Written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams, the famous “Hard-Traveling Heroes” series was O’Neil’s attempt at bringing a sense of real-world relevance to the comic-book page, as Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Oliver Queen and one of Hal’s alien bosses from the Guardians of the Universe explore the back roads of United States in a beat-up pickup truck, off to “look for America.” To be honest, I’m a little on the fence about these stories. With his new attitude, new threads, new relationship and new status quo all firmly set in place, Green Arrow was ready for his breakthrough adventure, which came in the pages of 1970 issues of GREEN LANTERN, which was appropriately renamed GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW for the duration of its 13-issue run. With the loss of Queen’s company and fortune went all of the superficial similarities to Batman: the Arrowcar, the Arrowcave, etc. Recognizing that it would be difficult to cast Green Arrow as a counterculture figure if he was still a millionaire living in a fat mansion, writer Denny O’Neil came up with a story in which crooked financier John Deleon managed to steal Oliver Queen’s company out from under him, leaving him practically penniless. Guess she just looked really good for her age…)Īfter all this, there was just one more alteration O’Neil needed to make to Ollie’s life, which came in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #75. (It also wasn’t much mentioned that Dinah, if her JSA membership was taken into account, must have been around 15 years older than Oliver. Successive issues of JLA built up the relationship between Ollie and Dinah, with Dinah at times torn between her newfound love for Ollie and her loyalty to the memory of her husband. The Canary’s husband sacrificed his life saving Dinah from Aquarius, and at adventure’s end Dinah asks Superman if she can join the Justice League on Earth-1, as Earth-2 is “too full of memories.” Superman kindly agrees, and refrains from pointing out that Earth-1, being more or less a duplicate of Earth-2, might not offer that much relief. However, since Larry was accompanying the Justice Society on an adventure here for the first time, well, ever, one might suspect that he’s not long for this world, and sure enough … There was a slight problem: the Black Canary was married, to longtime romantic interest private eye Larry Lance. At one point in the adventure, the JSA was under the control of Aquarius and battling the JLA, which provided Green Arrow with his first encounter with a woman he’d soon get to know much better: JSA member Dinah Drake Lance, a.k.a. JLA writer Denny O’Neil was looking to flesh out Ollie’s character more and decided to give him a steady romance - but with who? The answer came in JLA #74, in which the Justice League was in the midst of one of their annual teamups with their interdimensional counterparts from Earth-2, the Justice Society, joining forces to battle the alien menace known as Aquarius. While Ollie Queen’s wardrobe was getting a much-needed overhaul, that very same month, in the pages of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, the groundwork was being laid for Ollie to get something else he’d needed for quite some time: a girlfriend. In his third appearance in BRAVE AND THE BOLD #85 (September 1969), the character’s visual appearance was overhauled to match his new characterization by artist Neal Adams, with a flashier, more flamboyant costume to elicit a “Robin Hood”-style “hero-of-the-people” flavor, and a mustache and funky forked goatee to separate the new “with-it” Green Arrow from the “straights.”Īs for the story itself by Bob Haney, “The Senator’s Been Shot!”, it’s fairly standard B&B territory, and not nearly as noteworthy as Green Arrow’s new look. In the late ’60s, and later throughout the ’70s, Green Arrow’s home-away-from-home from a publishing standpoint was the long-running Batman teamup series THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, where he appeared over a dozen times in the course of the run. Next up? A new look, to match the new attitude… As the character regained more prominence in the mid-1960s through his membership in the popular JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA series, new JLA writer Denny O’Neil began altering Ollie’s personality, or to be more precise, actually giving him one, portraying Ollie as a bit more hotheaded than the rest of the League, and often concerned with the smaller threats the League tended to pass over. Oliver Queen, a bland if likable enough chap who bore a striking conceptual resemblance to DC’s most famous masked crimefighter, Batman. For Those Who Came In Late: Last week, in response to the passing of writer Dennis O’Neil, we unearthed a lost entry from the COMICS 101 Archives exploring the early adventures of DC Comics’ Green Arrow, a.k.a.
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