Review by Frank Plowright
The subtitle of Hard Travelling Heroes has to date been exclusively used in connection with the Green Lantern and Green Arrow collaborations by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams. These were relatively few in number, certainly not enough to fill an Omnibus, so it’s slightly misleading to use the term with an Adams cover for a collection that moves way beyond his departure from the series.
In the early 1970s O’Neil and Adams produced groundbreaking and award winning, if not commercially successful, stories about Green Arrow forcing Green Lantern to confront iniquities and inequality as they toured the USA. Highlighting the likes of industrial pollution, treatment of Native American people and miscarriages of justice was something new for superhero comics (although not for Underground publications), and O’Neil’s message resonated at the time. Adams brought the graphic sensibilities of commercial art to comics. While his contribution stands the test of time, O’Neil’s up to the minute dialogue spoke to a new generation in the 1970s, but it’s now almost unreadable, trite, condescending and hectoring. Time has moved on and there’s now considerably greater sophistication to presenting social issues.
It means the continuation of O’Neil’s work, which at the time wasn’t seen as anything other than filling pages after the landmark material, now actually reads better. The dialogue is toned down, as the stories revert to a slightly updated version of the formula that saw Green Lantern successfully through the 1960s. Human dramas on Earth alternate with SF missions in space at the behest of the Guardians of the Universe, with Green Arrow and Black Canary very much forced into the latter. Social issues occasionally manifest, but handled with greater subtlety. GL also picks up a new sidekick in alien starfish Itty. It’s now a ridiculed concept, and the reality was GL in space needed a sounding board for the stories to work, so why should all companions be humanoid? However, it’s not long into Green Lantern being relaunched into his own title that O’Neil gives up the ghost to supply formula material, most of which has never been previously available in book form.
Long after his series departure Adams remains the template for the art. First his erstwhile inker Dick Giordano attempts the same style less successfully, before then newcomer Mike Grell’s prolonged run (sample art left). He’s absorbed Adams’ dynamic page layouts, but lacks his anatomical accuracy, twisting bodies into all kinds of impossible poses to approximate the style. However, the uninspired art of Alex Saviuk toward the end of the collection (sample art right) is a fair plummet down the quality scale from Adams beginning it.
Also featured are Green Lantern and Green Arrow separately teaming with Superman, both by O’Neil and Dick Dillin and perfectly acceptable team-ups. Far better is Bob Haney’s tale of Black Canary, Green Arrow and Green Lantern visiting Gotham to stand in for an injured Batman. Artist Jim Aparo was someone who could mimic Adams’ layouts, yet maintain his own style.
The Adams material has probably seen more reprints than any other DC series, most recently in 2018 as a Deluxe Edition, while the issues drawn by Grell were previously combined as Space Travelling Heroes. Just under the first 50% of the content was also available in black and white as the fifth volume of Showcase Presents Green Lantern. The remainder you really don’t need to bother with.
