DEATH IS THE PRIZE: Will the real Green Arrow please stand up?

The title of this post, for those who do not recognize it, is from an old game show, To Tell The Truth (1956-78), in which three contestants (one the genuine article and two fakers) would claim to be a certain person with a particular backstory in an attempt to fool a panel of celebrities (professional cocktail guests, mostly).  Winners got, I dunno, a blender.

Actually, it was about $500.
The losers were executed on live TV.

Why, you ask...?

Well, when we last left Ollie and Roy, Ollie's bow and arrows had been *snort* STOLEN when he dropped them during a rooftop battle with some low-rent gang-in-ties.

No comic book hero has a higher Longevity/Competence ratio than Oliver Queen.  
I mean, at least you have to approach Hal Jordan FROM BEHIND to hit him in the head. 

Turns out, the weapons were snagged by an undetected member of the gang, who have decided to use it to lure Green Arrow into a trap.

I miss gangs-in-ties, whose native language is Exposition.

If your first thought is, "Really?! How can the criminals be that stupid to believe such a plan will work?"  The obvious answer is "because they are from Star City, the City Without Sense (tm)".  But the correct answer is:

CLEARLY, Roy, barely containing his amusement, knows this is a trap and just wants to see whether Ollie will fall for it. There is an entirely different (and MUCH more interesting) version of Roy Harper in the Golden Age then the drug-addled douchebag the unimaginative modern age has made of him. 

"Because Green Arrow is that stupid and it will."

"SURE you will, 'G.A.'  Meanwhile, I will stay here, dressed as an adult, studying for the LSATs and boning up on the inheritance rights of 'wards'."

So. Ollie goes to reclaim his bow and arrows. After all... what could possibly go wrong?

Joe Quesada cosplaying as G.A., that's what.

"I can sell it at ComiCon!"

It's really easier to think of Green Arrow as Star City's Greatest Loser. But you're forgetting the host of Green Arrow FANS in Star City.  Even though this one's avoirdupois makes it obvious he's not Green Arrow, he still thinks he's going to pull it off, because he's from Star City, The City Without Sense (tm). At least he's the only one.

When you become a criminal in Star City, you sign up to be the beleaguered Everyman in a faded sitcom.

That is, a surprise OTHER than that spelling of "dumbfounded".

Whoa, settle down, Beavis! Cornholio wants some arrows for his quiver-hole.  For some reason, this hardened criminal doesn't just tell these losers to hit the road, because they are obviously not the loser he's waiting for.  But it's all complicated by the fact that two apparently credible candidates for genuine Green Arrowhood arrive immediately after.

"It's the plumber; I've come to fix the sink."

Add "cosplay" to the 1001 Ways To Defeat Green Arrow. How are they going to figure out who is who?!

Oh. Right.

Ah, this is one of Green Arrow's "William Tell" stories, where The Plot awkwardly positions him in some sort archery test/contest.

"Whoever wins the basketball game is the REAL Green Arrow!"

Gotham City villains would have simply shot them all. Or put them in an ersatz death trap.  But this is Star City, so the criminals HAVE to determine which one is Green Arrow so they can kill him and not the wrong ones.

I'll sure they'll be no complications with that.

DEATH IS THE PRIZE: Our Unlucky Day

 Meanwhile, in 1943, we find Green Arrow and his sidekick, the one with the dumb hat, located on a rooftop where Death Hovers Nearby.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Um.. it's St. Louis Louie, Oliver. Why don't you just MEET HIM AT THE FAIR, like the song says? You are SO stupid sometimes.

Of course, I've BEEN to St. Louis, so I can't say I blame you for not going.

Rooftops are a REALLY bad place to try to run from vigilantes, because you're kind of stuck. I mean, it's not like you can just jump the whole way across even an alley to the next building.

Except in Star City, where alleys are either REALLY narrow or all the crooks are trained by Leapo The Clown.

Ollie, who only has to hold on to his bow and arrows in order to do his job, manages to lose his arrows. 

What are the odds? Well, on the bright side, the next shot will finish him, so he won't have to manage long without his arrows.

I think Roy will make a good Green Arrow. I mean, he's smarter, he's a better archer, and he's already used to wearing the stupid outfit.  

