out in the solar system by his bosses the Guardians he finally figures out that he should be doing something more meaningful. When Ollie challenges the Guardians with all of the problems facing society on Earth and in America in particular at the time…
…an agreement is reached that one Guardian will travel with the two heroes in a pickup truck on a mission to find America.
So it becomes a road movie as the two men face the evils of society. Ollie’s girlfriend, superhero Dinah Lance/Black Canary gets beaten up by bikers when trying to look for him and falls under the influence of a Charles Manson-type cult leader. Can Ollie get her out of this evil guru’s clutches?
Then Hal and Ollie are at odds over lumber rights that a Native American tribe have been tricked out of by greedy white guys. Hal tries to find out if anything can be done legally and finds a conspiracy afoot while Ollie thinks that there will have to be more immediate vigilante action taken. This clash of ideologies finally comes down to a fistfight between the two heroes.
Then when an accident aboard a ship carrying toxic waste causes the Guardian to save Hal instead of preventing the chemicals from polluting the water.
Hal, Ollie, and the Guardian are whisked off to a planet where a deranged judge holds court and wants to execute the three for damaging the environment.
Then Hal, Ollie, and Dinah are taken to another planet where massive overpopulation has led to a myriad of quality of life problems and women like Black Canary are targeted for killing. They don’t really solve this because we can’t really ethically solve this in real life so they can only try and find the source of the problem on the alien planet.
Then Ollie suddenly gets attacked by harpies while trying to give flowers to Dinah back on Earth, which ends humorously when he tries to use a gas arrow against the creatures while they’re all in the same tiny room. Meanwhile Hal gets snared in a trap that only Green Arrow can save him from. A confrontation between some amazons from another dimension who have been wronged by a man and Black Canary leads to a battle between the empowered women since Dinah is a master of judo and jiu-jitsu. I thought that she had some sort of sonic scream ability, but here she’s just a master martial artist.
Then Hal and Ollie investigate a strange school where the order-obsessed cook uses a young girl with supernatural abilities to reign over the place with an iron fist. Because Adams drew the cook and the girl like then-President Richard Nixon and then-Vice President Spiro Agnew they actually got in trouble for the satire and couldn’t do it again.
Then consumerism is skewered as Hal helps out a small town from getting flooded. The mayor (who’s drawn to look like someone I don’t know on the cover and inside, but must have been another tool from the time) runs a business that makes useless plastic toys to distract the townsfolk from how fake and polluted their plastic town is. It’s up to a pretty late Green Arrow to save him.
Then this storyline gets real as Ollie gets attacked in the street by junkie juvenile delinquents and this sets the two heroes on a path to fighting the war on drugs in their own fashion. Then suddenly it’s revealed that Green Arrow’s sidekick Roy Harper/Speedy is a heroin addict!
More of the tolls of drug addiction are shown in unglamorous detail as another kid OD’s on smack and Roy’s drug use seems to be Ollie’s fault for mot paying attention to him this whole time. I couldn’t understand this, but from what he says it sounds like he was depressed and was medicating with heroin. A Spider-Man comic had talked about drug abuse before this, but it was more impact when this was a cover story here. It’s pretty dark and real for superheroes to confront this and that makes it groundbreaking.
Speaking of groundbreaking stuff in the next issue Guy Gardner, the next fearless man on Earth and his successor should he be incapacitated gets severely injured, prompting the Guardians to find a new Green Lantern on Earth. The man picked is John Stewart, an African American ex-architect with “a chip on his shoulder the size of the Rock of Gibraltar!” because of a lifetime of facing racism head on. When Hal assigns him to protect an openly racist political candidate it seems like trouble’s about to explode! Actually this is another major comic event as the third Green Lantern, John Stewart, was the first black superhero without the word “black” in his name. He’s just another member of the Green Lantern Corps (Blade had not been created yet.)
Meanwhile Ollie is offered a chance to run for mayor of Star City and after getting caught up in a riot between cops and black people that ends in tragedy, he becomes adamant to do it. He doesn’t become mayor in this collection, that would happen decades later when militant liberal comics writer Judd Winick was writing his comics in the 2000’s.
The Hal and Ollie find themselves at odds again when tracking down a Christ-like activist who is targeting Ferris Aircraft, Inc., Hal’s girlfriend Carol’s failing business. When they finally try to save the hippie from his self-crucifixion protest an angry mob chain them up to the other planes Calvary-style. A bit heavy-handed (even for this collection), but there is a good payoff with the straight-laced Green Lantern at the end, who has an investment in the company because of Carol, but is filled with disgust at what went down.
Then things get really heavy as Green Arrow accidentally kills a guy trying to shoot him. Even though it was accidental self-defense he’s a shattered man and goes to seek solace in a monastery after effectively killing his superhero persona.
So I asked my brother Andy about some stuff here as he actually watches the TV show Arrow to see if they ever got into any of this social justice stuff to see if it made it into the show.
Well, enough of my shoddy interviewing skills, but you can see how I will have nothing to do with this show. I know the character too well. I’ll just be under whelmed by bad writing.Me: So did Green Arrow kill anyone on the show?
Andy: In the first season, yes, he killed a number of people.
Me: How many?
Andy: About ten.
Me: Was he a shattered man?
Andy: No, he was reformed, and he made it clear that he was not going to kill anyone from the second season on.
Me: Did he ever talk about liberal ideas or run for mayor on the show?
Andy: He has run for mayor and he won. I believe he’s going to be mayor in the fourth season, but he doesn’t talk about liberal anything.
Me: They never talk about social justice stuff or relevant stuff on the show?
Andy: No.
Me: So what does he do, he just fights criminals?
Andy: Yes, he fights mostly other costumed criminals.
Me: Why did they want him to run for office?
Andy: He wants to do more good without having to do it as a costumed vigilante.
Me: But there’s no social justice stuff going on, so what is his platform as mayor?
Andy: There isn’t one. There was nobody else running for mayor, but he didn’t want the other candidate, Damien Dark‘s wife, to win the race.
Me: What’s he going to do as mayor then?
Andy: I don’t know. There’s been a serious civil disorder and I guess he’s going to try and fix it? But you don’t know what he’s going to do.
Me: He never went to a monastery or anything?
Andy: No.
Me: Was Roy Harper/Speedy ever hooked on heroin on the show?
Andy: No.
Anyway, back in the story, Hal and Dinah face off against a xenophobic organization who hate the “aliens” a.k.a. superheroes to take a shot at bigotry. Then out of nowhere Dinah is critically injured in a car crash and Hal needs Ollie to come back to civilization for a blood transfusion. This whole time Ollie has sworn off the world and it takes a monk to put him back on track to use his master archery for good again.
Superheroes have been social justice warriors since the beginning, except other than most SJWs today they actually do something about it instead of just giving it lip service on the internet. By injecting the ills of society into a comic for these heroes to face off against you get relevant stories. These stories are very much of their time as people argue about much different stuff these days - which I have no interest in participating in. They at least tried to make these stories have a deeper meaning here and since these comics were first published most writers and artists took the hint and added much needed subtext to their stories to make people care about what they’re reading. Thank goodness these stories matter a lot more than just being funny books for kids.
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