Rating:  -
The Adams/O'Neil Green Lantern and Green Arrow series was truly revolutionary. Although other reviews suggested that they were heavy handed and are now outdated, I think the majority of issues addressed in them are just as relevant today. I always thought that a real cool animated movie could be made from them. If you enjoy comics and care about social/political issues, you won't be disappointed with this book. Check out Volume 2. The two books compliment each other.
Rating:  -
3 Stars,,, 30 years ago, I would have given this book 5 Stars, but times have changed! And that really is the only problem with the stories contained in this book. The stories no longer fit contemporary tastes. In the 1950's, it seemed perfectly natural to have Batman and Robin captured by aliens and placed on display in an interplanetary zoo. In the 1960's, the Mad Mod Menace could, well, menace the Teen Titans with campy style. So, in early 1970 - when an elderly black man addresses Green Lantern "I hear how hard you been working for the blue skins, and how you helped out the orange skins, and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there's skins you never bothered with,,, the black skins! How come? Answer me, Mr. Green Lantern?" it was a jolt to the relatively conservative world of comics...
Actually, the comic Green Lantern had been in a steady sells decline for years during the late sixties... the decision had already been made to cancel the series, but since time and material commitments at the printer were pretty inflexible in those days, the series was handed over to new-comers Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams to pretty much do with as they'd like (since no one was reading it anyway...) for the remaining 13 issues. O'Neil decided to go really experimental, added Green Arrow to the cast - a long time second banana character with zero previous personality but now an enraged, hip social activist, who basically took the more innocent Green Lantern on a trip to "educate" him on the real villains of the world: racism, poverty, corporate greed, religious intolerance, etc. If Marvel Comics had flirted with at least the idea of social relativism for years, this was flat-out, heavy-handed preaching. It made a big critical stir at the time, but in the end was a financial nonstarter.
Today, it -is- very hard to read. It is "Laid on thick". Contemporary readers will have a hard time relating to these stories and older readers will find them interesting only as a mirror of the era of which they are so deeply rooted. Enjoy for nostalgic reasons, study for academic understanding, but not for your casual reader.
Rating: -
It's good that DC has brought this run of stories by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams back in print, and at an affordable price. It's not so good that these stories are straight out of the early '70s and loaded with the kind of heavy-handed social commentary that was so prevalent for the time. This book collects the first several issues of the famed "Hard-Travelling Heroes" arc, where Green Lantern and Green Arrow take, of all things, a road trip, where they hope to rediscover America and find out what happened to the "American dream" - yep, you read that correctly: it's EASY RIDER for superheroes. The two heroes, in the presence of a Guardian and with a brief assist from Black Canary, take on the alienation of African-Americans and Native Americans, corrupt corporations, cult leaders, and just about every other social ill that was making the front pages.
I applaud O'Neil and Adams for this work, as it was one of the earliest signs of breaking away from the world of absolutes so prevalent in super-hero comics. The problem is that it's somewhat overwhelming. I can take only so much dialogue about the evils of "The Man" before it unfortunately becomes humorous. I think that if O'Neil would have eased off and constructed his stories more logically, instead of just dumping GL and GA in one extreme situation after another, they would have fared much better over the years. But, at the time, these topics were rarely tackled in post-Code comics, so a hard message was better than no message at all.
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