Green Lantern Green Arrow : : the Collection

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Originally published in single magazine form in Green Lantern 76-82.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

green lantern is awesome! submitted by nasuaada on July 27, 2011, 4:43pm green lantern is awesome!

The stories that made comics RELEVANT (to the real world. Really). submitted by ZackTheCardshark on July 9, 2012, 9:11am Okay, first point:

green lantern is awesome!

This "review" is slightly less sickening in its frequency than "batman is awesome!", which comes up even more often. (And that's not even mentioning "good," "great," "funny," "cool," and all the rest. The average number of words in a review in this catalog is something like three.) I powerfully hate these "reviews" polluting the AADL catalog, and nasuaada (the name is a misspelling of the name of the warrior princess in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance series) gets my deepest contempt (and the contempt of everyone else who would appreciate a comic book review that actually gives them some information. For all of you, my brothers and sisters, what follows will feel like a breath of fresh air). But I digress, a lot.

Okay, now I've got that off my chest, I'll show you what a review is.

To begin with, you point out any relevant facts about the literature in question. Green Lantern/Green Arrow, when first published in monthly comic book form, rocked the comic-book industry. For the previous thirty-odd years, comics had had pretty close to nothing at all to do with "the real world," and the menaces that the colorful heroes fought (alien invasions every other month, rampaging indestructible giant robots, that sort of thing) were not anything like the menaces that our world faced (poverty, petty crime, pollution, and everything else under the sun). In the early years of comics, Superman actually had sometimes dealt with corruption, domestic violence, and other "real world" problems, but that quickly dropped out of the stories, leaving the unique art form of comic books with no relevance to "the real world."

Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil changed all that when they took over Green Lantern magazine and made Green Arrow his co-star. Suddenly, they began producing stories about a couple of "Hard-Traveling Heroes" (as the duo came to be called) confronting poverty, civil rights abuses, and many other human ills, all of which at the time were supposed to have no place in comics. (Remember, this was more than forty years ago.)

And the reality that rocked the industry was that these encounters between superheroes and real-world issues were not only interesting for their relevance, but they also made great reading!

And thus began what would become a revolution in comics, which it really isn't my place to expand on here. I'll go on to discuss the actual stories now, all right? And for all of you potential review-writers out there, you should start a section like this by clearly laying out the premise of the stories, before you go on to talk about - personal opinions, for example. (Please, please, don't ever give us a review that's made of nothing but personal opinions!)

The premise is simple and fascinating. Two superheroes, both in fact mortal men, but uniquely skilled with their respective unique weaponry, face the world together - but the heroes are so unlike each other in how they indeed face it, it's a wonder they ever became friends.

Green Lantern, a member of a pan-galactic police force of 3600 Green Lanterns, armed with a ring of power, the mightiest weapon in the universe. With it, he can literally do anything - absolutely anything at all - as long as his willpower is strong enough. And it pretty much always is. He is confident in the rightness of his cause, his mission to root out evil and destroy it - after all, he IS a cop.both in fact mortal men who are skilled with unique weaponry,

Green Arrow, a super-rich industrialist turned penniless at the hands of former friends, armed with a sturdy bow and a truly incredible collection of high-tech arrows he designed and built himself. His skill with them is supreme. Despite his flashy green suit, he is, quite unlike GL, utterly one with the common man. He sees more evil in corrupt politicians than in homeless people driven to mugging. It is hard to tell whether he holds more hatred for drug dealers or industrial polluters.

Anarchist-hippie-type superhero and square-cop-type superhero. Anyone would assume that these two would be the least friendly in the Justice League.

But - though often their relationship is strained by their strongly conflicting idealogies - they improbably came to be two of the greatest, most steadfast friends you could hope to find, and their adventures confronting equal parts social ills and supervillains only serve to bind then more tightly together.

Personal opinions department: These stories made Green Arrow my favorite superhero. I wish we had him in our world now. His outlook would hugely benefit the nation and the world, as would his personal missions into Mexico to take apart the drug cartels, his strong voice making the 99 Percent movement into a real national player, and his powerful patronage of the chili-cooking industry. (Oh man, that Green Arrow LOOOVES a bowl of hot chili!)

One other lesson for review-writers: Don't get too long-winded. I'm afraid I am never able to follow this rule, and I fear I suffer the consequences by turning off potential review-readers when they see the length of my ramblings. If you have stuck with me this far, heartfelt congratulations, and may you and your friends begin to write meaningful reviews, revolutionizing the AADL catalog as GL/GA revolutionized comic books all these years ago.

Footnote: I put "the real world" in quotes because, according to Gardner Fox's marvelous idea, the DC Universe is as real as ours, and today's physicists say that there are an infinite number of parallel universes. In an infinity, there's bound to be at least one (actually, an infinity) of every kind of universe you can imagine as well as those you can't.

Oh, wait, before I forget!

FINAL POINT: Read Green Lantern/Green Arrow. I promise it will be worth your time.

And now, my soul-stirring exit line (No. It's not mine. It's Stan Lee's, and Stan Lee never even had anything to do with DC Comics. Sorry, classic Marvel fans):

Excelsior!

-Zack Weiss (age 15 - but of course it doesn't matter)

cool! submitted by xiaoli zhang on July 30, 2017, 4:41am Green Lantern is very interesting!