Snowbirds Don't Fly: Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 and #86

[innerbrat.insanejournal.com]

Woo! First post to the new community. I did come here to post some scans of Golden Age Black Canary, but I saw uadlika asked for some scans from Snow Birds Don't Fly, so of course I had to.

Oliver Queen is having a bad day. He references something about Dinah talling him she's "not going to be home when [he calls] anymore..." which I guess means she's [gasp] decided to have a life of her own or something. So he's moping, then he gets set upon by wannabe muggers. Which should be nothing for the Green Arrow, except this happens:



He struggles off to a hospital, where he decides this is the kind of thing you call your best friend about:





There follows four pages of the horrors of withdrawal, the squalor of addiction-related poverty and how racism drives people of colour to drugs. Then:




There follows: PLOT. Ollie is a hothead, Hal doesn't tell him to shut up. They both end up accidentally taking junk, and Roy rescues them.





Dinah doesn't actually appear until the next issue. The issue is 25 pages long, so I'm hoping 8 pages of it is OK; I didn't want to leave any of this out:





After Ollie shows off his coping skills, he goes a-beating up bad guys, leaving his apartment free for one of Roy's friends to break in, OD and die. Hal, meanwhile, puts two and two together regarding what Roy was talking about and goes looking for him.





Time -and plot - passes. The OD'd friend of Roy's has a funeral.





I'll be back later in the week with some scans of Dinah's mother, who is just as awesome and has just as bad taste in men.

Comments

[ashtoreth.insanejournal.com]

Hal didn't do much, but, after the person Roy loved most BEAT HIM UP AND THREW HIM OUT AFTER ABANDONING HIM IN THE FIRST PLACE, Hal is the one who goes looking for him. Hal is the one who finds him and doesn't screw up by picking a fight because he doesn't like what Roy did. He is kind and unselfrighteous and he insists on getting Roy to someone who does care about him and will help him. It also matters that Hal is Ollie's best friend (aside from Dinah and Roy). Him doing that was notice that Ollie was wrong when he said it was all Roy's fault.

My favorite follow-up to this is when Dinah's mother is dying. Ollie is there and tells Hal. Hal immediately goes to the Titans and asks them for Roy. When Roy shows up, he just says, "Dinah needs you." And thats it. Roy goes with him on the spot. Hal drops him off and the family huggles.

Hal isn't the guy to take care of you, but he is the best friend who'll back you up.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Hal isn't afraid, and that includes being afraid to admit he's wrong.

Ollie is. Ollie is full of denial, and his version of liberalism is very much that of the late-adopter middle-class version of the time. He's great caring in the abstract. It's individuals, like Roy, that he's not so good with.

[innerbrat.insanejournal.com]

Nothing to do with your main point, but I also like how the first thing Ollie does is phone Hal, even though the Greens are apparently having a major tiff at the time. Dinah's scared she won't get to Gotham on time, so Ollie phones GL. Wasn't the line "If I have to beg him, you'll get there"?

[ashtoreth.insanejournal.com]

Probably. It was one of the 'fix-it' stories that Hal Jordan-loving writers wrote after everyone universally hated how mean other superheroes were to him in Action Comics Weekly.

(The other stories being Neil Gaiman's Green Flame story with Superman, and the restart of the Green Lantern series where Batman practically embraces Hal when he visits.)

[neotoma.insanejournal.com]

Hal is the one who finds him and doesn't screw up by picking a fight because he doesn't like what Roy did.

This is making me reconsider Hal. He comes off pretty well, in that he did go looking for Roy, he did get him to more competent help once he realized he didn't know the first thing to do, he does seem to actually listen to Roy.

Ollie really does come off as a self-absorbed faux-progressive here.