The idea was to partner the characters up to let them debate one-another like Point Counter Point while fighting bad guys. Green Arrow, the modern Robin Hood, was the voice of populist, class-warfare radicalism. O’Neil saw the Green Lantern as a right-leaning, peace-keeping enforcer of the establishment. “My whole life,” he says, “is based on respect for authority.” Green Arrow was once a wealthy CEO who lost everything (like Robin of Loxley losing all his lands and titles to Prince John). Green Lantern was a member of the Green Lantern Corps, a cosmic police force. I guess what really made GL/GA such a milestone is just how explicitly political it was. Again and again, Marvel tended to lead the way and DC followed. Stan Lee did a Spider-man story over at Marvel about the dangers of drug addiction, so, at DC, O’Neil made Speedy a heroin addict. O’Neil responded by introducing John Stewart, the first black Green Lantern. Was this really a groundbreaking idea, though? To be fair, over at Marvel, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had been using black characters since ’63 and Roy Thomas was writing about racial issues since ’68, so was this really only lily-white DC catching up? Shortly after Green Lantern’s humiliation at the hands of an old black man, Marvel had Captain America become a motorcycle cop in his secret identity and partner up with Falcon, a black, Harlem social worker turned crime fighter. “What would happen if we put a superhero in a real-life setting dealing with a real-life problem?” “Could the comic book equivalent of the new journalism be possible?” O’Neil asked. He came from the opinionated “new journalism” school of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Irish Catholic Denny O’Neil – young, intense and opinionated – came out of the newspapers and said that he still “considered myself as much of a journalist as a fiction writer,” (Jones and Jacobs, The Comic book Heroes, 1997). Was DC’s emerald titan really just Darren Wilson with a cosmic power ring? The Green Lantern turned out, in the words of Grant Morison, to be the “bewildered representative of every dumb-ass cop who ever pounded the beat the unthinking stooge of geriatric authorities from a galaxy far, far away” ( Supergods, 2011). Green Lantern is the ultimate cop, enforcing the law… and yet he was guilty of unconscious racism and class-ism. Superman is the ultimate fireman, rescuing us from disasters. Whoa! Nobody had ever seen this before in DC comics!īatman (who was also getting a darker, grimmer Denny-O’Neal-Adams makeover at this same time) is the ultimate detective, solving crimes. Green Lantern looks shamefully at his feet and mumbles, “I… can’t…” Then comes one of the top-10 most famous scenes in the history of comics: An old black man comes up to Green Lantern and says: “I been readin’ about you… how you work for the blue skins… and how on a planet somewhere you helped out the orange skins… and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with… the black skins! I want to know… how come!? Answer me that, Mr. (Remember, black people had rarely ever been depicted in DC comics at all before this.) He calls them “animals” (racist much, GL?) and “anarchists,” and spits at them, “You want a riot!?” (Is he in Ferguson? Baltimore?) Green Arrow appears and explains that the white guy in the suit is a slum lord who is evicting all these people. When he jumps in to ‘teach the punk a lesson,’ Green Lantern finds the whole (poor and mostly black) neighborhood throwing trash at him. Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76, February, 1970, announced a new direction by opening with the surprising words: “For years he had been a proud man! … His name, of course, is Green Lantern, and often he has vowed that ‘No evil shall escape my sight.’ He has been fooling himself.” Flying over the city, Green Lantern sees a “punk” shoving an upper-class white man wearing a suit.
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