Red, White, and Blue Arrow 3

We left Speedy with a very successful Red Arrow, who seems to have proven that he's not only as good as Green Arrow "in his prime", but possibly BETTER.  Terrific, in fact.

Desaturated Arrow here has Ollie-level overconfidence.

Together the archers notice that there's "nothing much doing in the city".  Which, well... it's Star City.  What do you expect?  So effective has Green Arrow been -- in his prime -- that all crime has been driven past the city's edge!

Ollie always used the 'slow' gate, because he didn't realize it referred to cars.

But only and exactly to the edge of the city, since the very toll-gates on the bridge are currently being robbed!  

What are the odds?

I make fun of the Arrowcar catapult because it's absurd, but using it this way when there's no vertical distance to transverse is especially idiotic.  Jeez, bridge trolls, just SHOOT them while they're inbound.   Instead they whoosh away in their bandit car.

A siren arrow? Who's going to be dumb enough to fall for that?

Well, now we know how dumb you have to be to be a crook in Star City.

This silly trick turns our bridge tolls back to run over dem two arrow characters down with their car.

That reminds me; isn't Green (or Red, or White, or Blue) Arrow exactly the WRONG name?  Why isn't he simply called Green ARCHER?  Who names themselves after the weapon they use? I mean, Wild Dog doesn't call himself "Stray Bullet", does he?

I would totally support him if he wanted to, though.

Anyway, the archer bros have to come up with a plan to stop a vehicle barreling down on them.

Spike Arrow is Green Arrow's tough cousin from the wrong side of the tracks.

Aren't ALL arrows "spike arrows"? In any case, it's a solid plan and works handily, giving Roy another chance to disrespect Ollie.

"when he was good."
Dang, Roy is casually savage. I love that about him.

A desperate crook risks a deadly jump from the bridge, but White Arrow is equal to the emergency.

Not only is White Arrow sensational, you can wear him with anything.

You may notice that the set-up for the White Arrow's outing was given less 'screen-time' than Red Arrow's. This is a very typical and efficient pattern in Golden Age stories where events (such as crimes, villain encounters, etc.) often come in threes.  If the first event is, say, three panels, the second will be two, and third will be one.  Once you know this 3-2-1 trope, you'll notice it in lots of Golden Age storytelling.  Based on this pattern, Blue Arrow should come on with little to no intro.

BOOM.

"No, no, it's my eyes!" really seems like a comment that would have been more appropriate when hideous Red Arrow appeared, but I guess not everyone likes blue.

B.A.'s got the swagger and is efficient.

And he's on point with his trick arrow use!  As good as Green Arrow...
was when he was good.

Unfortunately, Blue Arrow is also as GULLIBLE as Green Arrow:

As you'll recall, The Octopus got Ollie with a similar trick.

Roy, being astute (and second in line) manages to stop himself in time by grabbing on to the door. Blue Arrow, sadly, plummets to his doom on the rocky cliffs below.  Red Arrow was deemed insufficiently visually distinct from Speedy and so this is how White Arrow came to replace Green Arrow, who was never heard from again.

Or WAS he...? Find out tomorrow...

Red, White, and Blue Arrow, 2

Ollie is SO into the idea of retiring and finding a replacement; it would give him more time to spend in curio shops looking for Genuine Cultural Artifacts to stuff in his house.

Ollie's thinking, "JEEZ, kid, what took you so long to force me to retire? Why do you think I hired a sidekick ten times more competent than myself?"

Ollie may be a terrible crimefighter but he is highly adept at moving the plot along, because (SOMEHOW) he has a bunch of candidates competing to replace him THE VERY NEXT DAY.

So, you are about to learn something very important about Golden Age writers.

Do these guys have names? No?  Okay, NPCs Red, White, and Blue it is.

You probably have a host of questions at this point.  How were the candidates found?   How did this happen so fast and without the underworld finding out?  Just how many g-d archers ARE there in Star City and why?  How did Ollie get those costumes made in a day? Is there some ideological or moral test to pass or is it all skill-based?

