Recently, on a comics forum someone asked about our most treasured comic. I have to put this issue of Green Lantern / Green Arrow at the very top. It was a time of tulmut, racially in our country. DC Comics had a host of white male superheroes and almost nothing representing the diversity of our nation. While DC Comics' heroes were off fighting alien invasions, the real heroes were fighting for equity for blacks.
Although I was an infant when this book came out, I remember grabbing it off a table at our local flea market at the age of seven. Suddenly, the world was larger than my funny books. Green Lantern wasn't really answering the guy in the panel. The phrase kind of shot out over thousands of readers, a very subtle, yet in-your-face question that just sort of hangs over our hypocrisy, nudging us to peek behind it, even if just for a second.
I count this run of comics as treasured, because second only to the Bible, it helped shape my moral worldviews as a child.
If you've never read them, they've been collected in trade paperback over a dozen times, and the reciepient of numerous different awards and accolades.
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