Ollie, whose plan was obviously to simply get shot, can't even do that right.  Fittingly, he's up against a crook who only had to hold on to his bullets and gun in order to do his job and couldn't manage that.
You get the foes you deserve, I guess.

Ollie, being a fit Golden Age hero, naturally trounces this pork-pied loser straightaway, recovers his arrows, and returns home to recategorize his Amerindian artifact collection.  Or not:

What's the sound of a gun bouncing off Ollie's head?
Tink? Blonk? Thr-Bung?  
Where's Onomatopoeia when you really need him?

Add "empty guns" to the list of 1001 Way To Defeat Green Arrow. And "gravity" I suppose.  The final ones, it seems, since Ollie is going to be a big green splotch in a very narrow alley in about 5...4...3...

Ugh. Roy saved him. AGAIN. Death may hover nearby for a chuckle but clearly finds it more amusing to keep Ollie alive.

I choose to interpret the art in that panel as depicting that Green Arrow was prescient enough to have built-in, reinforced Rescue Epaulets into his tunic that Roy can aim for every time Ollie falls off a roof.  Ollie has lots of flaws but a lack of self-awareness is not one of them.  

Of course you lost your bow, too.  Kept the stupid hat on, though.

So, Ollie, who without his bow and arrow is just a dilettante anthropologist in a man-size Peter Pan costume, continues to run across the easily-forded alleys and rooftops in pursuit a group of armed gunman.

Your unlucky day was the day your parents died, Roy.
Or any of the days you saved Ollie, who, you'll recall, currently has no heirs but...you.

Well, at least now they can go down in the tiny narrow alley and just pick up Ollie's bow and arrows from where they fell, rather than have to go back to the toy store and pick up some more.  

You gotta be kidding me.

LMAO, Ollie dropped all his weapons and they got STOLEN. Like, IMMEDIATELY.  

Can't believe that was never in "There Oughta Be A Law".
Thanks to ROY HARPER, 1941 Papp Place, Star City, WA. 

Ah well, Ollie's a zillionaire, so no big deal.  He's surely got a million more sets of weaponry and can buy more (and nicer ones) any time he needs, rather than go on some wild goose card for "his favorite bow".

But three guesses what happens.  

How I May Come to Love Green Arrow

 THIS is all that matters this week:

Possibly this decade.

It's from Geoff Johns' latest retconshriftfest, Courtney & the Golden Age Sidekicks That Never Existed #2. It's a perfect example of why I am happy to indulge any of GJ's flaws or stumbles as a writer or just choices I don't care for (one of which we'll be discussing later this week).  I can forget or ignore details of stories I didn't care for; and he makes large-scale sweeping changes so casually that please me so deeply that All Is Forgiven, like a sitcom husband at the end of a 30-minute episode. And this one?  Oh, I can forgive A LOT for the sake of canonizing:

THAT OLIVER QUEEN'S GOLDEN AGE HAPPENED TO "OUR" OLLIE QUEEN ON EARTH-0.

It was suggested before, but here it is, loud, bold and unretractable: at some point in his contemporary career, Ollie Queen (AND ROY HARPER) went back in time and were STRANDED in the 1940s for a good chunk of time, where they operated as THE GOLDEN AGE GREEN ARROW AND SPEEDY.  Ollie SHAVED his goatee to do this, as a disguise.  

So.

For one thing, this it just plain HILARIOUS. 

It means IT ALL HAPPENED "for real" to "our Ollie", the one who used to run about raving about 'fat-cats'. All of it. Gayland. Bull's-Eye. The Black Raider. The car-catapult.  The Octopus. OSCAR AND ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 

I'm gonna assume that in some Noodle Incident that I hope is never, ever explained ,Oscar and/or Alexander the Great is responsible for Ollie & Roy traveling to and getting stuck in the '40s. Or maybe it was Per Degaton's doing because--YES. Because Per Degaton needed Ollie to join the Soldiers of Victory so he could affect Alexander the Great's life, so that Per Degaton could defeat him at the Battle of Arbela. Yes; Roy Thomas would approve.

