Cover art by Taurin Clarke
After a night of patrolling the streets as Green Arrow, Oliver Queen relaxes at home while watching the news. “More information has just been released about the mysterious murder that has captured the attention of Star City and baffled the city’s finest,” a television reporter announces. “Retired Horton Chemical CFO Donald Sherman was found dead early Monday morning. Here’s where things get strange – his death was an apparent drowning, though there was only a single, empty, gallon jug of water found at the scene.”
The police believe that Sherman’s death is connected to a series of other murders in Star City, including a retired Horton Chemical plant manager. Intrigued, Oliver Queen changes back into Green Arrow and heads to the scene of Donald Sherman’s murder. While there, the superhero bumps into Detective Benitez, who informs the superhero that the killer has struck once again, this time Senator Eustace Foley.
“You might be too young to remember, but there were a few ‘accidents’ and ‘oversights’ that somehow managed to avoid accountability,” Green Arrow tells Benítez of Horton Chemical. “Foley helped to bury it. You protect the world from interstellar monsters and goons in pajamas, but the real crooks are duly elected. How do you fight that?”
“You’re some leftist-radical superhero, huh?” Benítez responds, to which Green Arrow replies, “Nah. I just call myself Green Arrow.”
When Chris Condon took over writing duties on the latest Green Arrow comic book in late 2024, he had two goals. The first was to return the character to its “leftist superhero” roots established decades earlier by writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams, while the second was to take an idea that he had for a nonfiction graphic novel and turn it into a Green Arrow storyline.
“In Niagara, New York, there was an environmental disaster in the 1970s in which an entire community (Love Canal) was poisoned by toxic waste that had been buried underneath their houses,” Condon told Comic Book Club. “Essentially, an affordable community was built. All these people moved into this community… And couldn’t leave, basically. So I had wanted to do a story on that anyway…. And then when Chris Rosa, the editor of Green Arrow, came knocking, I was like, well, that’s perfect fodder for our villain.”
When Benítez and Green Arrow arrive at Senator Foley’s mansion, the detective tells the superhero that all of the victims were drowned with contaminated water brought by the killer in jugs. “We didn’t make this part public, but we found pH down their throats,” she adds. “Y’know, like to test acidity or whatever. Like a calling card. They even left a note with a name – the Fresh Water Killer, like it’s some joke.”
After watching surveillance tapes, Green Arrow deduces that the murderer – who is wearing a red raincoat and gasmask – is still on the premises and tracks them down. Her name is Francine Dory, has no criminal record, works as a middle school guidance counselor, and has a form of cancer known as Acute Myeloid Leukemia, which she succumbs to while in a holding cell.
Glancing over her file, Green Arrow discovers that Dory was once part of the Freshwater Community. The site was originally used by Horton Chemical as a dumping ground for toxic waste but was later sold to the county, which built an affordable housing community on top of it. Then people began to get sick.
“She lost her property,” Oliver Queen later explains to fellow superhero Black Canary. “Then her kid. Cancer, too. Her husband left her. She had nothing. All because Horton wanted to save face and a buck’r two. And it didn’t matter. No charges, no justice. Just a measly settlement that would barely cover medical costs. Why wouldn’t that radicalize someone?”
Although Love Canal is arguably the most infamous incident of toxic waste contaminating a community, it wasn’t the only one. According to Michael Stewart Foley in his 2013 book Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s, farmers in North Carolina began complaining of a foul smell on the roadside just seven days after the first media reports about Love Canal began to circulate. In order to avoid complying with new regulations set by the Toxic Substances Control Act, a waste hauling company had its trucks travel throughout the state and intentionally spill waste containing dangerous PCBs along the highway.
Once the duplicity was uncovered, the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of North Carolina decided to remove the contaminated soil from the roadside and dump it in a new landfill created in the town of Afton. Warren County, where Afton is located, was sixty percent Black, three percent Native American, and overwhelmingly poor at the time. The site was intentionally selected for those exact reasons – it was far enough away from any major urban center and had a population that would be hard pressed to oppose it.
The people of Warren County did oppose it, however, forming a Concerned Citizens group and challenging the decision in-and-out court over a three-year period. Residents initially argued that the landfill placed both their health and the local economy at risk. Furthermore, there already was an EPA-approved toxic waste site in Emelle, Alabama. The EPA and state of North Carolina countered that it would cost $12 million to transport the waste to Alabama as opposed to $1.7 million to dump it in Warren County. Their arguments swayed the court and construction on the landfill began over the summer of 1982, with the first trucks containing the toxic soil arriving in September.
At that point, Concerned Citizens changed tactics. Instead of health issues, they charged the EPA and North Carolina with “environmental racism” and resurrected the nonviolent civil disobedience strategy of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. On the morning that the first trucks arrived, two hundred local residents marched from the Coley Springs Baptist Church to the dump site. Sixty-seven of them were arrested for blocking the entrance. Protesters next resorted to blocking trucks by laying down in front of them, resulting in 523 arrests over the next month-and-a-half. Seven thousand truckloads containing forty thousand tons of toxic soil made to the site nonetheless.
Although the federal government eventually approved a multimillion-dollar relocation package for the white residents of Love Canal, trucks kept pouring into the predominantly Black Warren County. Former civil rights activists Floyd McKissick and Benjamin Chavis joined the protests and were subsequently arrested, as was the congressional delegate from the District of Columbia. A march was even organized from Afton to Raleigh, similar to the Selma to Montgomery march of 1965. By the end of October, the trucks finally stopped and the landfill capped.
Kenny Gordon lived at the Freshwater Community of Green Arrow during his youth. He was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was twelve-years-old after being exposed to high levels of benzene. When his mother passed away from breast cancer, the now adult Gordon organized a meeting of other former Freshwater residents.
“I know they wrote those checks and we cashed ’em,” he tells those in attendance. “But I don’t see any Rolexes on any wrists. No Ferraris out in the parking lot. What I see? I see people suffering. People who had to use that money to fix what they never broke. And we’ve let them win. We’ve let the world forget. But we’re done letting them walk on us. It’s time the world remembers. It’s time we fix what’s broken. It ain’t money I’m talking about. I’m talking about change, and I think I know how we get it.”
With those words, the Fresh Water Killer – who is actually multiple people and not just one individual – was born. By now, Detective Benítez has made the connection and drives to the abandoned Freshwater Community at night, where she is captured by the vigilantes. Fortunately, Green Arrow arrives in the nick of time and rescues her.
“It’s sad, isn’t it?” Green Arrow asks Benítez while staring at the unconscious body of Kenny Gordon. “Seeing his face, knowing his pain. They were all just a bunch of hardworking folks who were lied to, left behind. And we all just moved on and forgot. We left them there, Detective. In the past. They remained there like ghosts. Just reliving the same tragedies over and over. Running in place. Never quite able to push through whatever was holding them back. So they found tools. Built themselves new identities, a new ethos. And in the end, their pain, that thing that tore them apart, ate them alive. It became their badge. Their power. They became it entirely.”
He then adds, “I can’t imagine anything more rotten than a world that lets that happen. Can you?”
Anthony Letizia