Firing Line
or The Indomitable Spirit Of DC Comics in the face of Neoliberalism, As Witnessed By Green Arrow
Comics fucking suck. They’re everywhere, their fans suck, the movies they turn into suck, the people that watch them suck, and the people that complain about them suck. But, it used to be a lot better. Nowadays the only time this floundering enterprise reaches the news is when some publisher somewhere decides that a hot button issue from 8 years ago is safe enough to put in a book. It wasn’t always like this, Superman wasn’t peacefully protesting climate change, Static Shock wasn’t arguing for police reform, there was a time when news traveled a little slower and comic books had higher readership. When stories weren’t afraid to get punchy first and get headlines later. During the heyday of American comics, commonly referred to as the Golden Age, there was a very strong barrier between fiction and current events. Barring the occasional celebrity cameo, comics were mostly their own worlds, with their own rules. This isn’t inherently a good or bad thing. As we will explore, very powerful stories have been crafted with the aid of pulling from headlines. However, writers ignoring, or dressing topics up to the point they are indistinguishable from reality, while also retaining the critique only possible with fiction, is entirely a lost art at this point.
Now, I’m not going to talk about Watchmen. I know it and The Dark Knight Returns are the apex of cutting edge political fiction. What I want to talk about is a lesser known, but still often appreciated comic that dealt head on with the issues plaguing modern society. Not from a lofty, sweeping philosophical bend like its peers, but from direct interaction with people affected by said problems. This also isn’t a “the secret Marxist themes of Harry Potter” essay, the book I’m showcasing has actual issues front and center being solved, in part with revolutionary schools of thought. I’m talking about the incredible near decade run of Green Arrow written by Mike Grell.
But first, some background: Green Arrow is a strange character, like so many created during the Golden and Silver Ages of comics, he’s an attempt at putting a unique spin on a popular piece of media. Despite looking at first like a cheap Robin Hood knockoff, the inspiration for Green Arrow came from a 1940 Theatrical Serial called The Green Archer, based on a novel of the same name loosely inspired by the story of Robin Hood. Creator Mort Weisinger took the Green Archer, and added a touch of another popular character, owned by DC, Batman. Debuting in More Fun Comics #73 (November 1941), The Green Arrow was wealthy playboy Oliver Queen, who upon seeing the Arrow Signal would rush down to his Arrow Cave and hop in his Arrow Plane to vanquish mobsters. He even had a teen sidekick, Speedy, named for his quick fire use of the bow taught to him by a Native American tribe. And it’s in this wholesale cribbing, in my opinion, that a rare form of talent arises, The Art Of The Steal; or the ability to borrow so many aspects from so many different places that you Ship Of Theseus yourself into a unique piece of fiction. It’s why I personally dislike criticisms of works like Star Wars and The Matrix as “derivative”. I like all the works of fiction the Matrix and Star Wars are inspired from, and making something uncompromisingly enjoyable is far more palatable than the IP Nostalgia farm of works like the Guardians of The Galaxy films or Ready Player One. Works where the influences are laid bare in front of the viewer and commented on in semi ironic fashion. However, despite Green Arrow’s charming origin and quaint adventures, after a decade he was resigned to back-up features in Superboy comics.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the Green Arrow was plucked up and saved from mediocrity, sent on a path towards greatness that would take another 20 years to realize. Artist Neal Adams together with the late Dennis O’Neil, took the formula they’d first used to great success revitalizing Batman and tried it on Green Arrow. First, they altered him physically, the clean shaven hero was made scruffy, given his iconic long blond goatee. His costume was modernized from a bright green Archer’s frock to a dark green spandex ensemble that has become Arrow’s default look henceforth. Finally, and arguably most importantly, they altered the character philosophically, stripping him of his wealth and making him politically left wing, not a 1970s liberal, but explicitly an anarchist in the Weather Underground sense of the word. In the Green Arrow and Green Lantern series that followed this change, he was teamed up with space cop Hal Jordan, an establishment conformist who needed his eyes opened to the inequality he rarely encountered. In the first issue, the pair team up to defeat a redlining slum lord leasing dangerously under-repaired properties to racial minorities, a move endorsed by the racist police and the city, who were happy to turn the properties into shopping centers and parking lots once they collapsed on their occupants. The stories were pulled from the headlines but altered for their world, emotionally abusive teachers had psychic powers, judicial racism on alien planets, etc. Occasionally, the walls between reality and fiction would blur, most noticeably in issue 85, where the absent Speedy had been hooked on heroin. There were no super villains in this issue, and for an anti drug PSA coming out in the 1970s, it wasn’t racist. Addiction affected all races, and the pusher behind this drug wasn’t some menacing Mexican or Chinese national, but a respectable businessman, a local celebrity white guy in a suit and tie.
