One of these days someone's going to have to explain this obsession with naming super-heroes after colors. Blue Beetle, Red Tornado, Black Condor, Green Lantern, Brown Derby, etc., etc., etc. It's like they just throw darts at a color wheel.
Anyways. Green Arrow and Green Lantern are both long-time DC characters, although the versions shown here are circa the mid-seventies (witness Green Arrow's macho leather get-up and Green Lantern's haircut). The original Green Lantern first showed in the early 1940's, wearing a ring carved from a mystical green lantern that allowed him to do pretty much anything he wanted - flying, passing through solid objects, solid light projections, all kinds of nifty stuff. The Silver Age version shown above has pretty much the same powers, except that he was essentially one Green Lantern out of a whole darn whack of them. Y'see, this group of really old short guys with huge, blue heads (think of Charlie Brown at age 90, dunked in blue paint, and you get the idea) called the 'Guardians of the Universe' divided the universe into a few thousand sectors, and appointed a resident of each to be that sector's 'Green Lantern'. Of course, since no hero is complete without an obligatory Achilles' Heel, his ring didn't work on things that are yellow.
That's right, yellow. Go figure. You could take him out with a can of paint and a weather balloon.
Let's move on to Green Arrow, shall we? What can you say about a millionaire playboy and expert archer who uses his skills and training to stop criminals?
Three words: 'boxing glove arrow'. No, wait, how about 'boomerang arrow'? The list goes on and on, and it gets pretty damn silly. Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams revamped the character in the early seventies (giving him the spiffy new costume shown above) in an attempt to make him 'relevant'. (Everybody who thinks that the terms 'super-hero' and 'relevant' are an oxymoron, raise your hands now.) In no particular order, becoming 'relevant' meant losing all his money, discoving that his teenage sidekick - aptly named "Speedy" - was a heroin addict, and getting a sex life.
- NP
