Which O'Neil/Adams run is better: Batman or Green Lantern/Green Arrow?

[Jim Kelly]

Because the other changed two characters beyond recognition.

As opposed to all the comics since that have taken wild swings with Hal and Ollie? But I take the point, Denny's Hal is slightly different from John Broome's--although Neal Adams did a great job on Green Lantern. However, I think Green Arrow was greatly improved--given that Ollie had already done much of his changing in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD 85 (from Bob Haney and Neal Adams) and in issues of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA (from Denny O'Neil and Dick Dillin). I loved the Green Arrow's new look so much and I still think it's one of the best costumes. I wonder where Green Arrow would be now, if there had never been that big change in his look and his character--they made a super-hero that was practically on the garbage heap, into one of the most important DC creations of the 1970s and beyond.

And where would Elliot S! Maggin be if he hadn't been inspired by Denny and Neal's Green Arrow to use Oliver Queen for his college writing assignment--which ended up being picked up by Julius Schwartz for GREEN LANTERN 87? Which was the big break that got Elliot a job at DC.

I'm curious how people are reading these stories. All the modern reprints have been terrible. The Batman stories being the most drastic in changes to the art--to the point where I really don't think you can appreciate how Neal Adams developed Batman over those years. But even the modern reprints of the Hard Travelling Heroes are quite gawdawful with terrible colouring that is nearly blinding when I look at it. And how many people can afford to buy the back issues--I only have most of them (still missing some GREEN LANTERN issues) because I bought them at the time or only a bit later in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, anything with Neal Adams art, from back in the day, is not easy to get, unless you have deep pockets.

[Dr. Ellingham]

People can look back on works of art from the past and say that in hindsight they aren't much--but that doesn't change the place in history those works occupy. The Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories were given awards and accolades--the mainstream press took note of this revolutionary change in comics. It was a big deal and that is something you can't retcon out of existence. The run put O'Neil and Adams on the map. That's their masterwork. If it doesn't work for people now, that's because it was of its time--it spoke to the generation that was reading it while the ink was still fresh and the paper still white.

Beautifully said, and true.

[Falcon16]

GL/GA solely due to the introduction of John Stewart

[Billy Batson]

GL/GA was terrible

[The Darknight Detective]

The thing is the Hard Traveling Heroes is definitely a co-creation of Adams and O'Neil. You can say that Neal Adams wrote that story as much as the scripter, Denny O'Neil. While Adams may have had some contributions to the Batman stories (like putting in Deadman), he's mainly a hired gun and it's O'Neil creating his vision of Batman, which any one of a few artists could have been assigned to pencil--most likely Irv Novick, but also Bob Brown or Neal Adams. The Batman story that Adams was most involved with was the story of Talia and her father the Demonhead--but Bob Brown and Irv Novick actually did a lot of that (with Dick Giordano inking), so it's not really an Adams design.

And you can't change the past. People can look back on works of art from the past and say that in hindsight they aren't much--but that doesn't change the place in history those works occupy. The Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories were given awards and accolades--the mainstream press took note of this revolutionary change in comics. It was a big deal and that is something you can't retcon out of existence. The run put O'Neil and Adams on the map. That's their masterwork. If it doesn't work for people now, that's because it was of its time--it spoke to the generation that was reading it while the ink was still fresh and the paper still white. That's the importance.

Whereas, I feel like singling out the O'Neil and Adams performance on the Batman stories is a backhand to all the other creatives who were doing Batman back then. It was a group effort. Frank Robbins, Irv Novick, Bob Brown, Joe Giella, Frank Giacoia, Dick Giordano, Len Wein, Mike Friedrich and others all contributed to Batman in those years and they did work just as good and great. It's unfair to ignore those people and act like only Denny and Neal were doing anything worthwhile. There's so much overlap between the works of all these people that it's impossible to isolate them.

As someone who was alive during that time and remembers very well what was going on culturally, while I definitely acknowledge and respect what O'Neill and Adams did on GL/GA, it's value was more short term than long-lasting, IMO. There our lots of people, films, books, etc. that were both popular and critically received once upon a time, only to be not nearly as well received or even forgotten years later. The vagaries of time, as they say. Again, the work of O'Neill & Adams on GL/GA was good, but I prefer and enjoy their Batman collaboration that much more so.

