Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams: GREEN LANTERN / GREEN ARROW, Vol. I and II

Whoa! Two Dennis O'Neal collections in a row! This is just getting crazy (in truth, I'm just reading a lot of comic books for escapist purposes, because you can't just keep applying for jobs forever. At least, not without some reason for hope. Not that there's no reason for hope, which is why I eventually start again. That, and my addictions to eating / drinking, wearing clothes, and sleeping underneath a roof)! This time around, we've got his complete Green Lantern / Green Arrow run, with art by the inimitable Neal Adams (probably my favorite comic book artist? Tough to say, but the man can really draw...). I loved these books, but then I was already inclined to: Green Lantern was my favorite DC hero--hell, my favorite hero, period--growing up (maybe rivaled by Batman), and Green Arrow's been my favorite since I discovered social democracy (well, at least since I discovered that he discovered social democracy, which confuses the timeline a bit, but you get the point: I've always liked Green Lantern, and now also like Green Arrow. Got it?). Add to that the fact that these were groundbreaking comics (they were, however cheesy they seem now; Speedy on heroin is still a great story, forty years or so later), and, well, they're just great. GL is the straight-laced, law and order sort, GA the rowdier, bawdier believer in freedom, equality and the kind of justice that law and order don't always mete out. So, yeah: these are great stories, not just great comics, and deserve their A+.

Dennis O'Neil: THE QUESTION, Vol. I, II, III (ZEN & VIOLENCE / POISONED GROUND / EPITAPH FOR A HERO)

A faceless, should-have-died-in-the-first-issue superhero (actually, drop the "super": in his spare time, the wholly-human Vic Sage is an on-again, off-again muckraking Hub City newscaster) who meditates in his spare time. That's The Question. I mean, sure, Batman meditates, but c'mon--he's Batman, and Batman does whatever a particular writer thinks will make him look mysterious, in control, and smarter than absolutely everybody else. The Question is perhaps the most human hero out there (another good reason to strike "super" from the first sentence of this post), and as such he makes mistakes. In fact, he makes a lot of mistakes, so many mistakes that it's almost amazing he only almost-dies once in these three volumes (well, really almost dies. They're comic books, after all, so he kind of almost dies pretty much every issue). See, The Question doesn't even do a particularly good job cleaning up Hub City, and he knows it; to that end, however, no other hero in the DC Universe seems too interested in taking on the Hub City challenge. The mayor isn't exactly corrupt, but he's always drunk enough that it doesn't really matter whether or not he is. In fact, for a while, the town is run by a maniac priest intent on making Hub City into Sodom + Gomorrah + Watts (leading me to believe that the city is actually modeled on Detroit). Anyway, the point is, there's so much wrong with this place, only a zenned-out hero like The Question could even begin to deal with it. The art's alright, but Dennis O'Neil's writing makes up for its shortcomings, snagging these books a solid B+.