For comics fans of my generation, the scene in Green Lantern-Green Arrow #76 is iconic. For over a decade the hero Green Lantern had been portrayed as an intergalactic cop, a brave, straight-arrow hero stopping cosmic villainy and rescuing the innocent, and following the orders of his bosses without question.
But then, with sales falling, the middle-aged editors at DC comics decided to give the character to a couple of younger guys, artist Neal Adams and writer Denny O’Neil, in the hope that they could craft stories that would better appeal to young people living in the Age of Aquarius . And O’Neil and Adams decided to radically update the property by making stories that were relevant to their counter-culture peers.
Thus, this scene, when GL is directly confronted by a slumlord victim and asked that direct question:
“I been readin’ about you … How you work for the blue skins … and how on a planet someplace 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. Green Lantern!”
On the following page, the caption tells us of GL:
In the time it takes to draw a single breath … The span of a heartbeat — a man looks into his own soul, and his life changes.
Ah if only it were that easy to wise up cops in real life!
No matter, the writer’s and artist’s hearts were in the right place.
And their revitalized series, costarring the law-and-order GL and his goatee-ed, liberal counterpart, Green Arrow, was a great success. In their short tenure on the title, using the term “Relevance” as their watchword, the creative team had the heroes deal with pollution, Native American rights, women’s rights, drug abuse and Manson-like cults.
They absolutely blew my ten-year-old mind. I remember forcing issue 86—that’s the one where Green Arrow comes home to find his Robin equivalent, Speedy, shooting up heroin(!)—into my parents’ hands, and saying, “See? Comics aren’t just silly fantasies! This stuff is real!”
(And that might have been a mistake: They thought it might be a bit too real for me. But to their credit, they let me keep buying the mag.)
O’Neil and Adams did another thing of interest, shortly thereafter. When the campy Batman TV show craze ended, these two were entrusted with the task of scraping all of the =BAM! POW!= silliness off of the character of Batman and returning him to his darker, more frightening roots. Their version of The Batman (yes, that “the” makes a difference) is the one which has lasted. All of the writers and artists and filmmakers and actors that have followed are building off of their work in many ways.
Denny O’Neil had a long, storied career. He just passed away, at the age of 81, after a long illness.
And as I think about him, I think again of the panel I shared above, in that first GL/GA story that hit me so hard as a kid.
Because for most of the years since it was published, the scene—and the series—has been considered corny—as corny as TV’s Batman. Because it is so earnest, so overtly trying to illustrate a point about racism, that once the 60s/early-70s counter culture period ended and the world moved on to the Me-Decade 70s and the Reagan 80s, it looked like an artifact from another civilization.
I never stopped loving it, though, museum piece or not.
And now comes the Black Lives Matter protests—sparked by the horror inflicted by policemen on a black man. Protests that have suddenly shaken the mainstream awake from its lethargic indifference to the black experience. Protests that flared up as Denny O’Neil was on his death bed, coincidentally. And suddenly, everything is different. And this scene written by Mr. O’Neil isn’t corny at all, is it?
Rest in Peace, Denny O’Neil—and thank you.