Cover art by Mike Grell
In the early 1970s, writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams transformed the DC superhero Green Arrow into a “social justice warrior” during a multi-issue road trip with the more conservative Green Lantern. Together they explored the remnants of the 1960s and the effects that the Vietnam War and civil unrest had on the country, while exploring such topical issues as the environment, white supremacy, and economic inequality.
In the late 1980s, writer/artist Mike Grell likewise used the character of Green Arrow to explore the social issues of the times, only now it was Post-Reagan America as opposed to the Sixties. Although Grell himself was more conservative than his 1970s counterpart Dennis O’Neil, the fictional world he created wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill” but one plagued by homelessness, prostitution, drug abuse, and gang warfare instead.
While Green Arrow is most associated with Star City and other superheroes of the DC Universe reside in such fictional locales as Gotham City and Metropolis, Mike Grell set his version of Green Arrow within the real-world city of Seattle. Green Arrow’s Oliver Queen relocated to the Pacific Northwest along with domestic partner Dinah Lance (aka Black Canary) in the comic book miniseries The Longbow Hunters and continued to reside there for an additional eighty issues.
The Reagan Era witnessed a resurgence in “rugged individualism,” personified by such motion picture anti-heroes as John Rambo and the Charles Bronson character from the Death Wish film series. Each of these vigilantes were intent on dispensing their own brand of justice at a time when the law was often perceived as on the side of the criminal rather than the victim. Drugs, prostitution, and street crime, meanwhile, created an urban jungle within the United States that only a hunter who operated outside the law could navigate and tame.
The Green Arrow of Mike Grell reflected this same vein of vigilantism. “I’ll admit, I started this for fun,” Oliver Queen tells Dinah Lance. “But that was a long time ago when things were simpler. Now we’ve got kids on the street who kill for pocket change. When some scumbag beats an eighty-year-old woman for her social security check and the court can’t touch him because he’s a juvenile who’s back on the street in sixty days, a lot of people want to know where’s the justice? For people like that, the answer is people like me.”
While Green Arrow may have developed a conservative edge under Mike Grell, Oliver Queen’s left-leaning heart remained intact. For Green Arrow, it doesn’t matter if someone is black or white, straight or gay, prostitute or homeless – no one deserves to die at the hands of some murderer. He chides a Seattle police lieutenant for not caring about the death of a prostitute at one point, and when no one pays any attention to the homeless being killed off, it is Green Arrow who declares, “I’ll look into it.”
Mike Grell’s run on Green Arrow – which lasted from 1987 through 1994 – was about more than life on the streets of Seattle, however, as it contained narratives ripped from the headlines of the times as well. Oliver Queen thus finds himself caught in the fallout of the Iran-Contra Affair, the ouster of dictator Manuel Noriega from Panama, an oil spill disaster similar to that of the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989, and the IRA’s terroristic actions in support of Irish independence from Great Britain.
In their Green Arrow/Green Lantern comic book series, Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams didn’t offer solutions but merely highlighted the current social issues plaguing the country. Mike Grell went further than his predecessors by not only exploring but often dissecting the relevant issues of his times.
In the three-part “Round the Horn” story arc, for instance, Oliver Queen finds himself in Africa as part of a mercenary group hired by an unnamed government to track down poachers. Black market profiteers were hunting and killing rhinos and elephants for their horns and tusks within both the real world and Green Arrow, endangering the species and driving away much needed tourist dollars.
The narrative not only relates Green Arrow’s fictional adventures in Africa but the factual issues facing the region. A brief history of poaching is recited, for instance, but while Oliver Queen exhibits a deep sense of left-leaning environmentalism throughout Grell’s run on Green Arrow, the issue of poaching has a more conservative bent. Instead of protecting endangered species, the comic book argues, banning the sale of ivory had the opposite effect by creating greater demand.
“People who had no previous interest suddenly crave ivory because it is forbidden,” Oliver Queen is told. By regulating legal hunting laws in Zimbabwe and South Africa, meanwhile, the elephant populations of those two countries actually increased over a ten-year span, offering further evidence that banning decrees were both detrimental and unnecessary.
An oil spill caused by a damaged tanker is examined from multiple perspectives in the two-issue “Coyote Tears,” including efforts to contain the environmental impact at the site of the accident, the petroleum company’s attempts to spin the facts and shift the blame, Green Arrow’s quest to find the ship’s missing captain, and the internal monologue of a coyote that explores the negative impact human beings have had on nature.
Interest in government conspiracies – especially those pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy – was rampant during the 1990s, and Mike Grell weaves a fair share of his own into Green Arrow. Oliver Queen plays the “patsy” on at least two occasions, first when he is cast in the role of Jack Ruby during an assassination attempt on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and then later as a Lee Harvey Oswald surrogate in the sinking of a U.S. navy vessel in the Panama Canal.
A clandestine group of government officials and business executives opposed to Gorbachev’s policy of demilitarization is ultimately revealed as having orchestrated the assassination plot. “One thing that Vietnam proved – the thing that Jack Kennedy wouldn’t accept – was that war may be hell but it’s damn good for business,” one of them says. He then adds in regards to Kennedy, “If he’d been just a little more reasonable, he might still be around.”
While Queen is able to prevent the death of the Soviet President, he is directly responsible for the sinking of the U.S. naval vessel when a tracking device he plants on a shipment of drugs turns out to be a bomb detonator. The superhero is subsequently branded a traitor and wanted for terrorism, and Queen must prove his innocence by exposing a rogue group of government officials intent on expanding America’s military presence in Panama after the ouster of dictator Manuel Noriega.
The comic book world of Mike Grell’s Green Arrow had little to do with traditional superhero comic books, electing to reflect the real-world of its times instead. There are no supervillains within the pages of Green Arrow, just a steady stream of serial killers, drug dealers, and violent gangs operating in the city of Seattle, with IRA terrorists, environmental concerns, and government conspiracies thrown in for good measure.
Grell touches on each of these topics, as well as many more, offering a critique of the late 1980s and early 1990s through the eyes of green-clad superhero who carries a bow-and-arrow and has always worn his heart on his sleeve when it comes to the downcast and discarded of society.
“You see the potential, I see the waste,” Oliver Queen tells a young idealist on the last pages of the series. “You see hope, I’ve seen despair. Dragons don’t exist, so I’ve settled for tilting at windmills.” In the Post-Reagan Era, it was arguably the best that anyone could hope for – even someone as adept as Green Arrow.
Anthony Letizia