“Green Lantern/Green Arrow” and Bronze Age Relevance

Fans and scholars often remember Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams’ “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” as epitomizing the turn toward “relevance” within the Bronze Age of Comics. Let’s quantify and contextualize this claim, with the first issue of GL/GA as our guide. 1/13

The “ages of comics” periodization (Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, etc.) inevitably simplifies comics history and privileges superhero comics. But certain series and moments do align well with the “ages” model, which is why it endures. Green Lantern/Green Arrow is one such series. 2/13

There’s a conceptual rejection of the Silver Age in the decision to spotlight Green Lantern Hal Jordan’s crisis of faith. Jordan’s 1959 debut, where he replaced & updated a Golden Age character, was modelled after the 1956 debut of the new Flash, often cited as the start of the Silver Age. 3/13

The Silver Age is associated with the optimistic rejuvenation of superheroes in new scientifically oriented contexts. Where the Golden Age version of Green Lantern was powered by magic, Hal Jordan is a Space Age test pilot who joins a squad of super-scientific intergalactic police. 4/13

The first page of Green Lantern #76, which debuts the Green Lantern/Green Arrow era, shows a softly smiling Hal Jordan soaring above a bustling cityscape devoid of people, secure in his Silver Age smugness. The captions underscore this smugness and this story’s determination to challenge it. 5/13

He decides to check in on Green Arrow, but as he soars toward the street, finds a crowd attacking an older man in a suit. Declaring an intention to teach proper respect for law & order, Hal protects the older man and makes a green cage to send his attackers directly to the police station. 6/13

But instead of being thanked for his heroism, Hal is hit with a can of beans that becomes a torrent of trash. Hal starts to retaliate before Green Arrow compels him to (literally) change his perspective. Hal looks up as Oliver drops down, into the street & the messiness of earthly conflict. 7/13

Echoing Jacob Riis’ classic expose “How the Other Half Lives,” Oliver invites Hal to observe the poor living conditions in the apartment building owned by the landlord Hal unwittingly protected, who plans to further disenfranchise the tenants by evicting them to build a parking lot. 8/13

While sympathetic to the plight of the tenants, Hal resists Oliver’s attempt to implicate him in their systemic marginalization, saying he was just doing his job upholding the law. Not pulling any punches, Oliver says that if he only cares about following orders, Hal’s as good as a Nazi. 9/13

In a much-quoted & reproduced scene, Hal is then confronted by an elderly Black man who accuses him of caring more about multicoloured space aliens than social conflicts at home. This is obvious metacommentary on the superhero genre in general, of which Hal becomes representative. 10/13

On the next page, O’Neil hammers home his critique in an internal monologue where Hal reflects on the sudden realization that “bad doesn’t have to be a bug-eyed monster or evil scientist.” Instead, “evil was all around me… disguised as familiar, everyday people and places!” 11/13

Hal’s monologue is a neat summation of the Bronze Age turn to relevance as a turn away from fantastic metaphors. This is further underscored by the issue’s epilogue, in which Green Arrow explicitly says that the greatest threat to America is the “moral cancer” of its internal social problems. 12/13

The Bronze Age mission of Green Lantern & Green Arrow becomes a rambling roadtrip across America, not pursuing any specific supervillain but rather “searching for a special kind of truth… searching for themselves.” Metatextually, it’s a search for new ways to tell stories with superheroes. 13/13