Denny O'Neil (1939–2020)

Wow. Dennis O'Neil knows how to write a Batman story. Venom is about responding to failure and the consequence of taking drugs for the "easy out." Rarely is Batman depicted with such emotional depth (or as a psychopath for that matter), and it makes the character very engaging.

The art doesn't seem particularly striking on first glance, but is actually quite excellent. It enhances the text rather than distract from it. And man is it eerie when the Dark Knight cackles! My only nitpick is a show more scene where Bruce Wayne goes from clean cut to caveman in one month. What, is there Rogaine in those pills?

It should be noted that DC Comics advertises this as an origin for Bane. Well, only kind of. The villain of the Chris Nolan flick is nowhere to be found, but the guy is addicted to the same strength-enhancing venom introduced here.

But even if DC's marketing for this book is a bit misleading, this is a great comic. Trust me: You'll be happy to be misled. show less

I wish I'd known about this book when I did my big readthrough of Green Arrow tales, because it's much more Green Arrow and Green Lantern's tale than it is Batman's. This collects two stories: the first, "Peacemakers," is about the first meeting between Green Arrow and Green Lantern, while the second, "The Arrow and the Bat," unites the two with Batman.

That said, it's not very good. I feel like the later you are in Denny O'Neil's career, the worse his writing is, and this book is no show more exception. It's jumpy, characters don't (re)act realistically, the conspiracies are too complicated to make sense, it's bloodier than a mainstream DC superhero story ought to be, and it doesn't even get basic points of continuity right. Oliver seems to have lost his fortune already, but he hasn't even joined the Justice League yet because there is no Justice League yet. And it was O'Neil who wrote the story where Oliver lost his fortune, set well into his tenure on the League! What's the point of writing a tale to tick off a continuity box if you get the continuity wrong? None, as far as I can tell, because this is a disappointing and uninteresting book.

Batman "Year One" Stories: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »
Green Arrow: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow: Hard-Traveling Heroes, Deluxe Edition collects their critical issues that demonstrated the power of mainstream American comic book writers to discuss and engage with critical issues in the early 1970s. This volume collecs Green Lantern nos. 76-89 and The Flash nos. 217-219 & 226. Beginning with their April 1970 story, “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” O’Neil and Adams engaged with the civil rights movement and the work yet to show more be done, acknowledging that superheroes fighting far-off monsters and defending alien planets are overlooking the systemic issues in the United States.

When the Guardians of Oa challenge the Green Lantern for his effort to help people stand up to slumlords, he decries, “Some hideous moral cancer is rotting our very souls!” Where Adams portrayed Green Arrow gesticulating in typical superhero fashion for most of this speech, he portrays Green Arrow with a horrified face in the last panel as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy’s portraits appear behind the costumed adventurer. Arrow’s words move the Guardians of Oa, leading them to send one of their number to Earth disguised as a human to travel the country like Jack Kerouac and learn about the problems facing Americans.

In the August 1971 story “Snowbirds Don’t Fly,” some teens attempt to mug Green Arrow while in his civilian identity as Oliver Queen. One shoots him with a crossbow and Queen recognizes the arrow as one of his own. He and Green Lantern find where the teens reside, with one begging the building manager to let him in. The begging teen cries and shakes, leading Green Lantern to reveal his ignorance as he fails to recognize the symptoms of withdrawal. Green Lantern and Green Arrow convince the young addict to take them to the flophouse of the other teens, where Arrow finds his sidekick Speedy amongst the strung-out youths. He believes that Speedy was working undercover to find the man behind the narcotics ring. Noticing that Speedy appears pale, Green Arrow recommends he rest while they pursue the leaders of the drug ring. Throughout the story, Green Arrow and Green Lantern moralize about drug use, showing their shock that anyone would use heroin. Through Speedy, O’Neil and Adams offer a more sympathetic voice, contextualizing the emotional pain a young person might feel and how they could turn to drugs to ease their feelings of pain. Rather than listen, Green Arrow disregards Speedy’s pleas. Later, he’s shocked to catch Speedy in the act of shooting up.

Other stories touch on counterculture cults and even adapt concepts from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Though O’Neil writes in his introduction that he has no desire to look back, preferring to look forward, these comics remain essential reading both for their impact on the industry and for how they influenced later stories. O’Neil and Adams’s comics played a role in the national discussion by distilling these issues into short-form narratives that readers could easily understand, even as they reflected racialized discourses about drug use and poverty. Beyond that, Speedy’s drug use remained a part of his backstory through several different industry reboots and the showrunners of the CW’s Arrow even incorporated it into their plot. This volume is a must-read for all Green Lantern and Green Arrow fans. show less

Knightfall is a book of two distinct halves, and the first is definitely better than the second. In the first, a gangster known as Bane decides he is going to prove himself by taking out Batman, and he enacts a massive scheme to deplete Batman's strength in order to do so. Bane himself is the best part of this; far from being the brute thug I'd imagined from the film versions of him, he's a fascinating, semi-heroic character, or at least a character who could easily become a hero with the show more right push.

The second half of the book tells the tale of Jean-Paul Valley's time as Batman, while Bruce Wayne recovers from his breaking at the hands of Bane. This is less successful, partly because there's so little overlap with the first. Bane is dispatched quickly and easily by the new Batman, who capitalizes a bizarrely small amount on his major accomplishment, and he stays in prison for the rest of the novel. And given how important a character Jean-Paul is in the second half of the book-- he's Bruce's first choice for a replacement!-- he's introduced really late, very shortly before the breaking of Batman. The effect is two halves that don't quite mesh; Jean-Paul should have been more important in the beginning, and Bane should have returned at the end. Without some source of cohesion, the ending is unsatisfying.

Part of the reason I started this project of reading superhero prose fiction was to see how writers rendered the interiority of superheroes in prose. O'Neil actually uses this as a plot point; Bruce thinks of himself as "Batman" up until his back is broken, and then he cannot anymore. But when he adopts other disguises, he also inhabits them completely-- as does Jean-Paul the identity of "Batman." When the narration dubs Bruce Wayne "Batman" again, you know the hero has made a comeback. show less