Green Arrow: Wedding Bells and a Failed Generation

BACKSTORY

My favorite comic book character of all time is Green Arrow, a.k.a. Oliver Queen. He's a DC Comics character. The real irony of my love for this character is that he is a flaming liberal. I tend to lean right in my politics, so it's an odd match between me, as reader, and Ollie, as a character. We share however a common idealism: the belief that a utopian society (while perhaps never possible) is still something worth fighting for.

Oliver Queen's history is rich. Originally written as Batman with a bow (replete with his Arrow Cave and Arrow Car), one fine author took the Emeral Archer in a daring new direction. Denny O'Neil began writing Oliver in tumult of the late sixties and early seventies. I was still in diapers.

At the age of nine, I used to frequent the local flea market for bargain comic book deals. Denny's Green Arrow was a decade old when I read my first issue. I bought it for the cover, which displayed Green Arrow's ward Roy Harper being carried down a dirty alley. Roy had overdosed from heroin.

Denny and a phenomenal artist, Neal Adams, conjured up an incredible story in the mind of this nine year old kid. Lives were ruined and remade-- usually in a matter of three or four issues, (quite unlike the ruined life that is working on a four year pit to climb out of). Oliver was forced to look at what his abandonment did to feed his ward's drug addiction, to honestly evaluate his hard-line environmental stances, to examine his beliefs about a variety of social ills, and then make personal changes at the end of each story arc. Needless to say, I was hooked. At nine year's old, I started gobbling up as many of these back issues as I could find.

Green Arrow was appearing monthly in the Green Lantern title starring Hal Jordan. These two best friends decided to travel America together and gain a deeper appreciation for each other's opposing political views. Oliver was an idealist, and I loved him for it. He was loud and obnoxious-- barking out about the poor, the oppressed, racial discrimination, the lure of big business, over-population, gang violence, drug abuse, and the environment. Hal was his sounding board, and Ollie was Hal's.

It's probably safe to say that in spite of being right leaning as an adult, my early childhood years were bathed in social justice thanks to Denny O'Neil's writing. One thing that libs and conservatives should be able to agree on no matter what is social justice. We might disagree on how to get there, but our target is the same moral place, or at least it ought to be.

Now the hippie, goatee wearing archer has popped the question to his lover of over thirty years of stories. Seems like a good thing, right?

It might have been. It might have been the best comic book ever written, but this won't happen now. You see, for the past four years DC Comics has decided to humanize Oliver Queen a bit more. Like we needed that. I mean, it's funny to me that everytime someone needs "humanizing" they are drug through the muck. Why not humanize a villian and make him/her more kind? Making Oliver more of louse is akin to making the Joker love puppies.

The avalanche began when it was revealed to us first that Ollie walked-out on a newborn son. Later he flagarantly cheated on his lover with a young woman who was killed off an issue later. The next three years gave rise to failure after failure for Mr. Queen. The best this once noble character has been able to offer readers in the face of his failures is a handful smuck one-liners saturated with MTV slang and American Pie flavored humor. I'm sure some people enjoy it, in between X-Box games and watching their Paris Hilton videos.

In three short years, Oliver was so beaten down by crooks, that he needed to be rescued in his own title four times. Besides getting bested by almost every villian he faced, Oliver Queen made a run for Mayor of his hometown and won. That's a good thing, right? Well it would have been if had done anything while in office. Editorial decisions had Ollie forced out of office due to a scandal for funding a rogue superhero group -- while the biggest scandal of all -- Oliver Queen's illegal stock trading still lies in a unwrapped package for some future author to dig up and sully his character with.

During his stay as Mayor, Oliver Queen didn't use one red cent of his own money to support the poor and oppressed in spite of being a billionare. He called in Bruce Wayne and used his money. He didn't advocate for anyone (except homosexuals, and that was because he wanted their revenue dollars). His core values went AWOL and Oliver Queen became "The Man." He joined the system since it was apparent the staff of DC Comics weren't going to let him beat it.

COMMENTARY

So this was about a wedding... his lover has apparently said "Yes" to his proposal, in spite of the cheating, the lying, and the failures. But given the track record of the past four years, who honestly would want this guy? Green Arrow went from being a political activist who quoted Hemmingway, understood Latin, and spoke intelligently about social justice, the Greek Gods, economies, and other significant issues of our day to becoming a loser dad and an unfaithful twit with a big "Duh" stapled on his forehead.

Did the character need to be dumbed down to appeal to new readers? I was nine years old when I began my journey with Oliver Queen. I doubt seriously that making him more "hip" will do anything other than give the mindless generation behind me just one more thing to outgrow. Sadly, I suspect we can add a failed marriage to Oliver's list of woes, because I don't see his fiance lasting long with him either. She outgrew him years ago.

In a sad realization, it came to me the other night, that Oliver Queen really is the child of the tumultous sixties and seventies. You remember that generation that was so bent on changing the world that they neglected their marriages, their children, and dropped the ball in social justice? Yeah, that's them. He epitomizes a group of world-changers that just upped and joined the system when free love got old and their marriages got stale and their parenting responsibilities started cutting into their down time.

Green Arrow has become the voice of the impotent Left; devoid of anything exept a few fancy speeches, he is a rich bastard-making womanizer who wants everyone else to use their money to serve the poor, while still hanging on to his own. He's bent on telling the rest of us how to live while wearing a hypocrite's mask. (Al Gore's house eating up four times more energy than mine comes to mind.) Oliver Queen has become what he once hated, what he fought against, and what a little boy at the flea market prayed he'd never become:

A milk-less teat on full display in a hungry world.

There's something to be said about life imitating art. I just wish we could set the bar a little higher and have something put before that is worth imitating. Is that too much to ask?