One thing you can say about the relevant stories of the late Silver/early Bronze Age is that writers had no shortage of issues to choose from. By late 1970 writers have tackled man’s inhumanity to man, campus protest and black power, but there’s lots more to come.
Environmentalism began popping up in comics around the end of 1969. Over the course of 1970, Roy Thomas made it Namor’s prime directive in Sub-Mariner. Rather than have Namor try to conquer the surface yet again, Subby offers to work with the surface nations to protect the environment — after all, a polluted Atlantic won’t work out well for Atlantis (which we’re informed is completely non-polluting).
As in the real world, governments move slowly on this issue, plus most nations don’t trust Namor — he has, after all, proclaimed his desire to rule the world more than a few times. This lets Thomas keep Namor his usual pissed-off, potentially violent self without recycling his old silver age plots.
In “Youthquake” in #28 (Roy Thomas, Sal Buscema, Sal Buscema cover), Namor joins a New York protest against plans to level a city park for a new factory. Conveniently the developer, Sam Westman, is using his big demolition machine Brutivac to destroy the park. Otherwise Namor wouldn’t have an adversary worthy of punching out.
In #30, “Calling Captain Marvel,” by the same creative team, Thomas — who scripted the unsuccessful two-issue attempt to revive Captain Marvel earlier in the year — gives Mar-Vell a guest-star gig.
Cap’s partner/sidekick Rick Jones is performing in a waterfront coffee house when Namor shows up amnesiac (did you know it’s the MU’s most common disease?). We learn his environmental activism has made him cool.
It turns out Namor lost his memory in horror after discovering an extortionist plot to hold the world’s oceans to ransom.
This seems so over the top it’s like something Hoggish Greedly would have pulled in Captain Planet — but then again, the 21st century has shown our billionaires are capable of much worse than I ever imagined.
Native American issues were also becoming prominent and both DC and Marvel took a shot at them. In Green Lantern/Green Arrow #79, “Ulysses Star Is Still Alive” (Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams of course), our hard-traveling heroes find themselves in the middle of a land grab targeting a Native American tribe. The bad guys want the land for its lumber and have legal technicalities on their side. Green Arrow’s solution is to inspire the despairing natives by posing as their legendary ancestor, Ulysses Star.
This unfortunately reeks of the “white savior” trope — the Natives are helpless until Ollie, the firebrand white dude, tricks them into standing up for their rights. There’s some of that in the Avengers plotline which starts with #80 and “The Coming of Red Wolf.”
Red Wolf, AKA William Talltrees, is the first Native American superhero since DC’s Super-Chief. Frustrated by his tribe’s shameful reluctance to stand up to Cornelius Van Lunt’s land grab, Talltrees summons/is chosen by the spirit of tribal champion Red Wolf, getting a wolf sidekick in the process (a she wolf attacks William, he kills her, then discovers her puppy — which seems a rather brutal way to get a dog). Hunting down one of Van Lunt’s lackeys in the big city, he runs into the Vision, who introduces him to the Avengers.
Alas, there’s a problem. Vision, Wanda and Clint want to help Red Wolf but Captain America says stopping Zodiac’s upcoming big and evil plan should be their priority. Black Panther rejects both options in favor of fighting organized crime — not that organized crime’s pulling a caper they have to stop, he just wants to fight them. The team splits to work on all three cases, while making melodramatic comments about how this might the end of the Assemblers.
Red Wolf’s tribe are as cowed as Ulysses Star’s people, but at least they have one of their own inspiring them rather than Oliver Queen in redface.
While Team Red Wolf take down Van Lunt, the Black Panther joins forces with Daredevil to save “A Life on the Line” in Daredevil #69 (Thomas, Gene Colan, Sal Buscema cover). It has nothing to do with what most of us would call “organized crime” which makes me wonder if Thomas changed his plans after that Avengers story. It involves radical black militants, the Thunderbolts (no relation), though like the Diamond Heads from a few months earlier their politics is a cover for a protection racket. T’Challa’s involved because the older brother of one of his students has joined the Thunderbolts — but it turns out he’s working undercover to destroy them.
