Remember the time Green Arrow shot a villain? No, the other time.

[wizardru]

Of course, back then we were supposed to be shocked at the loss of innocence. Or something.

Hey Kids, it's my first post evar! I've been inventorying and sorting my comics collection and discovering good choices, bad choices and baffling choices. You can decide for yourself about this cut from DC's second attempt at trying to fix continuity, Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time. This was before DC became like a junkie, needing more frequent hits on the old continuity vein, each one giving less and less of a hit. 5 issues of trying to make it all make sense again...and making everything far, far worse. Here's 3 pages from the last issue.






So you may or may not recall that the crux of the event was that Extant (formerly Monarch) starts attacking heroes, aging old ones to their actual age and so on...until it's revealed he's actually a pawn of Crazy Ol' Hal Jordan as Parallax, who's ultimate goal is to remake the universe so that everything is peachy keen. It's a great big pile of DOESN'T MAKE SENSE, clearly at least partially mandated by the transparent desire of editorial to retire some characters and launch new franchises. The JLA takes it on the chin pretty hard.

A final showdown, with Green Arrow and a bunch of others, including an alternate reality Batgirl, Triumph and Damage. During the fight, Hal starts stone-cold blasting some dudes...and knowing that she's not long for this series, Batgirl does this:



The subsequent arrow in the power symbol trick causes Hal to go splodey and 'die', much to the mixed emotions of the readership. Ollie, of course, must bear the brunt of his actions. Alone. Like a loner. Who is alone.

(WTFery ALERT: That blonde woman in the first panel? That's Power Girl, asking why shouldn't folks be happy about saving the universe. After all, she just had this baby in a mystical virgin pregnancy in about five panels! What's not to be happy about? She and Ms. Marvel will be meeting for lunch later to compare notes. The kid ages rapidly, disappeared and has never been acknowledged again. Let us never speak of it again.)



And finally: Emo Ollie is EMO. Also, the useless defenders of the timestream. Until they get wiped out a few years later.



I hope we've all learned a valuable lesson here. I'm not sure what that is, but I feel better for sharing it with you.

admins, in case I can't add them, tag suggestions:
Creator: Jerry Ordway, Creator: Dan Jurgens, event: Zero Hour, publisher: DC Comics, char: green arrow/oliver queen

Comments

[darkness_p]

The statue should take a lesson from Ollie. She sucks at dramatic posing. Loved the last two panels of page 2 though.

Powergirl. Powergirl and the baby. WTFery indeed...

[thandrak]

Hey, so Babs became the Time Trapper for a few weeks?

[comicoz]

Time Trapper is whoever needs to be for the Epic-Ultimate-Final-World Changing Crossover of the Week.

[twigcollins]

Ollie did this all for that pose in the second-to-last panel.

I know I would.

[icon_uk]

Which I think I last saw in a Universal horror movie as Dr Frankenstein curses the heavens for the lack of lightning

Sublte body-language this is not.

[benicio127]

That pose is almost as good as Ollie's pasta eating pose.

[kirke_novak]

Can you do that to a bow? Because if yes, that's a pretty shitty bow IMHO.

[seriousfic]

Greeny the Arrow Cat shares your grief, Ollie.

[halloweenjack]

Ollie's just trying to distract us from ZOMG STONE NIPPLEZ in that panel, and it almost--almost--worked.

[jlroberson]

So, Jurgens, you didn't think KILLING JOKE was graphic enough, huh? Thanks.

[halloweenjack]

The fact that parallax!Hal just sort of grazed her in the side with his star-igniting power reminds me of Gilbert Gottfried's routine about Moby Dick, about how this whale with, you know, a whale-sized mouth only took Ahab's leg.

[thokstar]

I'm pretty sure alt-Batgirl's death was forced on Jurgens by editorial.

[pyrotwilight]

Aww I thought Equinox was cool...

And Zero Hour Babs would've been awesome to keep around...

[an-idol-mind.livejournal.com]

And Hal stayed dead for less than a month. The end.

[autumn_lily]

Ollie's pose of angst in that last page tells me that somebody went to theatre camp as a child!

[star_of_airdrie]

"Pose of Angst" added tp both favorite phrases and positions. There is lots of drama here at the moment. But poor Roy has to do his one armed version of Pose of Angst

[jlroberson]

When I'm grief-stricken my head goes into my hands. I've never seen anyone, ever, in real life react to it like this.

[mullon]

That day, Ollie cursed SCIENCE! for its evil.

[shadowpsykie]

i think you mean
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceIsBad

[shadowpsykie]

i hate to say this, but Alt!Babs' death was one of the best things in this book. it kinda echoed (in a VERY minor way) Kara's death in CoIE (who was her bff in that reality)

[jlroberson]

For echoed read: "stole from." Anyway, Babs also got shot through the middle. It was the favored way to kill female characters at DC in the 80s. It's a great way of keeping most of their body, and face, intact for a heart-tugging death scene.

And now they've moved on to dismemberment for men.

[scenesaroundjackson.wordpress.com]

STUPID BOW!!!

[mad]

Lulz.

[jlroberson]

>>Also, the useless defenders of the timestream. Until they get wiped out a few years later.

GodDAMN how fast I put a comic down when I see Waverider's in it...

[deleonjh]

You know, arrows aren't exactly designed to be non-lethal. The sharp and pointy end is kind of a dead giveaway. Ollie should just use boxing glove arrows all the time, though I guess he could still give someone a concussion that would seriously mess up their brains permanently.

[cmdr_zoom]

It really didn't help that they set Hal up as the crazy strawman villain who wanted to undo the whole damn Crisis and bring back the multiverse. At the time, COIE was recent enough (and we'd seen enough of the fallout) that this actually sounded like a pretty good idea to a lot of fans, myself included.

Today, however, it seems that the only fans still really pulling for a return to the Silver Age are the ones who're now running DC. The time has passed for that to be an effective solution either; too much water under the bridge, too many new fans to be alienated.

[jaybee3]

The thing that really annoyed me about Zero Hour is that Ollie is the ONLY one who is at all upset that Hal is dead even though most of the people there were his friends and teammates. I mean Power Girl with the baby there almost/maybe even slept with Hal! IIRC in the very next issue of Superman, Clark tells Lois its OK they defeated an evil super-villain (without mentioning it was one of Clark's former best friends).

And then...when DC wanted to give Hal a "heroic" death after putting him through so much crap in Final Night. And then they gave him a "Funeral for A Friend' special issue of GL where everybody (particularly Superman!) went on and on on how great Hal was and how sad they were that he was dead as if Zero Hour and their happiness at his death there (which must have been mere months before DCU time) hadn't happened.

No wonder Batman thought they were all hypocrites.

[wizardru]

What bothered me the most about Zero Hour was how mechanical it felt. Stuff didn't happen organically as part of the story, but as part of a checklist. It even read that way: Aged the JSA to remove characters who shouldn't still be hale and hearty from the 30s: Check. Reorganize timeline to make it current to 1994: Check. Introduce new characters that won't really stick: Check. Make drastic character changes (a la Secret Wars) that don't make sense but fulfill editorial mandate: check.

Like many of DCs 'events' from the late 80s/early 90s, it felt very mechanical. But at least Zero Hour only did it in 5 issues, I'll give them that.

[mad]

That is most wonderful, most dramatic shaking-fist-at-the-sky pose I've ever seen.

Ollie, you have such ~flair for drama.