266 GREEN ARROW
a back-up feature. Mort Weisinger wrote the majority of these stories; however, Jack
Kirby (who contributed the deserted-island origin story) also contributed a few stories
in 1958. During this time, Green Arrow’s stories were largely driven by his trick arrows,
such as the net arrow, the rocket arrow, the fi re extinguisher arrow, and, perhaps the
most famous of these, the boxing-glove arrow.
In 1969, writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams began to revise the charac-
ter; this led to the loss of Queen’s fortune, as well as his team-up with the Silver Age
Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) on a now-classic road trip across America and the depths
of interstellar space. O’Neil saw Green Lantern as a “cop, a crypto-fascist,” who meant
well but was hampered by his willingness to take orders without questioning them.
O’Neil proposed Green Arrow as a challenge to the mindset of “liberal, vaguely well-
meaning people of middle-class origin.” In essence, Green Arrow was to act as Green
Lantern’s conscience. So he did, in stories that addressed issues of drug abuse, racial
inequality, and class struggles, many of which contributed to or solidifi ed the increas-
ingly left-leaning political orientation of the Green Arrow character. Green Arrow also
began an on-again, off -again relationship with the Black Canary (Dinah Lance) in the
course of this series.
When Mike Grell took over writing duties in 1987, he moved the character from
Star City to Seattle and attempted to take Green Arrow in more plausible directions:
no more trick arrows, no more super-science, and, as time went on, fewer and fewer
contacts with other DC characters. Grell’s run began with the highly praised miniseries
Th e Longbow Hunters (1987), in which Green Arrow faced down a Vietnam-era vet-
eran who was murdering prostitutes, and spent the rest of the book pursing a Japanese
assassin who is out for revenge. One of the clearest signs of Grell’s more pragmatic take
on Green Arrow was that Green Arrow agrees in the end to take a bribe from a drug
lord, keeping that money for himself rather than giving it to the poor. Longbow Hunters
is seen as the equivalent to Frank Miller’s Th e Dark Night Returns in the tone it set for
future writers.
Writers after Grell slowly returned Green Arrow to DC’s main continuity. Th e
character participated in DC’s mid-1990s crossover event, Zero Hour, in which he
was forced to kill Hal Jordan, who had become the power-crazed demigod Parallax.
Shaken by this turn of events, Queen retired to a monastery, where he met his biologi-
cal son, Connor Hawke, and trained him as an archer. Eventually, Queen returned to
his Green Arrow duties, but in 1995, while infi ltrating a group of ecoterrorists, Green
Arrow chose to sacrifi ce himself to save Metropolis, and Oliver Queen died. After
this, Connor Hawke became Green Arrow (with a brief stint as a member of the
Justice League of America , as well as in his own series), until the Green Arrow series
was canceled in the late 1990s.
Kevin Smith restarted the Green Arrow title in the aftermath of Final Night (1996).
Parallax, having not quite died, elects to restart Earth’s sun; before he does so, he
chooses to “fi x things,” and resurrects Oliver Queen’s body. Queen eventually returns,
body and soul, and agrees to share the protection of Star City and the Green Arrow