Now, we know already there is an Earth-2 where all this stuff ALSO happened. So this is completely gratuitous. GLORIOUSLY, DELICIOUSLY gratuitous.  Geoff Johns has gone OUT OF HIS WAY to do this. And, meanwhile, ONE PERSON is missing after the "Dark Crisis" hoo-haa: Ollie Queen, who will be sought for by His Family and found, of course.  

But why?

Here is my hope. Golden Age Green Arrow (let's deem him "Oliver") was introduced in 1941

I love that the first thing we see Oliver do is set out on a vacation.
I love that Speedy is called The Cyclone Kid ONCE, and never again.
I love that in his first panel (and in many of his early stories), they refer to previous cases we never hear any more about.
Golden Age Green Arrow may be stupid, but it's stupid FUN.

He was reinvented some thirty years later by Denny O'Neil in 1970 as a more "Robin Hood", anti-establishment type (whom we will label as "Ollie").

And a self-righteous, hypocritical, judgemental, loudmouthed jerk. But that's neither here nor there.  Because you could be an anti-establishment type WITHOUT being any of those.
Like Robin Hood.

Well... that was over FIFTY years ago now. It ain't 1970 any more. Like a lot of the DCU, Green Arrow is twenty years overdue for a refresh.  And who is more likely to fix a broken character with a refreshed view of their origins than Geoff Johns?

There have been some very successful templates that could be followed.

"Batman: Brave & The Bold" did an excellent job of figuring out who Green Arrow would have to be and what his relationship with Batman would be like.

Everyone remembers how GRIM AND VIOLENT CW's Green Arrow was.  Me? What impressed ME was how HILARIOUS Steven Amell's Oliver Queen was when appropriate. His Oliver Queen was a masterpiece of comedy entirely due to the strength of his performance.  CW Flash was Vaudeville but CW Arrow was the Frasier of superhero shows.

Q.E.D.
Add "Shakespeare Trivia" to the list of "1001 Ways to Defeat Green Arrow".

But, as usual, Geoff Johns seems to be forging his own path. And here's what I hope it is, based on the revelation that "Ollie", AS SOON AS HE HAD THE CHANCE, chose to become "Oliver".  

• He shaved his goatee. 
• He built an Arrowcave and filled it with trophies and giant statues of friends and foes. 
• He created a giant yellow Arrowcar with a fin and a catapult.  
• He invented a host of absurd trick arrows.  
• He wore a brightly colored Robin Hood outfit, with a little feather in his cap.
• He got an apartment in the city.
• He took vacations and played tennis.
• He had an Arrow Signal that was a flaming green arrow in the sky.

He didn't do this because he '"had to". He didn't do this "to fit in".  "Ollie" is not a conformist.

He did this because he WANTED to. He did this because this is who he always WANTED to be. 

And it is PERFECTLY consistently with his personality.  NO WONDER he is so righteously angry all the time. He WANTS to be the Golden Age Batman. He WANTS to fight crime COLORFULLY. He WANTS it to be fun.

He's both of the De La Vega Brothers, rolled into one.

But too often the world sucks and doesn't cooperate.  And he resents that.  It's the fault of greedy people and vicious villains. They have failed him; they have failed this city, and that ticks him off. He doesn't WANT to be grim and gritty. And the people who force him to be WILL pay.

And THAT is consistent with that guy in Brave&TheBold. AND that guy on CW. "Ollie Who Became Oliver" then had to come back to be Ollie and is angry about it, but who still has flashes of unapologetic Golden Age zest and Robin Hood swashbuckler flair?

THAT is a Green Arrow who is interesting.

THAT is a Green Arrow I could come to love.

P.S.  Is it any wonder Speedy turned to drugs after returning from the fabulous '40s? Now, even THAT finally makes sense.

And the Oscar goes to...

The key to our previous story (Per Degaton's first story, The Day That Dropped Out Of Time), was that Alexander the Great was the great defender of Western Civilization whose victory over the Persian forces of King Darius III at the Battle of Arbela had to be preserved by the JSA, lest all of the world's modern inventions and technological wonders (like pavement, I say with great sarcasm) start to disappear.  

Would it have killed them to call it,
"The Day That Time Forgot"?

The great Alexander, defender of Greek ideals like democracy and The Single Most Important Man In History, was very grateful for the JSA's assistance and gave them a nifty keepsake of his gratitude.

