Green Arrow: Secret Origins

All kinds of things I did a while ago have been coming out this month and last; the most recent issue of the SFRA Review contains my review of the book Moving Target: The History and Evolution of Green Arrow by Richard Gray.

Even though I was kind of overcommitted on reviews, I jumped at writing this one. Green Arrow is, actually, the character who got me into comics! On a forum, someone once linked to a history of Green Arrow on Scott Tipton's Comics 101, and it fascinated me, as detailed accounts of the creation of fictional properties I've never actually seen so often do. As I assert in my review, "Green Arrow is popular enough to have never faded into complete obscurity, but enough of an also-ran that writers, editors, and illustrators are always trying to reinvent him to keep him relevant to the times" (14). So he's had a Batman rip-off period, a goofy sci-fi period, a heavy-handed social commentary period, a sidekick to Green Lantern period, a gritty urban noir period, a killed-off-and-replaced-by-an-ethnic-legacy-character period, a middle-aged crisis period, and so on. The character is constantly transmuting, and I wanted to see it for myself.

So when I got into comics, I ended up reading every Green Arrow trade paperback ever published, borrowing them from the library, and then I ended up buying all the uncollected Green Arrow issues from the 1980s and 1990s. I believe it's a true statement that I've read every Green Arrow comic published 1983 to 2011!

Here's a couple paragraphs of the review:

Gray’s book argues that, as created, Green Arrow was a “blank slate” (10), beginning as a pastiche that was “[p]art Batman, cowboy, vigilante, Robin Hood and soldier” (9). But as time went on, writers were able to use that blank slate to their advantage: “what makes Green Arrow unique is precisely that he is so malleable in the hands of an assortment of writers, but consistently human in all of them” (6). The book provides a comprehensive overview of the character; Gray divides his history into a number of eras, overviewing and analyzing the character’s development in each one.

The book is at its best when Gray has a strong angle on a particular era and highlights aspects of the character that move beyond fan truisms. For example, many dismiss the character in his early years as a mere Batman rip-off, and there is an element of truth to this—but as the quotation in my previous paragraph shows, Gray identifies other aspects of the character’s early formulation that often go unnoticed, especially Westerns. At some point, “blank slate” transitioned into “everyman” (119), and this became the basis for most interpretations of the character from the 1970s onwards. In writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams’s 1970-1972 run, the former millionaire became a social crusader, standing up for the oppressed of America alongside Green Lantern. The “Hard Travelling Heroes” era has been much discussed because of O’Neil’s social commentary, but Gray provides a close reading of the underappreciated realistic art style of Neal Adams, who used “photomontage and similar pop-art influences” (83), and provided the character with a sense of movement and humanity that grounded the social commentary.

You can read the rest of the review here.

I think I have just one more thing I've already written that's yet to be published, so this fertile window will soon be over.