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Stalling His Way Back: Green Arrow

The mid-1990s at DC seemed stuffed to overflowing with death, death, and more death. Superman died around 1992 or 1993; Green Lantern (as Parallax) followed in 1994 (and would come back to die again a couple of years later); and shortly after Hal Jordan / Green Lantern / Parallax went to whatever passes for the Great Beyond in comics, Green Arrow also met his maker.

Some comics readers hold to a cynical idea that nonethless holds considerable predictive value. We may call this the "Marvel Death Principle," although it seems equally true for comics by the major publishers. The principle states "No one is really dead but Bucky [Barnes]."

Even those of us who have never heard the Principle stated so cleanly understand it fairly well. So we need neither show excesses of sadness about the passing of some favored character, nor fake surprise when he returns.

As I write, Oliver Queen has already returned, but the story has not yet appeared.

The Green Arrow Problem

Green Arrow appeared with the great birth of Golden Age heroes between 1938 and 1942 (with a few stragglers later on). He appeared as a backing feature in the multi-story comics of that far-off day when a comic book contained an anthology of (mostly disposible) stories by a variety of artists and writers. Like many heroes of his day, he failed to achieve dominance of a comic title (as Superman had overtaken Action Comics and Batman similarly overtook Detective Comics). Thus, while this relegated him to the back pages of other titles, it also immunized him somewhat to the kind of limbo-state enjoyed by characters who appeared in titles that poor sales forced publishers to cancel.

Green Arrow, therefore, did not have to disappear in the same way that the more well-known Golden Agers, like almost the entire membership of the Justice Society did. He had no rug to pull out from under him. Nonetheless, it took quite a span for him to become an institution. His character had enjoyed no significant developments in twenty-five years and had enjoyed only minor changes that mostly echoed the gimmickry of the sixties Batman concept. The character did not appear in his own regular ongoing series until over forty years since his original creation.

We can therefore call him a sleeper.

None of this demonstrates that no one ever tried to make the character work. DC had something in mind when they assigned Jack Kirby to redraft his origin in the fifties, and he did appear as a back up feature again after that point, becoming a poor-man's Batman. However, hand-me-down Arrowcaves, Arrowplanes, and Arrowcars failed to make the character compel. Neal Adams and Dennis O'Neil had considerably more success in his reworking of the character: he invested him with a stylish new look, a personality, a point of view, and circumstances that suggested a life to which normal persons might more readily relate. However, the title in which the new Green Arrow first appeared did not endure, and he became, once again, a supporting character, either as an out-of-place figure in Justice League of America or as a backup feature in Action Comics in the hands that had remade him.

He did not really succeed until Mike Grell, one of DC's lights of the seventies and now an esteemed figure in independent and "New" comics, decided to work upon him himself. Grell's stories stripped him of much of his superheroic baggage, replacing Adams' design with one more suggestive of the real logistics of archery. Grell took away the silly gadget-arrows (unlike Marvel's Hawkeye, who still uses a variety of absurd devices with arrows). Following the head start that the character enjoyed with a new approach (beginning when he quit the Justice League back in 1980), Grell sank Green Arrow up to the neck in a lurid comic-book Seattle where the hero would confront drug dealers, rapists, pedophiles, "fag-bashers," and other villains more appropriate to the the fears of the man in the street.

The villains of Grell's tenure and later represented the threats perceived by a subset of Everyman, for whom Adams, O'Neil, and Grell all saw Green Arrow as a champion. That this Everyman seemed frequently to view the world through a liberal / "progressive" jaundice represents a seemingly inevitable tendency within post-1963 comics to lack the ability to see beyond what matters to the American center (and not-so-center) left wing.

Green Arrow approached the hundred-issue mark, and sales must have suggested that the talent on the title had wrung all the saleable stories out of the concept already. DC decided to replace Green Arrow with a younger version and kill him off.

Scale and Inflation

In spite of the Marvel Revolution, which made Green Arrow's flowering from Batman wannabe to deeper human being possible, Green Arrow became, in a real sense, obsolescent. I do not intend this to mean that the character concept lacks the potential for indefinite future stories; but comics, themselves, after the sixties, no longer kept to a reasonably human scale.

A man with a longbow and steel-tipped arrows and his guts and his fists would have done very well in the comic-book environments of the 1940s. When the major menaces of that day appeared, one encountered mad scientists with ray devices that either threatened to level the city, or created giant gorillas, or turned the citizens into monsters. A fist, hammer, or arrow could deal with both the scientist and his invention. Similarly, spies and bandits limited to bullets and knives remained on a scale suited to such a character.