[Jim Kelly]

Although I saw the GREEN LANTERN (co-starring Green Arrow) comics in the drugstore back in 1971, I didn't buy them because I believed they were too adult and not the kind of thing I should be reading. The only actual issue I got from the store at the time was GREEN LANTERN 87, which was the issue that introduced John Stewart. In fact, this issue wasn't a good example of the GL/GA team-ups, as it had one new Green Lantern story and one new Green Arrow story (Elliot Maggin's college thesis).

Actually the Green Lantern/Green Arrow book that made a far stronger impression on me was something I picked up in the summer of 1972. My dad (who had never had a car before) drove my mom, two of my siblings and I east over the Rockies and across the prairies--my parents both having been born and raised on farms in Saskatchewan--where I met some of my aunts, uncles and cousins for the first time. It was quite an epic journey. But on the way back we stopped at a motel in the BC interior and I walked over to the town store where I found a pocket paperback of GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW (Paperback Comics, 1972).



This was in fact the second volume of two--the first had collected 76 and 77, while this one collected 78 and 79--all in black and white and the panels pasted up to fit the pages. It was exciting and I read the whole thing in the car, on the way back to Vancouver with my family.

The dedication at the front from Carmine Infantino says: "Our Green Lantern could be the instrument that will change what one generation considered junk, into the jewel of the next." And following that was a three page introductory text from Dennis O'Neil, New York City, July, 1971.

Seeing the panels in rich black ink and pasted up in such a way where you had to look at the details in each panel before going to the next page, that really concentrated my attention and I felt totally immersed in the emotion and the action of the stories.

[Jim Kelly]

Back in 1983 and 1984, DC packaged the GL/GA stories in their Baxter Books as the seven issue GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW. While it was pretty impressive at the time, I question if those Baxters did right by the material. Not only were they published on immaculate, white paper, with better printing quality, but the art was re-coloured, with all kinds of added effects. It was really dazzling--but I think you lost a lot of the subtlety in the work of Adams and his inkers.

I never got the Hard Travelling Heroes TPBs in the 1990s or the hadcover collection in 2000, but eventually I did buy the two volumes of the 2004 trade paperbacks. The colouring is okay in places and over the top in others and there are a lot of effects that you don't see in the original comics. I think the worst reprint, by my standards, is the Hal Jordan story from THE FLASH 226, just because the art is so revamped and the colours are done in such a modern fashion that it's nothing like looking at the original story as it appeared in that issue of FLASH.

Reading the 2004 TPBs, I was the most aware of the problems in how O'Neil handles certain characters--to the point of being offensive. But this wasn't something I was totally unaware of all the way back in 1972. Like Stan Lee, Denny had his own stye as a writer that often creeped me out. He was still one of my favourite writers, but he put words into the mouths of characters that I found absurd.

For instance, his Batman would refer to criminals as crud. This came across as wrong--since Bruce Wayne (especially the Frank Robbins Bruce Wayne) was a humanitarian who has sympathy for disadvantaged folk that have turned to a life of crime (all the way back in "The Case of the Honest Crook," in BATMAN 5, in fact), so it seems against type for him to look at humans as garbage.

[Robotman]

That’s a tough choice. They pretty much created the modern versions of Batman and Green Arrow. Their Batman run brought the character back to his Dark Knight roots. Not to mention making him the globe trotting hero who faces down threats like Ra’s and the League of Assassins.

On the other hand their GA/GL run helped to bring the DCU into the modern age. Up until then Marvel was considered far ahead of DC in regards to modern storytelling. Hard Traveling Heroes showed that DC characters could tackle socially relevant issues.

I guess I have to go with their Batman run because of the cultural significance. Without their run Batman would’ve still been stuck in the campy phase and we wouldn’t have the character that we know today. The character that has kept DC relevant even in the most difficult times.

[iron chimp]

At least GL/GA put people centre stage and made heroes actually look at what they were doing and whether they were just stooges for the status quo or if they were actually doing anything. It was over the top, it was a tough read sometimes, it was high melodrama but it was pure baller too.

Superhero comics got stripped of any meaning - motives were reduced to vendetta, megalomania, or protecting dowagers from octopuses and penguins. At least GL/GA tackled life head on with real problems.