Unfortunately, even these kinds of stories, which for the time were mostly unheard of, were not enough to save The Green Arrow from his destiny, and the duo returned to being a backup feature. The 1970s comics audience weren’t ready for media that dealt with these problems head on. Even though they were received well critically and the story is considered a classic, they just couldn’t convince audiences that the real world was interesting enough. In a twist of irony, New York City Mayor John Lindsay congratulated Adams and O’Neil in a letter, whether he had read the initial arc where big city police were portrayed as racist jackbooted thugs for slum lords, a clear metaphor for the problems plaguing cities like New York, is unknown. I think part of the reason that the Adams and O’Neil series is seen as a classic while the Grell series isn’t, is best summed up by the author himself. In a letter published before a 1983 reprint of the series, O’Neil says, “We would dramatize issues. We would not resolve them. We were not in the polemic business. I was smart enough to know enormously complex problems couldn’t be dissected within the limitations of a 25 page comic book”. A noble effort to understand one’s limitations aside, this isn’t necessarily true. The problem came from the debate like structure of the comic itself. Green Lantern was a cop, and as O’Neil himself states in the same letter “a crypto-fascist”. However this crypto-fascist was allowed to be right within the confines of the story just as many times as Green Arrow was, even when he didn’t have an answer. Problems were often debated, and the people they affected were little more than window dressing to be cycled off after the issue was over.
Sure the evil landlord goes to jail, but the poor people living in it are still poor, there’s surely more than one exploitative landlord in the world. To a certain extent, this reliance on the unchanging status quo is part and parcel of all modern superhero comics, and certainly a decent reason why they are derided as fascist wish fulfillment, but this too would change.
Once more the Green Arrow Character was plucked from a fate of occasional appearances in back up features of The Flash and thrust not into a new ongoing, but the exciting new frontier of Direct Market comics. Unlike traditional comics, these never saw the newsstands, you had to either get them at your local comic book shop or order directly from DC themselves. The reason for this deviation was content, a Direct Market comic could have nudity, deal with explicit themes, and all without ever attracting the ire of censors. The miniseries Green Arrow: Longbow Hunters, written and drawn by Mike Grell, was one of the first and most well received of the Direct Market Mature Audiences line, colloquially known as The Black Label. The key to its success was looking at the thin wall between headline and fiction, and taking a sledgehammer to it. Gone were the super villains, gone were other costumed heroes or even fictional cities, as the series took place in 1980s Seattle. Despite being one of the first comics to do this grounded retread, it is arguably the best. He’s not interacting with real people, this is still fiction where a man in a costume shoots criminals with arrows and gets away with it, but the writing takes careful steps to ask itself “how would this world based on ours evolve and change with every story beat”. By the end of the story, the world that the Green Arrow inhabits is radically different from how it began, and the character has been changed by these same events.
I do not exaggerate when every half thought out criticism brought up in regards to Batman is already solved here. Even the pretense of a man running around in tights is precisely examined from the perspective of someone who has done it. I dare say that the aging Green Arrow, with his receding hairline and wishes to settle down, is a more nuanced look at an old superhero than both the elderly Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Returns and Nite Owl in Watchmen. Where both of these reflect the angry bitterness at the heart of the feelings of their creators, Grell’s Oliver feels both joy and sadness reminiscing (and soft retconning) his origin to his girlfriend Dinah ( the second Black Canary) . In an incredible spread by Grell in issue one, he explains that his life trapped on an uninhabited island, single-handedly fighting off smugglers with a makeshift bow was sensationalism, and he actually simply rounded up a few stoners smuggling marijuana back to the states.