But the plain and ugly truth is: Golden Age writers DO NOT CARE.  Golden Age writers are not interested in exploring a concept or justifying its use; their only interest is in EXPLOITING concepts.  They are not stewards of the conceptual environment, in which story ideas are like natural wealth.  They are consumers; they lay waste to the forests of the mind, heedless of story potential they are destroying just to get lumber for some dumb little outhouse of a story.  They couldn't care less that they are wasting the potentially poignant concept of "a fading hero struggles to find his successor with the aid of his sidekick" on this slapdash nonsense.  Because it's the Golden Age. They have no fear of running OUT of ideas, so they think nothing of wasting them as soon as they occur to them.  Once you understand this about Golden Age writers, every  Golden Age story makes a lot more sense-- or at least it's much easier to understand why it DOESN'T.

Editor's Note: Roy eventually gets over his aversion to the name "Red Arrow".

Roy immediately takes advantage of an opportunity to test Red Arrow's lack of self-preservation (a key quality of Green Arrow's).

There is a whole Untold Tale of those trial jumps and I'd love to have seen it.

Then a lesson in gun safety (specifically, that guns are not safe).

Ye gods, their costumes look so hideous together, I'm surprised the crooks don't simply faint from fashion dissonance.

The crooks try for a getaway, but Red Arrow is undeterred by Speedy's warning that his planned shot is impossible.

Except for it's impossible to describe how much more hideous Red Arrow's costume is than Green Arrow's. Some things simply don't reverse well.

In addition to lacking self-preservation, Red Arrow also has Green Arrow's lack of realism; he's looking like a good successor so far!

Even the crooks realize this guy is better than Green Arrow.

Roy is duly impressed by Red Arrow's performance.

I dunno, though; he might be UNduly impressed.  All that jazz, including the bolo shot, seems to me like bog-standard Green Arrowing.  But part of reading a Golden Age story is accepting all statements at face value; if you are told It Was Amazing, then it was amazing, no mater how many times you have seen It before.  The stories don't work unless you play along.

In any case, you'd think Red Arrow has clearly proven himself a more than capable successor for Green Arrow (more capable THAN Green Arrow, in fact!) and that he can be Speedy's new partner, contest over.  But that's not how the Golden Age works, and we will darned well put White Arrow and Blue Arrow through their paces, too, before a decision is made...

Red, White, and Blue Arrow, 1

 Riddle me this! What is worse than 

Answer:

Four of him.

What's this? Has Geoff Johns time-travelled to the Golden Age so that he could create a spectrum of archers, one for each color?

Nope, this is Adventure Comics #133, in which Speedy tells Green Arrow he's over-the-hill and needs to be replaced, so they hold try-outs for his replacement.  I'll say this for Green Arrow; that's definitely a story you wouldn't find Batman and Robin doing!

Your definition of "glorious" may vary.

It begins, as many Green Arrow stories do, with Green Arrow bringing a bow to a gunfight.

"Yeah, G.A.; it's almost as if using weapons that require expertise and strength to produce only one tenth as much force as those that can be used easily at a greater distance by an amateur were somehow tactically unwise."

Naturally, Green Arrow proposes to solve the problem with one of his dumb arrow-based stunts, which immediately backfires.

"Leaving Speedy as a decoy" says so much.

"Aqualad is my decoy!"
At least Aquaman is more self-aware about it.

Unsurprisingly, this stupid "ladder of arrows" stunt G.A. used to pull all the time finally goes South, and Speedy plummets to his death.

You know, being saddled with the guilt of a dead sidekick would be much more on-brand for Green Arrow than Batman.   Except I suspect Ollie is not capable of guilt. "Ugh! Now I have to go back to the Rez and get ANOTHER one."

Fortunately, Speedy's REAL ability isn't archery; it's PARKOUR.

As we learned from the CW. Roy can do parkour WHILE outrunning a TRUCK.

Thus Speedy saves himself by, um, rolling.

Translation: Roy has known for years that Ollie would eff this stunt up at some point.

It's like I always say, folks: always get your crime-fighting orphans from the circus.  They come pre-equipped for such situations.

This bracing brush with death helps Speedy to finally realize that his adult partner is dangerously incompetent.

"Yeah, G.A., it's almost as if traipsing around fighting crime on rooftops in a Robin Hood costume with a dilettante millionaire amateur anthropologist and archery enthusiast was somehow tactically unwise!'

Ollie, of course, feels he's not to blame.

It's like watching the scales falls from Roy's eyes.

Rotten wood or no, the "ladder of arrows" stunt is stupid and dangerous.

Pictured: how to safety scale a wall.

In case you never noticed, every time Batman'66 throws a bat-line so that he can Robin can scale a wall, THEY SHOW HIM TESTING THE SECURITY OF THE LINE before they climb.  Always buckle up!

