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The Vision of Hard-Traveling Heroes

Recent Public Square columns have explored some right-wing material available in the medium (here, here, here, here,and perhaps even here and here). To find this much after a short search for such content provided something of a surprise, since I began this series of columns under the assumption that the editorial bent of most comics monolithically tilted towards the left end of the political spectrum. This notion, perhaps, results from a modern plurality in the medium of such viewpoints; but even more so, the Father of Political Comics, the run of Green Lantern / Green Arrow anthologized in the Hard-Traveling Heroes collection created this impression when it came, first and hardest, on the scene.

If some comics serve as manifestoes, occasionally to the detriment of the cast involved, rarer pieces engage the reader, enlarge the scale of characters, undermine rather than reward the complacency of the audience, and drag their material into an altogether different editorial model.

And, while this sequence of comics generally examined issues of importance from a left-wing perspective, they did so with considerable sympathy for both protagonist Green Arrow and foil/straw man Green Lantern, such that political noise did not generally drown out the resonation of real human beings dragging themselves through the gray muck of difficult moral questions. As such, the piece has aged well in spite of the tendency of political notions to drift in and out of fashion.

The work survives the risks of obsolescence by remaining firmly welded to a view of the human condition and the flaws of our character - flaws that transcend ideological preference. As such, the piece in particular segments or in its entirety should endure as a model of an appropriate lens through which to examine current events and one's own culture. Ideology might have shaped the episodes and the perceptions of the characters, but more than political dogma comes through in this piece; Man, in his brutishness and sublimity, appears, too, and in this the work collectively performs its greatest feat.

The End of the Dream

If one attempted concisely to define the method (if not the purpose) of O'Neil's and Adams' efforts on Green Lantern / Green Arrow, one might begin with the concept of escaping from escapism. Selective human awareness means that no one probably ever attains to perfectly clear awareness, devoid of delusion or deliberate oversight, so it need offer no surprise that this work does not detail the human condition, with a comprehensive litany of flaws of the human character, in its entirety.

Given a monthly book that ran a thousand years, a theoretical immortal team of creators might craft a decent, although incomplete catalog, of that sort. O'Neil and Adams, however, had limited time to work in, constraints of genre with which to contend, and priorities to pursue. And, as a method, this earnest team sought to drag the superhero comic, possibly kicking, screaming, and fighting the development the whole way, from a shared universe of vapid daydreams and point it towards the world the reader lived in.

To understand what this gallant duo of creators intended, begin with the comics they knew from their own youth. If of a superheroic form, these comics followed a formula: The hero contended with some colorful crook, perhaps failing once or twice before rounding him up by the end of the story, to stand in the last panel wisecracking as uniformed policemen hauled away the scowling bad guy. Usually nobody got hurt. And usually nothing that happened in the story mattered at all. Or, to pick a favorite target of many humorless skeptics, we might visit the Archie comics of the day. These generally featured some improbably clear-faced adolescent contending with the specter of Trouble (as manifested by the anger of grown-ups like the school principal Mister Weatherbee or the girlfriend's father Mister Lodge) in the attempt to pursue some trifling goal like a party, a dance, doing the chores, or indulging in an impossibly large meal. These pieces could occasionally offer edifying platitudes, but generally did not explore themes of relevance to people with real problems. They attempted neither to speak to them nor about them.

To those who came of age in what we could describe as the Era of Problems - possibly definable from an undetermined point in the 1950s, and continuing indefinitely (and increasingly) into the future - such an approach would not do; it seemed a positive disservice to the reader and, furthermore, seemed to offend the Civic Man in the creator. The comics of "Relevance" emerged as a reaction to this historical oversight. Such a view of comics sought to drag the superhero from a life where he generally interacted only with others of his kind - costumed and extravagant oddballs - and back to the cities and towns where real people lived and, too often, suffered.

Beginning with the first chapter of this work, then, the setting changed drastically from rumbles with imaginary beasties on imaginary planets in gallant attempts to save members of imaginary races from fates just unpleasant enough to invite the intervention of a hero but not ugly enough to truly disturb the reader. Rather than on generally interchangeable space-opera planets, the entire moral saga began in a neighborhood of tenements with a squabble between tenants and a stereotypical slumlord.