This simple change gets to the core of what this series does so well: offering a sobering meta-look at the character of Green Arrow not unlike how someone would reflect on their own life; in a sense also not unlike what I’m doing right now. Where now we have meta narrative legacy films that tear down the importance of the original character to build up a new one, here events are given new context, but their importance stays the same. Yes Oliver Queen went on that island in part out of suicidal narcissism, yes that narcissism lead to the creation and proliferation of a false heroic origin, but he still went on to do good out of that lie. This revelation isn’t therapeutic, talking it out with someone is not the solution to all of the problems put forward, and Oliver continues to exhibit the narcissistic behavior that lead him to center himself in so many people’s problems as the Green Arrow. Of course there’s also the matter of a serial killer on the loose.
Being written and released in 1987, murder was on everyone’s brain. According to Wikipedia, over 25 serial killers were active during 1987, 16 of which began their activity that year. The burgeoning television mass media enterprise was finally winning key territory from newspapers as the 24 hour news cycle entered its 7th year of existence. Just two generations removed from the invention of the television, Americans were consuming it like never before. It was possible to get finance, weather, global crime, and even presidential addresses streamed into your home at nearly any hour. For the average person, it must have been total insanity. This 24/7 anxiety plays a core part of the narrative in Longbow Hunters, and many other comics coming out at the time. The Seattle in Longbow Hunters mirrors most of the world at the time, which is to say overtly reactionary in the sociopolitical sense; a world that feels on the brink of chaos, where one bad news cycle could start a riot.
Not one but 4 serial killers end up stalking the streets of Seattle through the events of our story, preying on everyone from the oft forgotten dredges of society to its wealthiest members. When it is revealed at the climax of issue one that the so called Seattle Slasher is a homeless mentally ill Vietnam veteran, we are given a chance to peer into the psyche of both the character, and the author who served in Air Force logistics during that same war. The Slasher, whose full name was never revealed is given brief flashbacks throughout the first issue. Serving as a tunnel rat, the Slasher is recruited during the war to serve as an assassin of opportunity for none other than the CIA. Knowing of his violent urges and rapidly outliving his usefulness, they decide to illegally extend his tour of duty and send him deep into the theater of combat. Presumably he survives this and the newspaper clippings that adorn his underground hovel back home are rife with references to other unsolved serial killings throughout the country implied to be his handiwork. Each of the flashbacks ends with the murder of a sex worker.
From a modern lens, this trope can be considered very overused, going back over a century, even overseas to when fear of Jack The Ripper gripped the British populace. Though I am not one to give into socially liberal justification for the existence of media, nor am I quick to label anything problematic, I’m sure the argument could be made for this mini to be so on account of the use of sex workers as window dressing for violent killings. That being said, this argument of “swerfism” is a very weak one. While the Slasher is never given more than a last name and dies very unceremoniously as the result of getting in the way of another serial killer, his victims lives are explored in great detail. Perhaps out of some subversion of a trope that didn’t even have a name at the time, or perhaps out of an incredibly lucky act of foresight, Grell spends quite a bit of time with all of the on screen victims shortly before their death. They are more than just their profession, they are given names and feelings that are ultimately ripped short, a fate ironically also met by their killer. While they are given final justice, the Seattle Slasher as an idea lives on in reactionary fervor, as bodies are added to his count posthumously due to the sadly ubiquitous nature of violence against women with knives. That being said, though the Seattle Slasher bleeds to death in the last pages of issue one, the story is anything but over.
