I really struggled with where to place this one on my list. I respect the hell out of the intent, but I feel like the execution after that first issue was very hit or miss. I wish I loved this series more than I do. Still, it was absolutely establishment-shattering for the time.


This is definitely one of my favorite moments in comic book history. I wish the rest of the run had lived up to the benchmark set here.

To the contrary, I find that to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read in comics. 

9. Green Lantern 76-87; 89, by O’Neil and Adams

   

Knock off the eye-rolls, kids!

I know, I know… these are issue-of-the-month morality plays replete with ladlefuls of leftover 60’s liberal pieties, overtly obvious analogues and a tendency toward preachiness.

HOW-ever, I’m going to have to pull rank and haul out the old, “Ya hadda be there” response.

Nobody in mainstream comics was doing anything close to what Adams and O’Neil were attempting here. We’d already seen O’Neil’s naturalistic stories and Adams’ photo-realistic style resurrect “The” Batman, and when O’Neil let his freak flag fly about so many issues that were dividing the country -- governmental corruption, racism, environmental destruction, pollution, women’s lib, conformity in a culture driven by consumption, the trial of the Chicago Eight (!),

  




and of course, drug addiction – readers like me were first stunned and then elated.

“Readers like me” were teenagers who had been set adrift by the sea-change that had begun with the JFK assassination. Thanks in large part to the power of the press, much that we had taken for granted about our country and our culture had been exposed as hollow pretense and we found ourselves on the other side of a deep divide. Realizing that you’ve been lied to, or that you just hadn’t been paying attention, made “readers like me” that much more receptive to O’Neil, Adams and their four-color pilgrims’ progress.

To see two DC heroes, who were so “establishment” that they made the Anderson family in “Father Knows Best” look like the Manson Family, and particularly two than whom no one had been stodgier, hit the road Easy Rider style to “look for America” was mind-blowing, if I may use a quaint expression.

Read it as a story created in reaction to a tumultuous time and you can forgive at least some of O’Neil’s ham-fisted characterization and melodramatic missteps. Adams’ art, though, is less of its time; in fact, I think it far outshines most of the work he's done in the years since. In Green Arrow’s facial expressions, he captures perfectly the anger and frustration many readers felt; in Green Lantern’s face and body language, he caught equally well the sense of bewilderment and disillusionment others felt at noticing “The Man” behind the curtain.

And I still think that the old black man, forever, ironically, and appropriately nameless, who confronts Green Lantern so simply and so eloquently is one of the greatest of all comic book characters.



I loved those issues then; I respect them now.

PS: "Hard-Traveling heroes" was NEVER the name of this saga. That's the bogus allegedly hip name they gave the reprint collections.

To expound, now that I'm back from a trip to jail to see clients.

20 or 30 years ago I likely would have put that run of GL on my list.  In the interim it really hasn't aged well for me.  The art is fine.  I still like Adams of that era just swell...though I've gotten a little bored with it.  The story feels incredibly dated and extremely heavy-handed.  Yep...I get that it was cutting edge for the time and for a decade or so to follow.  

My real issue is with that particular scene.  I'm fine with old black dude saying what he says.  GL's response, however, is laughable.  Not just based on his character as established at that point, but in general.  The appropriate response was, "I've saved the entire Earth this time and this time and this time and this time.  That includes the red-skins and the yellow-skins and the white-skins and the black-skins."  GL's response simply doesn't work for me.  I know what O'Neil was trying to do.  I just don't think he succeeded in any way.  

But that's exactly my problem with it.  I'm hearing the author's voice, not the character's voice.  I know what O'Neil and Adams are saying and want to say.  I just don't buy that Hal Jordan is saying that.