The Void in the Soul

These books detail some of the symptoms of a void in the soul without really exploring where this void originated. But the symptoms themselves have eloquence. Linchpins of self-definition, such as national identity, religious faith, and social roles all came into disrepute, leaving too many bereft of key elements of identity. The reformist urge that actively discredited such notions did not, after all, leave in their wake the Rebuilt and Perfected Man; instead, they left a spiritual vacuum that human beings, hungering for identity and a role in the larger cosmos, sometimes choose to fill with garbage, if nothing else comes close to hand. Such garbage includes junk religion, junk politics, drugs ("junk"), junk philosophies like nihilism. The seventies came to earn the label Era of Lowered Standards to a great degree because of the poor attempts Everyman, unfairly stripped of his defining concepts, made to replace them. We can argue plausibly that flaws in the old rules meant they had to go sometime; but how, indeed, can we justify thrusting people out into a new anomic milieu without having prepared them to confront the essential existential nightmare this sometimes created?

Begin with the drift of Black Canary into a charismatic cult, led by some watered-down comic-book Manson. In 1971, allowing a superhero(ine) to drift into something of the sort played the role of "shocking incident," particularly in DC territory, where the superheroes seemed to rise and remain above human failings such as hero-worship and the need for meaning. Yet she found herself sucked in to a figure well known to those of us who remember Jim Jones, David Koresh, and various (and variously dramatic) others.

The corruption of Roy Harper - from role model of superheroic youth to just another mainliner fighting the draw of the needle - demonstrates more damage that follows the emptying of the soul. Furthermore, the shock of this event, pulling a Golden Age juvenile sidekick into the ugly side of contemporary headlines, threw cold water in the face of the very antiseptic feel the mostly-harmless Green Arrow stories of the 1950s and early 1960s had enjoyed.

And, out beyond, the bullies and goons that our emerald-clad duo run into with alarming frequency also show the symptom of the emptying of self. The very act of bullying, after all, does not suggest a completed or satisfied personality; rather, it implicates a lack of belief in one's own self-worth that demands increasing doses of demonstrated cruelty and domination in order to drive back the fear of submission or weakness.

Convenient Blindnesses

The theme of convenient blindness appears, from the very first chapter of this work, and recurs, with considerable irony, in later chapters. Throughout the various chapters of this interconnected work one can detect, in the background, the premise that Enlightenment will come to him who bothers to seek it, and the correlary notion that the general absence of awareness must result from a deliberate evasion of the ugly business of seeking self-awareness and insight about the world in general.

Begin with the selective redirection of attention which a nameless citizen attributes to Green Lantern in the first chapter of this work. Some have made the argument that, since perhaps everyone benefits from the efforts of a hero who repeatedly saves the world, one might spare him accusations of racism or apathy, but we can essentially let it go; far worse things would await this character in the future, including a tangled mess of character redefinition that may have passed the point of remedy by 1998.

With Green Arrow playing the role of Enlightened Man of Good Will, Green Lantern could serve as his foil, somewhat like Dr. John Watson, in that, though he had a fair degree of reasoning ability, he could not, given the right pieces of evidence, come up with the correct answer, as O'Neil and Adams chose to define it. Lantern, instead, played the role of protege and student, trying to overcome the density of middle American complacency through such lessons as Green Arrow chose to bludgeon home in the various episodes of the series.

Irony - often with considerable impact - attends the various oversights of the self-proclaimedly aware Oliver Queen. Incessantly attempting to remedy the holes in Green Lantern's education, this Mouth That Roared managed to miss the following: his ward's drift into addiction to heroin; his girlfriend's drift into a dangerous charismatic cult; his own mortality in the face of lethal force; the life-threatening dangers which his attempts to stir some mistreated Native Americans into militancy involved; and, perhaps, some others not immediately obvious to memory.

