Super Social Justice Warriors

DC Rebirth’s Green Arrow and the Comic Culture Wars

Anastasia Salter

Assistant Professor

University of Central Florida

Twitter: @anasalter

Benjamin Percy, interviewed on Green Arrow Rebirth #1, May 2016. http://archive.is/wCPni#selection-1117.2-1143.107

Green Arrow is a social justice warrior. Green Arrow has his finger on the pulse of the moment. We're channeling the zeitgeist. If you've been reading the newspapers over the past few months, you've encountered headlines that we have considered filtering into — slanted versions of — into the series.

And the thing that I've struggled with, since taking Green Arrow over, is his billionaire status. This is a Robin Hood figure. And the pull quote from the trade, without question, will be, "How can you fight the man if you are the man?"

That's a question that Black Canary poses to him.

Green Arrow has lost his fortune before, but this will be the first time that he's complicit in that loss.

Scully, Tyler, and Kenneth Moorman. "The rise of vigilantism in 1980 comics: Reasons and outcomes." The Journal of Popular Culture 47.3 (2014): 634-653.

Green Arrow [in the 1980s] gave Americans a more easy-going vigilante, suggesting that you did not have to be brooding or conflicted to carry out justice. Though he questioned his methods in issue #19, there was little reason to fear he might lose his attitude and become an extremist like the Punisher or insane like Vigilante. He remained an attainable character—a relatively average guy who was really accurate with a bow and arrow. It was almost to suggest that anyone could be a vigilante. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why it carried the “Suggested for Mature Readers” label across its covers. It was another series to give Americans an escapist fantasy, one that showed them a new side of a familiar face, a character who had provided social advice in times past and now arose to do so again. Green Arrow demonstrated that a character could clean up the streets and still have a regular life; he was easy to like and he was easy to sympathize with, but most of all, he possessed a sense of fair play and strong, dependable notions of justice.

Stoddart, Mark CJ. "‘They Say It’ll Kill Me… but They Won’t Say When’: Drug Narratives in Comic Books." Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 13.2 (2006): 66-95.

Vigilante justice was normalized within comic book drug narratives. Characters like Daredevil, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, and Spider-Man worked outside the boundaries of law that have governed the official institutions of criminal justice (i.e., the police, courts, and prison system). However, there were well-defined rules of the game for the ritualized violence of supervigilantism. This model of legitimate vigilantism was governed by two principles. First, the superhero vigilante worked as a complement to the official justice system. While violence was a ritualized part of hero-villain interaction, the ultimate aim was to submit the villain to official processes of criminalization and punishment (which occurs off-page). Second, while the hero may have used violence, he or she did not kill the villain.

Gates, Geoffrey. "‘Always the Outlaw’: The Potential for Subversion of the Metanarrative in Retellings of Robin Hood." Children's Literature in Education 37.1 (2006): 69-79.

Is the reader invited to see Robin Hood as a conservative outlaw defending universal values, or as an innovator—a social reformer at work in the forest?

Conventionally, Robin Hood has come to Sherwood Forest after a skirmish with the law. At variance is the seriousness of Robin’s lawbreaking and his class background. These are rather important issues as they set up our understanding of Robin Hood’s reasons for being outside the law, the nature of his ‘alternative society’ in the forest, and prefigure how his eventual reincorporation is to be understood. In Michael Morpurgo’s storybook Robin of Sherwood, Robin and

Singer, Marc. “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race.” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp. 107–119. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2903369.

The idea of the split identity, one of the most definitive and distinctive traits of the superhero, is also one of the most powerful and omnipresent figures used to illustrate the dilemmas and experiences of minority identity. The concept has a long pedigree in the ories of race, beginning in 1903 with W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and his concepts of the veil and double-consciousness.

Bainbridge, Jason. "“This is the Authority. This Planet is Under Our Protection”—An Exegesis of Superheroes' Interrogations of Law." Law, Culture and the Humanities 3.3 (2007): 455-476.

Superheroes reflect perceptions of failed or deficient law. They are therefore another vehicle for thinking discursively about law because of what they can say about society and its perceptions of the effectiveness of law, in the context of their manifesting a pre-modern, sacralised, view of embodied justice as opposed to modern constructs of law.

Eric Francisco. “Trump Forced 'Green Arrow' to Double Down on Political Comics.” October 2017. https://www.inverse.com/article/37378-green-arrow-dc-comics-donald-trump

In October 2016, writer and novelist Benjamin Percy told Inverse he was introducing “a certain orange-faced candidate” into his Green Arrow series for DC Comics. The character, Nate Domini, soon appeared in the six-part “Emerald Outlaw” saga, as an entrepreneur-turned-politician who rode a nationalistic, xenophobic platform to win Seattle’s mayorship.

Green Arrow is the most political series at DC,” Percy tells Inverse on Friday of New York Comic Con, a year to the day of our original interview. He adds that “channeling Trump” into the series was both “natural and inevitable,” and though Trump himself isn’t in the comic, the series will always have something to say in the wake of his administration’s actions.

Thank you!