"Alex, when you say 'you', is that a singular 'you', or a plural 'you'?

 It's ambiguous in English, you see..."

Which they couldn't store at JSA HQ, since that has NO trophies, as everyone knows, so Alan hung it at home. In his bedroom.

So, there are obvious problems with this rose-colored view of Alexander, a Macedonian king (highly hellenized through his tutoring by Aristotle) who conquered Greece because, you know, he loved it so, and who used that love as an excuse to punch Persia in the nose repeatedly as revenge for its having tried to conquer Greece a century and a half earlier, Persia's King Darius all the while begging to be left alone. I mean; Alex stole Darius's MOM, even.

But we'll waive that, since this is Golden Age JSA, not a Marvel Comic where heroes have to be shown to have feet of clay.  No, the real issue here is writer John Broome's portrayal of Alexander as a hero at all when ALEXANDER THE GREAT IS PART OF GREEN ARROW'S ROGUE'S GALLERY.

Five years before the the Justice Society faced off against Per Degaton in All Star Comics #35 (1947), the Soldiers of Victory went up against Dr. Wilfred Doome in Leading Comics #3 (1942).

We're just gonna call that "Jupiter" thing a Google Translate issue.

I mean: even in the Golden Age, how could anyone take a villain with a ridiculous name like "Dr. Doome" seriously?

Because "Long Island", "New York" and "1942" are concepts you will understand, along with English.

Wilfred was yer basic Ugly Mad Scientist With A Time Machine, except his was a temporal fishing rod, with which he grabbed historical world-conquerors to join him in conquering the present.

Writer Whitney Ellsworth made no bones about it: Nero, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great were SUPERVILLAINS of history.  

Hey, Gaius; when you wrote De Bello Gallico, you lost the right to criticize anything as BORING.

I REALLY appreciate Ellsworth's refreshing moral clarity here.  These were not Great Unifiers or Complicated Figures; there were Military Conquerors of Every-Effing-thing They Could Find and we call those people supervillains, period.

Kang The Complicated Figure

And, in the long run, what's the SUREST way to stop ANY supervillain, past or present?

SPEEDY, THE ROY WONDER

Boy, is that one red foot of Roy's in that final panel the best detail or what?  

The key to ruining any supervillain is: pitting them against Speedy and Green Arrow. Not because Speedy and Green Arrow are that GOOD, mind you. Rather, because Green Arrow villains are immediately damned to forgotten obscurity, no matter how much of the planet they may have conquered at some point in history.

"I WOULD RATHER RATHER LIVE A SHORT LIFE OF GLORY
THAN A LONG ONE OF OBSCURITY!"
said the man who's about to become a Green Arrow villain.

I am NOT going to replay this story; it's exactly what you'd expect from a Soldiers of Victory story. Or a Golden Age JSA story. Or even most Silver Age JLA stories.  Each of the mastermind's surrogates is dispatched on an Evil Task, is defeated one by one by a different hero, then activates their recall buttons to return to History where they belong.  Alex The Gee is assigned to get radium from the Florida Everglades and Green Arrow to stop him.

Points to Ollie for knowing that Alexander employed archers (mostly Cretans), to greater degree and effect than previous Greek forces, but it's still a stretch.  Given his uses of the sarissa and hypaspists, the Shining Knight would be more on point.  Ollie, like a dog, just hears what interests him.

I bet you think "Alexander The Great fighting Green Arrow for Radium in the Florida Everglades" can't get any more absurd as a premise.  
It can. Do not underestimate the Golden Age.

If you are wondering why there is a bunch of radium to be stolen in the Florida Everglades, it's because that's where Prof. Geppetto the Little Old Scientist is making radium-powered robots.

Like ya do.

How Roy Thomas never got his hands on Leo Starr to make him founder of STAR Labs, I will never know.  Anyway, the robots are all strictly mindless automata, except for one, who thanks to some unexplained imperfections, is sentient, speaks, and has a wacky sense of humor, which is treated as a mere comic relief annoyance rather than science's greatest breakthrough (other than Dr. Doome's Time Grapple). 

From the makers of "Holmes and Yo-Yo", "Living Doll", and "Small Wonder",
it's "That's Our Oscar!", Fridays at 7 on ABC.