Thus, the accusation of complacency, while initially and heavy-handedly pointed at Green Lantern, returns to indict the very figure who promoted himself as complacency's antidote. However, the tendency to smugness infects the human personality in ways that a simple trip across America can't automatically cure; and the messianic pretensions of the professional reformist often provide some strong foundations for self-congratulation themselves, despite verbal bombast to the contrary.

Amateur Messianism

At moments, our Enlightened Hero, Green Arrow, resembles a fraud-armed-with-jeremiad, and this tone probably remains most responsible for the hostile criticism that this work occasionally attracts.

We might, if given to charity, excuse this excess by observing it as a likely consequence of a post-Robert Kennedy liberal synthesis. However, O'Neil and Adams do not attempt to delude the reader that someone might somehow fix the world by the simple act of proclaiming himself some kind of secular savior. Indeed, the figures who do take this approach - the cult leader Joshua and the unfortunate young man who dies after chaining himself to a jet engine in an environmental protest - do not tend to come to good ends.

One the one hand, one can cynically view such self-anointment as a colossal act of arrogance, inasmuch as many people have tried, and failed, to save the world or some aspect of it. On the other hand, one can defend the tendency by default, using the notions of the oft-quoted Rabbi Hillel: "If not us, who? If not now, when?" However we might tend to view this tendency, however, we can at least recognize it as characteristically thematic of the sixties and their aftermath. While many of the things concerned souls in the 1960s sought have become institutions circa 2001, no sense of inevitability attached to them in that earlier decade; and, furthermore, the "Great Man" theory of history held more credibility to those who, as adults, had experienced the impact of potent historical figures such as the principals of World War II, or, later, the various casualties of the 1960s such as Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. In such an atmosphere, bargain-basement messianism could flourish much more readily than in a later, more skeptical age that had watched too many figures rise and fail.

Regardless, the role of savior-of-whatever attaches, somewhat permanently, to Green Arrow, in spite of subsequent attempts by writers like Mike Grell to make the character more urban (without, necessarily, reworking his worldview), and a simplified version of the character as he appeared in this period informed later works like the end-of-the-millennium miniseries Brave and the Bold and Kevin Smith's relaunch of the character in Green Arrow.

A Place in the Canon

While the whole "let's get in a car and go find America" bit had become a cliche not long after the movie "Easy Rider" hit movie screens (and, perhaps, some time before through the vehicle of prose works by Beat authors), and a number of the ideas that permeate the whole "Hard-Traveling Heroes" arc tend to come into and go out of fashion frequently enough that the turnover wears heavy on such concepts, the overall piece weathers well and makes an excellent piece for anthologization.

Literary properties make for a good deal of the staying power of its appeal, in the sense that these stories defy the normal comics editorial model in which, traditionally, nothing ever happened to change either characters or the world they lived in. Character growth, in particular, routinely absented itself from superhero comics, even in the growing continuity-model pioneered across the aisle at Marvel Comics. Nonetheless, we can see the various principal players throughout this series suffering a number of blows to their own self-congratulation and a number of episodes of wrestling with a sometimes-unwanted onset of insight. The paraphernalia of colored tights, silly names, and unlikely abilities can only conceal this for those who do not wish to see.

And, of course, the general excellence of delivery makes a classic out of this material in another way. In some ways this work would serve as a swan song for Neal Adams in terms of ongoing series for major publishers - the intermittent character of his work on Marvel's Avengers arc roughly in this time period would mar its anthologization - and would do so when both Adams and O'Neil enjoyed peak periods of productivity (not their last, but perhaps their last with all the advantages of enthusiasm, talent, and opportunity to cross-fertilize as creators in one package).

A work that reads well, looks beautiful on the printed page, rattles the reader's cage and, perhaps, makes him think has done more than most of the comics ever printed. If it survives a few decades of the comics that follow, assuming the form doesn't vanish into a kind of morbid decadence in the interim, so much the better; having occurred at the cusp of the maturing of superhero comics and the episodic collapse of that form under the weight of continuity, these stories in some ways offer the best of the comics of the sixties and of the seventies.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 280. Completed 07-OCT-2001.