Speedy's doubt is immediately freshly fed by G.A. flubbing a smoke arrow shot

and blaming it on the wind.

Old Man Yells At Cloud.

Unlike the rest of us, this is Roy's first realization that Green Arrow just may be incompetent, which torments him into sleeplessness.

"Knowing that G.A. in his prime never made any slips".  I'm just going to put THESE here as a reminder of Green Arrow In His Prime:

Roy has a case of rose-colored glasses so severe that he may think his own costume is grey.  But he realizes that, as Ollie's only friend, it falls on him to inform Ollie that he is, in fact, incompetent.

There is much I could say about Ollie's decor. I will say none of it.

Fortunately Ollie facilitates the necessary confrontation by asking for it.

Neither will I make an "awfully hard" joke.  That is for lesser wits than mine.

"No secrets between us remember? I mean, unless you are doing drugs. You BETTER keep that from me because I have a ZERO sympathy policy."

Awfully hard it may be, but Roy gets right to it and wastes no words.

"THAT CAN'T GO ON."
Meanwhile, nearly 80 years later...

Okay, now I'll address the decor.  I think it should always be remembered that Ollie is rich amateur anthropologist, which means that he's a classy packrat, who picks up knick-knacks from any culture and shoves them into some display in his overcrowded apartment.

Anyway, to his credit, Ollie is self-aware enough to IMMEDIATELY understands that Roy's saying he's washed up and needs replaced. AND ROLLS WITH IT!

"This week, on Hoarders..."

Man, I bet the souvenir stand operators just salivate every time they see Ollie coming and put on their best fake obsequious foreign accents to dump their excess unsalable tchotchkes on this rich rube: "Oh, um, SI, memsahib, we have-um heap big sale on velly velly rare objectos!"

Ollie doesn't mind being put out to pasture but is determined that his legacy will be preserved! THERE MUST NEVER BE ANOTHER GREEN ARROW!

Actually, I think Ollie had the right idea.

Ollie's solution therefore it to create THE RED, WHITE, and BLUE ARROWS!

More on this idea tomorrow!

JuJuBit: Bull's-Eye

 Our next JuJuBit figure profile is BULL'S-EYE.

or, as he is less actionably known, Leapo the Clown.

As you may remember, Bull's-Eye is the completely original one-of-a-kind clown-like villain who used to battle Green Arrow in the Golden Age.

There's no backstory as to how his face got That Way (or whether he just wears elaborate make-up while lounging around the hideout).  You don't have to be that deep to be Green Arrow's nemesis.

"Battle" is rather a strong word.  

God, I love Bull's-Eye.  Never any elaborate traps or devices; he simply clobbers Green Arrow with whatever happens to be lying around. He's an improv comic.

Mostly Bull's-Eye made a fool out of Green Arrow (no challenge there) until the very end where he would be caught through some turn of bad luck. As if being a Green Arrow villain were not bad luck enough!

Bull's-Eye schtick was that. he was a former acrobatic clown ("Leapo") whose specially was dodging projectiles, making him the perfect living target to confound Green Arrow.

Confounding Green Arrow is fun but not especially difficult.

The JuJubit sculpt was based on this image of B-E:

That signature is George Papp, co-creator of Green Arrow.

Given his schtick, I knew that his Heroclix dial would need to grant him "Leap/Climb" (a mobility power that allows easily change elevations and escape from opponents) and some other powers that might make him difficult to hit.  I also wanted him to be a low-cost figure so that he would be easily added to teams; a "harasser" rather than a "tentpole".

So, I chose this dial:

Some obscure Marvel menace, I believe.

It has two "move and attack" powers (Running Shot and Charge) and three "hit avoidance powers" (Deflection, Combat Reflexes and the Super-senses granted by his team ability), all of which is perfect for his M.O. of attacking on the go and being hard to hit.  The trait that grants leap/climb and a free change of elevation screams "Leapo"!  And he has power Ranged Combat Expert and Close Combat Expert (which shows he's both a crack shot and wicked hand-to-hand opponent).  The Wildcard team ability (that's the Question Mark in a circle) allows him to fit in on any team of villains.  Plus, he's got TWO starting lines, meaning you can play him at a more threatening 50 points or at a still spicy 25 points.

It looks like this on his customized card:

I have a lot of customized Green Arrow villains in Heroclix (e.g., the Red Dart and the Octopus), but Leapo is going to be my favorite!