GREEN LANTERN #79 – 81

Script: Denny O’Neil | Art: Neal Adams
Inks: Dan Adkins (#79) & Dick Giordano (#80 & 81) | Editor: Julie Schwartz

“ULYSSES STAR IS STILL ALIVE!”

Still in Indian country, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and their Guardian colleague become involved in the struggle between a tribe and a pair of men named Theodore Pudd and Pierre O’Rourke over logging rights. The heroes disagree on their course of action and go their separate ways, Green Lantern looking for legal recourse while Green Arrow teams up with Black Canary to pursue extralegal remedies.

Our heroes are drawn back together when Green Lantern shows up at a standoff between the tribe and the loggers with a U.S. congressman in tow, to find the Indians fighting back alongside the so-called spirit of their late tribal hero, Ulysses Star. The ghost is unmasked as Green Arrow, and he GL have a drag-out fight to settle their philosophical debate.

In the end nothing is really hashed out. The corrupt loggers are arrested for arson (a component of Green Lantern’s investigation) while the tribe finds themselves living in squalor as always.

Along the way, Green Lantern, who has shown some doubts over his usual approach to heroism in recent chapters (and even in this one) remains true to himself by following the letter of the law, which is a nice touch from O'Neil, who so far has seemed mostly concerned with knocking the series’ star down a few pegs.

We also learn – though I assume longtime readers already knew this – that Hal Jordan was once an insurance adjuster. I swear, that character must have the most diverse professional life of any comic book character ever: test pilot, insurance adjuster, long haul trucker, and I think a few more. Most heroes have one single job in their entire fictional existence, but it seems Green Lantern’s creative teams are never quite sure what to do with him, resulting in a character who comes across as sort of an aimless drifter.

(Personally, it seems to me that "test pilot" is a pretty awesome career for a secret identity and I'm unsure why it was ever changed from that in the first place!)

“EVEN AN IMMORTAL CAN DIE!”

This tale begins with our heroes getting run off the road, their truck totaled, then attempting to save a freighter from explosive destruction moments later. Green Lantern is injured in the process and, confronted with a choice, the Guardian who's been traveling with him and Green Arrow opts to save his life rather than the crew of the ship. Green Arrow and the crewmen save themselves, however, by throwing the vessel’s load of pollutants overboard. The Guardian is then ordered to report to a tribunal on the planet Gallo for a hearing on his choice to save one man instead of many, and GL and GA accompany him. But Gallo has been taken over by the local maintenance man and his robot army, leading to our heroes cleaning house and rescuing the Guardian from execution.

Thankfully, the bit with the pollutants at the beginning is pretty much it for this installment’s social commentary. As soon as it was revealed that the ship was transporting a load of recently outlawed plastic byproducts, visions of a preachy 22-page environmental manifesto began to dance in my head. But O'Neil shows remarkable restraint and limits his message to only the first few pages before moving into a straightforward superhero action tale..

And by the way – I don't mean to come across as some heartless jerk as I go through these stories. I generally have no real problem with social commentary appearing in superhero comic books. Many of the earliest superheroes, including Superman, started out as social crusaders during the Great Depression, after all! I simply like for the commentary to be A) even-handed and B) more importantly, I prefer for it to be parceled out as small moments or asides, not presented as a story’s – or a series’ – primary reason for being.

One further note: our hard-traveling heroes are in the northwestern United States as this story begins. The past two issues, they were explicitly in Washington. Yet O'Neil is telling these tales in something akin to real time – we’re told here that they've been on the road for five months and crossed the country two times in that span – so with all this driving back and forth, why has O'Neil limited the locale of three consecutive series to one small sector of the country?? It seems really odd to do it this way.

“DEATH BE MY DESTINY!”

On the planet Oa, Green Lantern headquarters, the Guardian is sentenced to mortality on a world called Maltus, there to live out his days and die naturally. Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Black Canary accompany their friend to his new home, which they find overrun with homelessness and disease thanks to a population explosion caused by a woman named Mother Juna.

The group confronts Juna and learns that when Maltus was exposed to cosmic dust which rendered many of its female inhabitants infertile, she developed a way to grow full-size humans from single cells, and this led to the world’s overpopulation. In the end, the Guardian remains behind to help the people of Maltus while the others return home.

This is a social message type of story I can handle. Rather than get preachy on Earth, O'Neil goes the route of allegory, using Maltus as a sci-fi example of what could potentially happen to Earth someday. This is the sort of thing STAR TREK did well, and if all of O'Neil’s stories had gone this route, I probably would have been fine with his entire premise.

This issue comes across as the end of the GL/GA saga, with our heroes going their separate ways, their journeys together completed. I must assume that “the new GREEN LANTERN co-starring Green Arrow” was conceived as a six-issue experiment, with the intention of either canceling the series or continuing it if sales warranted. And since there's plenty more GL/GA ahead, it seems likely that sales figures came in with enough of a boost for DC to keep the concept going.

I'll be interested to see if O'Neil and Adams keep going with their topical material or if, their experiment concluded, they will turn the series into a more straightforward superhero series with minimal commentary. I'll hope for the latter, but I'm expecting the former -- after all, if the run was extended due to its success, there would be no reason to change the formula.