The sixties saw the real beginnings of significant inflationary developments in comics. Not in price (though that happened, too), but in hero scale and scope of stories, did these tales bloat and engorge in a process that continued unabated until 1985, when superheroes started fighting villains that could and would destroy the entire universe over and over again (an infinite number of times). At that point, a talented man in a costume, or even a nigh-omnipotent godling in whatever he chose to wear, became rather insignificant. For more on the topic of comics inflation, see "The Seven Deadly Sins of Comics, Part I: Inflation."

Long before that point, Green Arrow had become awkward and out-of-place in the monthly tales of a Justice League that had to save the once per issue. One can make a trick arrow only so good, after all. Supervillains after 1964 had started to become so powerful that comics became a place where only Batman could flourish without powers, and then only by splitting hairs about the difference between "abilities augmented through training" and "super-powers," a difference made truly irrelevant by numbers of stunts Batman pulled over the years that no human being will ever reproduce.

The Next Generation

Starting in 1985, furthermore, DC had begun cycling out some of its key players. The character "Kid Flash" took the name and role of his mentor after the death of the same in Crisis on Infinite Earths. DC had thus symbolically closed its own Silver Age with the extinction of the hero who had ushered in said age way back in 1956. The ugly business of cementing a new and retroactive history might have slowed down DC's changing of the guard, but again in 1994 DC replaced one of its central players (Green Lantern) with a younger and more period successor. Not long later, Green Arrow, too, met an unpleasant if perhaps overdue end, to have his name and place filled by his son Connor Hawke.

Strange things move editorial policies. For instance, Green Lantern's books had decent figures relative to comparable titles when DC management decided to replace the Hal Jordan character as Green Lantern. Similarly, the new Green Arrow ran for three years in the same title as Oliver Queen had for the eight previous, yet the title saw cancellation not based on sales.

Sneaking Back from the Underworld

Based on a pitch by Kevin Smith, a movie scriptwriter who occasionally dabbles in comics, DC decided to forego its commitment to the next Green Arrow character. Connor Hawke had run as the Green Arrow for perhaps three years in the title; sales justified continuing the title in the same way as did the sales of other titles.

However, Smith wanted to work on a Green Arrow project starring Oliver Queen. DC therefore obligingly cancelled Green Arrow in order to clear the field for Smith's project and roughly dumped Connor Hawke into limbo, just as a variety of writers had begun to make the character mesh well with the other generations of superheroes that comprise the DC universe.

Before he could actually begin work on the new Green Arrow, however, Smith committed to a Daredevil project in Marvel's "Marvel Knights" line of books. By itself this wouldn't slow Smith down - he writes scripts and comics as the occasion demands - but Smith wanted the same penciler that he has on Daredevil, and that commitment keeps the penciler DC promised he could have from beginning work on a Green Arrow book. The success of Daredevil keeps the book running and puts off the Green Arrow project further into a more distant and less likely future, though Smith still claims he intends to pursue the project.

The average reader anticipating something with either Connor Hawke or Oliver Queen might not realize that DC has brought Oliver Queen back. DC, to foreshadow a project it expected to begin soon (rather than "later", "later yet", or "never") set some clues about the abortive new Green Arrow title in the last pages of the last issue of the old series. Note some panels from a late sequence in that title, where mysterious pairs of feet appear and disappear from Oliver Queen's grave (depicted below).

The most likely interpretation of this sequence suggests that Hal Jordan, as Parallax, came to visit the site of Oliver Queen's grave (Parallax' role as a time-traveler means that sequential constraints do not affect his actions in a logical, predictable way). Perhaps moved by nostalgia or his own questionable notions of justice, Parallax (or his feet, since we see no more of him here) recreates a pair of legs that seem to belong to Oliver Queen in his last days as Green Arrow. Then the duo disappears.

Therefore, as of Green Arrow #137, Oliver Queen presumably returned from the dead, ready to dive into his new, never-to-be-realized series. And his fans waited, through each new announcement of postponement, until years had passed.

Oliver Queen came back to nowhere in particular and remained so invisible from that point forward that readers might question the real difference between this state and his earlier death. If many superheroes suffer singularly pointless deaths, Green Arrow has done this one better by suffering an almost altogether pointless resurrection.

Sometimes weird laws drive developments in comics. To this day, no one really understands the reasoning underlying events like the year when Superman turned blue, split into a red and a blue form, then disappeared fighting monsters to return in his original form with no particular explanation.

We at least know why Green Arrow came back from the dead (so that he could appear in a newly-pitched Green Arrow project) and why it didn't amount to anything (see 1999 issues of Daredevil, with the footnote that the latter title barely manages to print anywhere near its schedule).

The return of Oliver Queen may ultimately go down in comics history as the least dramatic return from the dead in mainstream comics. Rather than the usual bombast and hooplah that accompany such an event, DC buried it in a footnote on the last page of a cancelled book.