Issue 2 serves as a set up piece, the middle act both reacting to and setting up things that will be reacted to later. The Robin Hood Killer, thought by police to potentially be The Green Arrow, is in actuality Shado, a Japanese woman seeking revenge for atrocities and exploitation done to her by soldiers in the American occupation after the second World War. Though on the surface a simple revenge story, Grell elevates this by taking a principled stance against the Japan fear that was sweeping the country at the time. Japanese business was not depicted as some foreign devil from the east that would destroy our way of life, instead we were the invaders. From seeds buried in the occupation and internment camps came a new class of American greed looted from Asian bodies. The only ability allowing Shado to get recompense for the stolen wealth is a honed violence. This isn’t a subtext reading, the murders committed by Shado are justified in itself by the colonial violence visited to her upon her people. The liberal Green Arrow, whom the audience is intended to identify with, is made to understand this line of thought, first out of opportunity when he unconsciously begs for the Slasher to be killed. However, in another brilliant stroke of foresight it is lived experience which pushes Oliver firmly into the radical sphere. In a particularly haunting set of panels, the liberal idealist is brought to face his own worldview simply through the use of close ups.
The lived experience in question is the introduction of the 3rd killer, which blossoms the story from a simple critique of corrupt capitalism to a naked critique of American Imperialism as a whole. Unlike the first two, the man only known as Jankowski doesn’t kill out of a mental or societal compulsion, but at the behest of capital itself. Dinah, on the tail of local coke manufacturing, discovers that the same shipping company that grew off of Shado’s peoples stolen wealth has again decided to prosper off the lives of people by dealing drugs to the Seattle community. After being caught attempting to leverage a local dealer she is taken to Jankowski, an employee of the shipping company that uses his murderous urges for the express purpose of harming threats to the company. Dinah is beaten, tortured, abused physically and sexually, ultimately left to slowly die naked in a warehouse. Oliver, upon seeing the brutality of capital touch those closest to him, kills Jankowski without hesitation.
This is not a trivial event played out for the authors sick kicks or shock value. Jankowski’s death was not entirely the answer here, it haunts Oliver for the rest of Grell’s time with the character. The term “fridging” (something I will address in its own piece), or violence against women as a plot device does not apply here. The violence depicted towards women in the pages of this issue are treated with every respect towards real survivors possible. The survivors, in this case Dinah and Oliver, are changed irrevocably by these actions. We’re not supposed to feel good about any of the acts committed by either party. In the coming issues of the series that follows this, we see them in therapy due in part to these events, a choice that is not made lightly. This is a traumatic experience in every sense of the word.
The final issue of the Longbow Hunters is a sort of wrap up so to speak, focusing more on the remaining few people left to be killed by Shado. Seeming random to outsiders, the only aspect connecting all of the victims was a distinct lack of any military record, despite being young men during the second World War. The enigmatic Magnor, executive of the shipping company in the previous issue, hires the fourth and final killer of our story; a soldier of fortune named Eddie Fyres. Fyres actually goes on to become one of the only recurring characters in this series and appears in most Green Arrow media to follow this. The timid looking mercenary symbolizes a synthesis of the other killers: being both a killer for capital, and a soldier giving into his bloodlust. In the final issues climax, the 3 remaining killers are drawn to the wild forests of Mount Ranier in an attempt to settle the vendetta with Magnor’s blood money; Shado, acting as the embodiment of anti colonial justice, Fyres as the armed shield of capital, and Green Arrow as the white moderate mediator. In the process they are stripped from their humanity, becoming predator stalking the trees relying only on anima reaction. Here, calling back to the urban showdown in issue one we see that Green Arrow too has become a killer, no better or worse than his antagonists.
While the trio stalk one another through the forest, a deal is brokered between Japanese and American. Fueled with cocaine money laundered through Contra rebels, the financial debt is seemingly settled between the Yakuza and Magnor’s compatriots. The real life Iran-Contra affair differs little from the depiction here, albeit with an origin change as it is revealed that Magnor and his men were O.S.S supervisors who looted resources from wealthy Japanese-American citizens during the internment. After stealing millions in Yakuza gold from a businessman revealed to be Shado’s father, the men used their now C.I.A connections to erase any history of military involvement during the war, removing any link from their criminal past to their future as wealthy businessmen. Later, to aid their pocketbook, the men financed right wing South American regimes in exchange for cocaine, the street profits of which were then fed back into companies like these as revenue. Barring superheroes and the Yakuza, all of this actually happened. As this book was being written, the Reagan administration was making appearances on nightly television denying these exact same events. The book divulges again from reality as, shortly after the deal goes bad, Magnor and company are assassinated and Green Arrow walks away with almost half a million in freshly laundered money, money that becomes a driving force in the following series. In reality the people involved all wound up very much alive with lucrative careers in politics and elsewhere, to our eternal shame. The raw power coming off of these beautiful pages I have showcased is in part yes due to the skill of the artist, but it would be little without Mike Grell looking at the world around him and inserting a power needed to bring true justice to the world he sees. The world of Green Arrow is reactionary, just like ours is, but by self criticizing and internalizing new, potentially different ideas from people who have lived experiences, the character, and hopefully the audience is able to transcend simple reaction.
