GREEN LANTERN #76 – 78

Script: Denny O’Neil | Art: Neal Adams
Inks: Frank Giacoia (#77 & 78) | Editor: Julie Schwartz

“NO EVIL SHALL ESCAPE MY SIGHT!”

Right off the bat, our socially relevant excursion begins on something of a false premise. Green Lantern arrives in Star City to visit with his colleague, Green Arrow (and were they ever especially close prior to this run of issues?) but first bumps into a young man roughing up an older gentleman. Naturally, GL takes the older guys’s side and sends his assailant off to police headquarters for booking, which results in the area’s remaining citizens promptly pelting him with trash.

Green Arrow appears and explains that the fellow GL just saved, Jubal Slade, is a slum lord with plans to demolish the tenement housing the young man who attacked him, along with numerous other Star Citizens. Arrow takes GL on a quick tour of the building, which leads to our afore-mentioned false premise: an older black man confronts the Lantern, calling him out for working for “the blue skins” and helping the “orange skins” and “purple skins” but doing nothing for the black skins. Ashamed, Green Lantern has no rebuttal.

John Byrne, not exactly renowned for his racial sensitivity, nonetheless has an excellent point about this scene: Green Lantern has saved Earth countless times. He has saved the entire human race countless times. He has, therefore, saved the “black skins” countless times. He is above such things as petty racism. He routinely battles threats of intergalactic proportions. Going out of his way to help any particular race is absurd because he goes out of his way to help the entire human race every day.

Nonetheless, Denny O’Neil needs someone to represent “The Man” in his social allegory, so he's chosen to turn Hal Jordan into a blind follower and heavy-handed authority figure ready and waiting to be brought low and have his eyes opened by Green Arrow’s progressive attitude.

Long story short, our heroes get Slade arrested (and I have no problem with this; the guy’s an utter slimeball even if what he's doing is technically legal) and then Green Arrow gives a speech to one of the Guardians, GL’s superiors, about coming down to Earth to walk among the common man. Surprisingly, the Guardian agrees and soon he, Hal, and Green Arrow’s alter ego, Oliver Queen, set out in a pickup truck to see the country and cure its social ills.

One issue in and I'm unimpressed with this classic run, though the Neal Adams artwork is gorgeous and O’Neil’s scripting is fun.

“JOURNEY TO DESOLATION!”

Traveling through a nondescript mountain range, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and the Guardian fall in with a group of miners rebelling against their tyrannical boss, Slapper Soames, and his Nazi war criminal security squad in a town called Desolation. Green Lantern faces a crisis of conscience and learns that the Guardians have severely dialed back the power of his ring while he's on leave, but nonetheless our heroes win the day.

This story is a bit more of a straightforward action tale. There's still some commentary, but it's not nearly as preachy as in the prior issue, so I have no real problem with it. My main concern instead is that, even with his power ring functioning at partial capacity, Green Lantern is a really incongruous fit for this type of “street level” story. I assume Green Arrow was added as the series’ co-headliner in an attempt to boost sales and not strictly from a storytelling perspective, I can't help feeling some other less powerful hero would've been a better fit to travel the country with the Emerald Archer. (Of course if that were so, you'd lose out on the novelty of DC’s two “green” characters working together.)

“A KIND OF LOVING, A WAY OF DEATH!”

Our next tale finds the emerald duo and their alien companion in Washington State, where they tussle with a motorcycle gang and then save Black Canary from a hate-cult presided over by a mentalist named Joshua. The story’s not bad, and the message is perhaps a bit heavier handed than in the prior tale – but not nearly as ham-fisted as in the original chapter. This time our heroes wonder about the nature of racism and suspect that every human has the capacity in his or her soul to hate, and possibly to kill, a member of another race.

Of note is that O’Neil drops a Native American cook into the story when the group stops for lunch, and he conversationally refers to himself as a “red man” while continually calling his guests things like “paleface” and “white eyes”. I'm unsure if this is all in earnest on O’Neil’s part – this was, after all, pretty common language, at least in fiction, circa the early seventies – or if it's a sly way to inject some casual racism into the story before we learn that its core is, in fact, a question of race-hate.

We also see the motorcycle gang beat up Black Canary and steal her motorcycle (built for her by Superman, of all characters, in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #75), leaving her unconscious by the side of the road – and I'm thankful that's all they do. A DC comic in recent years would have almost certainly had her raped as well.

Speaking of the Canary, I should note the inks by Frank Giacoia here. In my lifetime, my exposure to Neal Adams has been pretty much exclusively his original Batman work and his short X-MEN run, where he was inked by Dick Giordano and Tom Palmer, respectively. This is practically my very first time seeing Adams inked by anyone other than those two or himself. And while Giacoia does a fine job of remaining true to Adams’ signature style in most places, he seriously glams up Black Canary to the point that she looks more like a “Giacoia girl” than an “Adams girl” – and I can't complain about the results. She's really quite striking here.