It's all wacky good Golden Age fun! Especially when...

Alexander The Great (tm) MEGO Action Figure (catapult sold separately)

ALEXANDER KILLS GEPETTO WITH A CATAPULT.  Dang.  Leo Starr didn't even LOOK Theban.  Must have registered with the Medizing Party in his youth. Having killed a defenseless old puppetmaker, Alexander works out his comedy routine with Oscar.

"Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal."--Alex T.G.
Lest you think that Alexander was not as much of a pompous ass as he is being portrayed here.

He uses the robots to capture Green Arrow, which he immediate regrets. because who doesn't immediately regret meeting Green Arrow?

OMG THE CATAPULT

THIS is the real reason G.A. was sent to fight Alexander: comic book irony.  Ollie enjoys archery, sure, but nothing but nothing compares to the joy he gets out of using:

THE ARROWCAR CATAPULT!

Okay, it's not often I root squarely for Ollie, but the only way that could be funnier is if the robot landed on Alex or that were Alexander himself bouncing off the ceiling.  Green Lantern may get hit by ceiling tiles, but Green Arrow hits the ceiling tiles with YOU.

Anyway, then Speedy executes Alexander The Great.

"Toil and risk are the price of glory." Alex T.G.

Nah, Ollie saves Alex's life.

Alex should be glad this isn't first-season Ollie:
"YOU HAVE FAILED THIS CITY-STATE!"

There is painful "humorous" badinage between Oscar and the Archers, but then Alex does the ONE thing you NEVER expect from a Green Arrow villain: he returns.

"I do not steal victory." Alex T.G.

Then Alex decides to have the robots REND THE BOWMEN LIMB FROM LIMB.

Add "radium-powered robots" to the list of 1001 Ways to Defeat Green Arrow.

The point I am making here, btw, is: Alexander The Great is a ****.  But Alex gets saucy with Oscar, who, after all, has a mind of his own; Oscar rebels, releases the archers, helps them defeat the mindless robots, and they rout the murderous Macedonian.

"The end and object of conquest is to avoid doing the same thing as the conquered."  Alex T.G.

Alex, tries to escape, but is cornered by swamp critters, cuz this ain't Macedonia.

"People are like snakes! You can give love, affection, affection even feed them, but at a certain moment they will end up biting you, because it is their nature."  Alex T.G.

Then there's a page worth of Ollie disguised as a robot shooting various swamp reptiles with arrows, just to fool Alex because.... frankly, I think it's just to embarrass him. It was a big tactic in the Golden Age.

“Every light is not the sun.” Alex T.G.

Crestfallen, Alexander presses his recall button and goes back home to 333 B.C.E.  

“When we give someone our time, we actually give a portion of our life that we will never take back.” Alex T.G.

I didn't really want to recount even this part of the story in this much detail. But this all happened, from Alexander's perspective, two years before he met the JSA.  Which leads me to my theory:

BEING A GREEN ARROW VILLAIN IS SUCH AN UNPLEASANT AND STRESSFUL EXPERIENCE THAT ONE DAY OF IT COMPLETELY CHANGED ALEXANDER THE GREAT, THE MOST IMPORTANT MAN IN HISTORY.

When he met Ollie, Alex was a young punk supervillain, who had never known defeat or humiliation. He had never met anyone who was a bigger **** than he was.

Then he met Roy. 

And Ollie. 

And Oscar.  

Like Scrooge meeting the Ghosts of ****ishness Past, Present, and Future.  It was a transformative experience so powerful that it turned him into the gracious champion of Western Civilization whom the JSA meet at the Battle of Arbela.

So, everything is explained except. 

"Roy, can you reset the atapultc-ay everl-ay...?"

What happened to Oscar?  That's the last seen of him. He runs, of his own volition, on radium, which has a half-life of 1600 years.  Oscar should, 80 years later be padding around the Florida Everglades, cracking wise and overthrowing potential world-conquerors.  

My personal theory is that the simplest explanation for why we have heard no mention of a sentient radium-fueled robot living in Florida for the last eighty years should be obvious to any long-time reader of this blog:

Oscar moved to Apex City, where no one gave him a second thought.