Following this incredible 3 issue run of comics, Grell would first pen an ongoing sequel, called simply Green Arrow and later a prequel miniseries. The ongoing series would cover everything from poaching to male sexual assault, even coming out for LGBT rights in 1988, years before most would even acknowledge their existence. Following Grells lengthy run, the character was unceremoniously killed off and replaced first with Oliver’s son Connor, and later with a version of Oliver more in line with the Adams/O’Neil version. The true death of the franchise, in my opinion, came when famous crier Kevin Smith made his mark on the run. In a fitting twist of fate, like so many of the radical generation before us, it was politics that finally broke the revolutionary spirit of Green Arrow as he ended up becoming the mayor of the Fictional Star City. To this date, no Green Arrow comics have sold as many units as the Grell Run. The Longbow Hunters did surprisingly well for a limited series, being nominated for an Eisner award, ultimately losing to Watchmen, which would start a trend of the series being stuck in the shadow of iconic stories like Watchmen. While Watchmen has not gone out of print since its inception, outside of the Longbow Hunters, The Grell run has only seen regular printing in expensive omnibuses that can run those curious well into the 300 dollar range for the set. A decently priced set of trade paperbacks was recently printed, though its availability is shaky. For those wanting to experience the saga in its original format, inexpensive ebay lots of the original floppy run are not uncommon, and may provide an inexpensive alternative.
Ultimately, it was chance that brought me to this series. I have never existed on this earth at the same time that Mike Grell was writing Green Arrow, his series finished several years before I was born. Truth be told , it could be said I was never supposed to read this book. A librarian I was acquaintances with gave me issue number 34 of Green Arrow, it was something her son had assumed had value due to its almost 30 years of age, but after taking it to a local shop for appraisal found that it didn’t meet the requirements for anything other than the dollar bin. During a lull in my final class of the day, I took the yellowed book out of my backpack, and I am ashamed to say what first drew me to the book was a particularly lurid scene of Oliver and Dinah locked in embrace, I had never seen anything like it. Growing up in the age of very corporate comics, sexuality of any detail was tantamount to career suicide, and to a 14 year old like myself, felt forbidden. What drew me past the breasts was something else rare to modern comics: a good hard hitting story. The plot wasn’t even self contained but I still felt intellectually sated by half tales of men framed for terrorism by the FBI and physical ramifications of past trauma. A small period of time later, I spent what little money I had at my local comic book shop on as many Green Arrows as I could get my hands on, at least the ones that were in the sale bin. I was so captivated that I own a majority of the over half decade run in single issues. Despite this, the series is rarely discussed outside of comic fans, and yet it offers the answers to so much of what people claim to want from their superheroes. Later in the series, Green Arrow uses the stolen funds to open an outreach center, and frequently defers going after simple property crime, instead tackling these hot button issues until the book was folded back into the DC universe proper. While we never got to see the aftermath of a world where the Iran-Contra Affair was solved with revolutionary justice, there is at least a book out there that plants these important seeds.
Hi, Netscape here. This is just part one in an eventual series covering the often forgotten political history in DC’s Mature Audience line. Next time, we’ll be taking a look at postmodern fascism through the lens of Marv Wolfman’s Vigilante, and more! Postcards will always remain free, but if you’d like to throw me a bone for the time spent researching and reading and writing, the subscribe functions are left on as a tip jar. You can also send me money through that scary twitter tip jar thingy, but I’m sure they’ll take it away again when I say no no words. I hope you’ve enjoyed this
All Love
-Netscape