Everything comes to a head in Avengers #82, “Hostage,” (Thomas, Buscema) in which Zodiac’s paramilitary army takes Manhattan hostage for a billion-dollar ransom. It turns out that Van Lunt wanted Talltrees’ tribe off their land so they wouldn’t spot him training the strike force at his ranch. Plus the Thunderbolts were tied in as agents of Zodiac … somehow. The Avengers thought they were divided but they were working together the whole time, unawares!
The trial of the Chicago Seven also inspired relevant stories at both companies. In 1969, eight anti-war activists went on trial over protests at the 1968 Democratic convention; the trial was less about them having masterminded the protests and more about making them an example. One of the eight, Bobby Seale, asked to represent himself; the judge had him bound to his chair and gagged (his trial was subsequently severed from the other seven). It’s a moment echoed on screen in Woody Allen’s Bananas (Allen’s character gets the same treatment) and on the cover of Green Lantern/Green Arrow #80, “Even an Immortal Can Die” (O’Neil, Adams).
Ollie and Hal’s Oan companion, the “Old Timer,” uses his powers to rush an injured Hal to the hospital rather than preventing a toxic-waste dumping incident. The Guardians, arguing that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, put the Old Timer on trial before the alien Tribune.
It turns out the Tribune is meshuggah, and plotting to lead his machines in the universal robot uprising. I think this works against the political commentary, but I do like Hal’s conflict over opposing the Tribune.
O’Neil tended to write Hal as often clueless in his support for law and order; here, I think he gets it right.
Daredevil #70 (“The Tribune”) and #71 (“If An Eye Offend Thee”) — Thomas and Colan, Marie Severin covers — also give us a Chicago Seven riff — free the New York Three! — with a Tribune running a kangaroo court.
If Thomas borrowed the name from O’Neil, I can forgive him, as his is the better story. We open in California, where cowboy star turned right-wing agitator Buck Ralston is speaking out — 
Karen Page is in line for a part in Ralston’s next movie but her woke PC communist anti-American bullshit views piss him off.
I believe Ralston is comics’ first far-right, law-and-order type (as opposed to more specialized right-wingers, such as the anti-immigrant Sons of the Serpent). Nixon had played up “law and order” as a theme when he ran in 1968, presenting himself as America’s first line of defense against radicals, protesters, anti-war activists and black activists. Ralston seems to share similar views of dissent and rebellion (Bullitt, a right-wing law-and-order political candidate would show up in Spider-Man a couple of months later).
I wonder if Thomas based Ralston on John Wayne, who was becoming well-known for his right-wing views, though this came out a couple of years before a Playboy interview made Wayne’s more toxic opinions known.
The Chicago Three aspect: during a protest against a New York visit by Vice President Spiro Agnew, a bomb goes off (we learn later the Tribune’s people set it). Inevitably, things get ugly.
(Walter Cronkite, for those who don’t know, was the face of CBS news in the 1960s, an anchorman who radiated sensible Midwestern calm and trustworthiness). After Daredevil gets caught in the blast, police arrest three protesters trying to help him; as the closest radicals to the blast, they’re the prime suspects, right? Matt and Foggy aren’t thrilled about prosecuting —
— but as you can see, the Tribune is ready to take the burden off their shoulders. We open the next issue with a Gene Colan splash page showing Thomas’ fondness for quoting literature.
To make a long story short, the Tribune takes over the trial but DD figures out his henchman aren’t extremists, just mind-controlled thugs. Once he deactivates the control device, the goon squad splits, forcing the Tribune to flee to his waiting helicopter. He leaves a bomb behind, Daredevil throws it out the building, it lodges in the Tribune’s chopper … While we do see a shot of Ralston on TV a couple of weeks later, I’m guessing it’s old film of him speechifying as we’ve never seen or heard of the Tribune since.
To wrap up with, here’s Robby Robertson on pollution (Gil Kane art) — 
— and Peter looking like he doesn’t want to get involved (Kane again).
And I’ll close with this Neal Adams page from the Ulysses Star story.
