When last we left Green Error, part-time vigilante and houseplant, he was waiting for his sidekick, Flapjack, to rescue him.
Which he does.
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| "Flapjack's Whistling Shaft" is the name of my next quartet. |
On such occasions, the Boy Back-Up loves to find little ways of rubbing it in that Ollie is too dumb to notice. Like calling Ollie "chum" after the pirates threw him off the boat as fish food. Twice.
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| THE BANANABOAT PEELS OUT! |
Ollie's captors having been subdued, the Hydrodynamic Duo quickly catch up with the pirates, who have already beaten the snot of everyone on whatever vessel they are robbing.
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| Boarding the S.S. Hieronymus Bosch. |
There's some needlessly homoerotic arrowplay:
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| "Quivering Prelude" is the name of my next quartet. Or the prequel to "Unwilling Cabin Boy". |
Ollie brings oceans of love for the boys.
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| You know, it wasn't until this panel that I was sure Kilgore's eye had a patch. I thought it have might just been, you know, redacted. |
Ollie threatens to shoot people with arrows while, well, actually shooting them with arrows.
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| Yellow? You know if Green Arrow were colorblind it would explain MUCH. |
And a man with a beard shoots Ollie dead. Thus di--
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| SPEAKING of needlessly homoerotic. |
REALLY, FLAPJACK?! Thanks for saving Uncle Gadget AGAIN.
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| Note the snotty caption making it clear just who is saving the day here. |
The pirates skedaddle to their own scow, but not without a parting gift for today's contestants: a brand-new torpedo with Pouty Pegboy attached!
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| Send them to the bottom? I thought that's who was tied to the torpedo...? |
Ollie, following his natural instincts as an arrow, launches himself directly TOWARD the torpedo.
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| Which, I must reiterate, was somehow inexplicably fired from an old wooden schooner. |
Which, thanks to thousands of hours of salmon laddering, Ollie simply catches and bends the solid steel rudders of.
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| "DAS IST LIMPET!" |
Flapjack is bit taken a back by meeting someone even more helpless than Ollie.
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| Well, he's a kid; but he is definitely not like you. Have you looked in the mirror lately? |
And Ollie through -- of course -- sheer luck...
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| World's greatest archer 'accidentally' hits a target. |
... KILLS ALL THE PIRATES IN A FIERY and/or WATERY DOOM!
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| Captain Kilgore et al, you have failed this great seaboard city. |
Thus dies... Captain Kilgore and the crew of the Black Raider. Golden Age is hardcore, baby.
And so, having triumphed again through dumb luck, brute strength, and his competent sidekick, Green Arrow adds another memento to his cavernous Armoire of Trophies:
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| Really need to get a bigger one of these for when you fight a robot dinosaur, Ollie; you know it's coming. |
Oh, and add "Mari Kondo" to the list of 1001 Ways To Defeat Green Arrow.
6 comments:
I don't think anyone's going to say this story is anywhere near the pinnacle of Green Arrow canon. At the same time, it's nowhere near the bottom: at least it gets the fundamentals right: Ollie and Speedy actually use their archery to stop bad guys. It's not that long ago when the "Green Arrow" comic involved Green Arrow studiously avoiding the use of archery, or being turned into a werewolf to teach white people what it's like to be black. I'm not sure golden age creators exactly respected their audience, but at least they understood they had to hit a few metrics in order to get paid.
Are the Kilgore Corps secretly a team of super-villains? I ask primarily because of their gunplay technique, which apparently involves shooting people through their own thighs and holding the rifle barrel while firing it at point blank into some random sailor's gut. And then Grape Ape is just...dangling, but prominent enough that he must be important. I realize random thug falling on his butt like a toddler speaks against that interpretation.
And did the penciller forget to draw another character into that torpedo panel? I can't figure out who "I'm not scared...when you're around" is talking about, since I only see Green Arrow. Even as a pick-up line, it's not convincing, especially when he's mangling a torpedo to just set it free to Drunkard's Walk the Star City Open Air Pirate Ship Mausoleum like that.
Head-canon, by the way: After the fight, Ollie re-cemented his feet into that flower pot. We don't see his feet again, after that, and it seems like the sort of thing he'd take a few hours out of his schedule to do.
I want to point out, though, that this story illustrates one huge gap between National Periodical characters and All-American characters. Johnny Thunder started hanging out with a cigarette girl whose overwhelming competence pushed him out of his own strip. Green Lantern adopted a dog who pushed him out of his own strip. Green Arrow, though? He hires a tween who's basically his mentor and yet somehow manages to cling to the starring role for thirty years until he can get the kid hooked on heroin.
Arrowcraft haiku:
Whipping up a fine
Salt spray as it planes over
The choppy waters.
I weep for its beauty.
"Really need to get a bigger one of these for when you fight a robot dinosaur, Ollie; you know it's coming."
I'm fairly certain that every super-hero fights robot dinosaurs sooner or later.
Green Arrow and Speedy once fought Alexander the Great, which is NOT something every super-hero gets to do. So there's that, anyway.
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