If you’re a comics nerd with any exposure to books of the early 1970s, you’ve undoubtedly seen this cover.
The story inside, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” can be considered the beginning of the Bronze Age. I say “can be” because as I’ve mentioned before, this is a point on which reasonable people can disagree. Even if we don’t count it, this issue gives a clear sign that things are changing.
(I apologize for the lack of images from inside by the way. We’re still having major problems and our hosting company isn’t returning my emails).
When Green Lantern sees some punks in a Star City slum assaulting businessman Jubal Slade, he intervenes to protect him. Green Arrow tells Hal that Slade is a slumlord and the punks were pushing back against his shitty treatment of his tenants. As GL tries to defend his actions we get the most famous scene: an elderly black man tells Hal he’s heard about how Green Lantern helps out orange-skinned aliens, works for blue-skinned aliens — but “what have you done for the black skins?” A shamed Green Lantern replies that “I — I can’t answer.”
By the end of the issue he’s brought Slade to justice but that’s not enough. He and a Guardian agree to go on the road, discovering America with Green Arrow. Maybe Hal can do something for the black skins after all.
It’s not a great story but it’s certainly a memorable one. It’s very much a product of the late 1960s zeitgeist with comics’ fixation on relevance. It might have worked better if I’d read it back then, but I suspect “what have you done for the black skins?” would have thrown me out of the story as much as it does now. It’s true, GL didn’t march at Selma or volunteer as a Freedom Rider but saving the world multiple times means saving lots of people of every race.
In the JLA’s first adventure, Green Lantern helps prevent Starro from enslaving everyone on Earth.
In Showcase #23 Hal stops the Invisible Destroyer from causing a nuclear explosion in Coast City. That would have killed lots of people of every skin color.
He and Flash save Earth from conquest by the cosmic-powered Myrmitons in Flash #131
In the JLA’s origin story (Justice League of America #9) Hal helps prevent the alien Appelaxians from transforming all of humanity into their slave warriors.
In Justice League of America #10 he helps stops Felix Faust gaining the occult power to conquer the world.
In his own magazine he thwarts conquest by intelligent pterodactyls —
— stops the Shark from mass slaughter of helpless humans —
— and I’ll stop there, as that’s more than enough.
It’s true, saving the Earth from alien invasion doesn’t solve the problems of civil rights. Or disability discrimination, misogyny, government corruption, etc. The world’s existing problems at the start of the comic continue unabated when the adventure wraps up. Saving the world matters but from the perspective of that elderly black man, it’s like putting a bandage on a guy who’s got multiple other health problems.
Mystery novelist Laura Lippman has made a similar point: stories about stopping criminals or catching killers settle for restoring the status quo, even if the status quo sucks (for a counter-argument, click here). Then again, as David Rieff says in A Bed for the Night, putting a bandage on a wound isn’t a small thing for the person with the wound. Fixing systemic problems, even with a power ring, isn’t easy, and as Squadron Supreme showed, can go pear-shaped easily enough.
Contrary to Hyperion, their work didn’t lead to any of those things. To paraphrase journalist Hal Boyle, there are things you can fix with super-powers, but some things you can’t.
A second problem I have with the story is making Oliver Queen the voice of impassioned liberalism. He’s the guy pointing out that while Green Lantern stops bank robberies and engages in clashes of titans with Sonar or Sinestro, regular Americans still have to cope with racism, pollution, unfair eviction and the thousand other shocks that flesh is heir too. This ignores that where Hal has been a working stiff all his life, Oliver Queen has been a rich dude, much more removed from “real” life than Hal Jordan. Sure, he lost his money a few months earlier —
— but O’Neil writes him like a red-diaper baby who learned to read from The Grapes of Wrath. Did he go broke, get woke? Was the radicalism always there, just never on the printed page? No question, Ollie’s a more vivid, memorable character than he’s ever been, but it’s one of those cases where his personality has no connection with the previous incarnation.
I’ll have more to say about this series down the road, I’m sure, but that’s enough for now. Images by Neal Adams, Murphy Anderson x2, Gil Kane x2, Bob Hall and Dick Dillin
“but saving the world multiple times means saving lots of people of every race.”
That’s always been my reaction too. I haven’t read enough to know, but has he done anything more for the aliens the old guy mentions?
(Also, who’s publishing those stories in-universe? It doesn’t seem like front-page news for the Daily Planet that some alien planet has been saved from a dictator. Maybe it’d be in an interview piece?)
Good point. As they did a Green Lantern show with the Corps and the Guardians in the DCU, obviously people did know at least a little about Hal’s activities. You’re probably right, either an interview with him or one with Flash (“All I do is protect Central City. My friend’s too modest to talk about it but he has hundreds of planets in his jurisdiction …”).
I didn’t think about the Flash angle!