Art by Shawn McManus
During the early 1980s, Oliver Queen, the secret identity of DC Comics superhero Green Arrow, was hired as a newspaper columnist for the Daily Star. He apparently developed a solid reputation as a journalist because it wasn’t long before he secured a major scoop – an unnamed rock star who had “retired” from the industry five years earlier was about to release a new album and wanted Queen to conduct his first interview. Before Oliver Queen can actually meet the musician, however, the artist is gunned down by a crazed fan while signing autographs, a tragic event that Queen witnesses firsthand but is unable to prevent.
The above storyline appeared as a flashback sequence in a short Green Arrow narrative entitled “Three Years Ago Today” that was published in Detective Comics #538 and released in early 1984. The unnamed rock star is an obvious stand-in for the real-world John Lennon, who likewise “retired” from the music business for five years before reemerging in late 1980. While the lower half of each page within “Three Years Ago Today” tells the story of the DC version of Lennon, the upper portion is set three years later and shows how the rock star’s death had an impact on both Oliver Queen and his superhero identity of Green Arrow.
John Lennon rose to fame during the 1960s as a member of the Beatles, often writing songs that captured the zeitgeist of the decade, such as “All You Need Is Love” and “Revolution.” As a solo artist, he constructed the protest singalong “Give Peace a Chance” as well as the optimistic “Imagine.” But then he suddenly stopped. After waging a legal battle to stay in the United States, reuniting with his second wife Yoko Ono and having a son together, John Lennon walked away from the life of a rock and roll star to become a “househusband,” far from the prying eyes of the media.
After five years of solitude, Lennon reemerged with a new album entitled Double Fantasy and a first single aptly named “(Just Like) Starting Over.” It would be a short comeback. Self-professed Beatles fan Mark David Chapman became obsessed with Lennon and traveled to New York City to not only meet his idol but end his life as well. The afternoon of Monday, December 8, 1980, Chapman waited outside the Dakota building across from Central Park where Lennon lived and got him to autograph a copy of Double Fantasy. That evening, Chapman was still standing outside and shot John Lennon multiple times in the chest when the former Beatle returned home.
The outpouring of grief was immense. “For all the official records, the death would be called murder,” Time magazine noted a week later. “For everyone who cherished the sustaining myth of the Beatles – which is to say, for much of an entire generation that is passing, as Lennon was, at age 40, into middle age, and coming suddenly up against its own mortality – the murder was something else. It was an assassination, a ritual slaying of something that could hardly be named. Hope, perhaps; or idealism. Or time. Not only lost, but suddenly dislocated, fractured.”
In the “three years later” storyline contained within the Green Arrow comic, the superhero receives a tip about an illegal shipment of guns that are about to arrive in the fictitious Star City. “Why don’t’cha just blow the whistle and call the cops on this one?” his informant asks. “Seems a bit small time to rate Green Arrow.” The superhero simply replies, “You didn’t hear? All the mad scientists are on strike this week.”
Green Arrow arrives at the docks where the gun shipment is due to arrive but the bad guys are ready and take him captive. “The government makes it difficult for people to get guns and I make it easy,” the head gunrunner explains. “Citizens of this town need guns to protect themselves. There’s a right to bear arms, or haven’t you heard?”
“And if those guns hit the streets as Saturday Night Specials, used in robberies, even murders, that’s not your problem, right?” Green Arrow counters. “You just sell ’em, you can’t control ’em!”
While Green Arrow was intent on stopping the flow of illegal guns in the DC Universe, it was the sale of legal firearms in the real world that was causing an uptick in violence. Large cities were under siege during the 1980s – the introduction of crack cocaine quickly became a source of income for young-at-risk men during the decade, and those youths were intent on protecting their territories by any means at their disposal.
Technological advancements during the previous decade, meanwhile, lowered the cost while increasing manufacturing capabilities for many durable goods, including handguns. As William Alan Bartley and Geoffrey Frain Williams point out in their August 2021 article for Contemporary Economic Policy, a glut of firearms available at cheap prices flooded the marketplace as a result, making it easier for crack dealers to arm themselves.
“Within the crack epidemic framework, there are two potential explanations for how crack markets led to an increase in gun violence,” Bartley and Williams wrote. “The one that seems most popular, the increased conflict version, would suggest that there was an increase in conflict over illegal transactions, thus increasing levels of violence and homicide for any given level of gun ownership, leading dealers and others to purchase guns for defense. Alternatively, the increased income version would suggest that crack dealings increased the income of individual deals and they therefore spent money on various accessories, including handguns, and this then led to higher violence.”
While the gun crisis of the 1980s ended the following decade, gun violence in general continued throughout the United States nonetheless. To mark the forty-first anniversary of Lennon’s death in 2021, Yoko Ono tweeted, “Over 1.5 million people have been killed by guns in the U.S.A. since John Lennon was shot and killed on December 8, 1980.” Ono didn’t cite a source but People magazine noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed 1.3 million gun-related deaths in the United States between 1981 and 2019.
On March 24, 2018, high school students organized “March for Our Lives,” a Washington, D.C.-based demonstration in support of gun control legislation. Over 800 similar events were held both in the U.S. and around the world, including Central Park in New York City. Among those in attendance was John Lennon’s songwriting partner with the Beatles, Paul McCartney, who wore a T-shirt that read, “We Can End Gun Violence.” McCartney told CNN that he didn’t know if March for Our Lives would have any effect “but this is what we can do, so I’m here to do it.” He also added, “One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here, so it’s important to me.”
Oliver Queen had a similar reaction after the death of the fictitious John Lennon in Detective Comics. “It’s ironic, even oxymoronic, that a guy like me who’s lived such a violent life would be inspired by a guy who preached love and peace,” he reflects. “But how can anyone watch a crime like that and not have rage and anger as his reaction! That, and a stronger resolution to do something to keep that from happening again. I don’t know about anyone else, but those are my reactions.” He then pauses before repeating, “Damn it, those are my reactions.”
Anthony Letizia