I get a kick out of reading old Green Arrow tales with his original costume and Speedy as a sidekick. Still, it's pretty obvious why he needed a revamp to the leather suited bearded Ollie Queen that we know today. Pretty much all of those plots could have been interchangeable with those that Batman and Robin took part in. They had some great artwork and fun stories, but other than the archery gimmick, were not very unique. I'm glad the battling bowman eventually found his own voice.
True. Even that Silver Age story about "Green Arrows of the World" was a revised Bat-tale!
ReplyDeleteGA was conceived as a "second-string" Batman, just as Martian Manhunter was conceived as a "second-string" Superman. Gave the writers other characters to work with so the big guns wouldn't be "over-exposed".
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say J'onn was conceived as a second-string Superman, though that's pretty much the way he was used in the early JLA stories. In his own series, his powers were somewhat different; mostly invisibility, shape-shifting, and walking through walls. Before the JLA, J'onn didn't even fly -- he propelled himself through the air with super-breath. Even in the JLA stories, the powers he used most often were flight, super-breath, and Martian vision, only occasionally making use of his super-strength.
ReplyDeleteHeck! He didn't even terraform his eyes until _after_ he joined the JLA!*
ReplyDelete*Prior to that, they were a hundred percent black; what you might call the polar opposite of Little Orphan Annie's optics.
I loved Mike W. Barr's Green Arrow miniseries in the early 1980s. It was a classic murder mystery but Barr (and prolific Batman writer) did a great job contrasting the way Green Arrow would go about solving a crime, as opposed to Batman!!!!
ReplyDeleteThat was a great miniseries I wish he and von Eeden had been given a continuing series in that vein!
DeleteOMG, that's Dave Gibbons' background for the free transfers with issue 1 of Doctor Who Weekly in 1979! If I hadn't had gotten that comic I might have grown out of Doctor Who and had a normal life.
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