Return of Cringeworthy Comicbook Moments: Hal and Ollie are Kind of Skeevy

[espanolbot]

When Green Arrow was returned to life with the Kevin Smith storyline Quiver, his former on-again, off-again girlfriend Black Canary had something of a dubious attitude towards Mia Dearsden after meeting her for the first time…

This attitude may have been based on how (originally) Ollie was a good ten or more years older than Dinah when they first met back in the early JLA days, with her being in her late teens at the time. In addition to him being a long time fan of the previous Black Canary, Dinah’s mother… (JLA: Year One). Once he was resurrected (in a younger body, I might add) Ollie and Dinah's ages levelled off somewhat.

He definitely attempted to get into the pants of Barbara Gordon back when they first met too, though it went nowhere due to him being kind of an asshole (Birds of Prey).

Way to implicitly slutshame Babs there Ollie. Urgh.

Anyway, Ollie apparently having a taste for underage blondes apparently is fairly well known in following Ollie’s resurrection, as Hal Jordan apparently feels that Ollie would sleep with the, then 17 years old, Supergirl if he got he chance (the Brave and the Bold issue 2).




This is especially rich coming from Hal, as, for a brief time, he’s pretty much the only A-list superhero in DC who had sex with an underage superheroine. This is to say, the 14 year old Arisia, who in a short amount of time went from this…

To this…

Shortly after this, someone in DC had the presence of mind to retcon this to Arisia chronologically being older than Hal, and in actually only looked (and acted) like she was younger than him. But that doesn’t really make it that much less squicky.

It does, or did if that stupid reboot didn't happen, make the two green heroes look kind of bad though. Though not to the extent of say, Ultimate Wolverine (who targets 15 year old girls on purpose) or Plastic Man, whose antics run the borderland between "hijinx" and "unbelievably creepy".

Such as the time he turned himself into a lamp and snuck into Wonder Woman's bedroom on the JLA Watchtower to watch her sleep (she notices instantly), or the time he snuck into Big Barda's bedroom and turned into a dress...



...or the time he made really disturbing threats towards Poison Ivy.

Comments

[ozaline]

Wow these are pretty bad, the only one of these I've read is the Brave and the Bold Lords of Luck which I rather liked as a story and didn't mind Hal resisting temptation (surprised Supergirl didn't try to use the 'I'm older than Superman' rationale she tried to use with Boomer in her more sexually aggressive days before the Kryptonite poisoning in her system was counteracted during New Krypton (that's a whole other can of worms though).

[big_daddy_d]

O.O

[goattoucher]

...

[the_phantom]

On the lines of this there is that JLU episode "the great brain robbery" where Flash and Lex swap body's and Flash (In lex's body) had sex with Tala, aka raped her.

[benuben]

Atleast that is just implied. I'm just gonna assume Flash told her to save it for later.

[icon_uk]

I'd forgotten that scene, i's a tricky one... and a scenario only possible in sic-fi/fantasy fiction.

Wally is stuck in a body not his own through no fault of his own, and he's stuck in the heart of the enemy base. He has to maintain his cover as Lex or else he's dead (if he's lucky they won't torture him for every bit of info in his brain first) and Tala is a powerful and ruthless sorceress who is the one who initiates sexual contact , thnking he's Lex. Wally possibly doesn't have the freedom to say "No", since Tala and Lex did have a relationship, and declining could make Tala supicious and/or dangerous.

If he refuses her advances he may well be discovered and killed, but if he doesn't, he's using Lex's body in a way that Lex can't control or may not sanction.

Very much a no-win scenario...

[robinzegblu]

I thought Tala had figured it out. It certainly seemed like she had.

[lieut_kettch]

Kara is right up Hal's alley: blonde, alien, and underage. Except that she's around 4 years too old for his tastes.

[xamda]

To be fair, Plastic Man is supposed to be a creep- he's not exactly a moral compass at the best of times. And if Ollie's line is implicit slut-shaming, Dinah's line is an outright accusation of paedophilia.

[icon_uk]

He's supposed to be immature/wacky... sort of like a living Tex Avery cartoon. I never recall him being as skeevy as he was in Morrison's JLA.

[espanolbot]

Dinah's a woman who treated Ollie like he deliberately cheated on her when he, while hallucinating from painkillers after being shot by the assassin Shado, was raped by said assassin.

Even after Shado later told Dinah when she confronted her about it that Ollie thought that Shado was Dinah at the time, Dinah still occasionally blamed for Ollie for it happening in the first place.

Though generally things surrounding Shado tend to get a bit weird, like how in one comic it was retconned to Shado being Connor Hawke's mother within a month or so of Connor sleeping with her during a Chuck Dixon mini-series.

Once someone point out that due to different Green Arrow writers not talking to each other had lead to Connor having sex with a woman who another writer said was his mother, they quickly had to release a statement saying that Connor wasn't actually related to her.

I think that it was the first writer thinking that Connor was Ollie's son from the aforementioned Shado incident, as opposed to a seperate case where he slept with one of his fangirls or something and abandoned her shortly after Connor was born (seriously).

[benuben]

Ehm, why does Barda look like she never did a push-up in her life? No offense to skinny people (I'm one of them), but I thought Barda was supposed to have more noticeable muscle definition than most other superheroines.

[bariman]

Bad artist, it happens. Even good artists sometimes make that mistake. But in this case, yeah, I wouldn't have guess that was Barda without someone calling her by name.

[cypherfdp]

Hal Jordan: Green Lantern, Justice Leaguer, Ex-Genocidal Maniac, Actively Trying to Get Into the Pants of Teenage Girls

[benuben]

One would think words like "boring" or "bland" would be the last ones to describe such character and yet...

[lieut_kettch]

Teenage alien girls. Thank heavens J'onn had the good sense to keep M'gann away from him.

[skemono]

Now, now, be fair: Supergirl's not wearing pants, she's wearing a skirt.

And usually Arisia did, too, from what I recall (or maybe that was just in her adult form?).

[damar148]

Overall bad stuff.

But I'm not quite convinced Ollie's comment is pure slutshaming as saying Babs is dressed and appears as a grown woman.

[nezchan]

I suppose there's the possibility he's playing along in his embarrassment with Babs' "you smell like my father" line and using a cliche "older man confronted by younger woman" joke. It depends on how quick-witted you want Ollie to be in this scene.

[donnblake]

Well, the way I read the comment was, "The fashion in which you are dressed suggests that you are open to advances of a romantic/sexual nature. If you are not open to such suggestions (because of your age) you should not dress in that fashion."

[fungo_squiggly]

I read it as that, with a side helping of "Holy crap, you're a kid, does your dad know you're out here fighting crime as a superhero."

[jaybee3]

Yeah some of this skeevy. Part for the course for DC (I think Wonder Woman was the only consistently non-sexist book under Rucka and Simone - even the Superman titles were guilty look at what they did to Cat Grant).

Also, interesting fact - that B&B issue with Hal and Kara? Written by Mark Waid and Supergirl has a personality resembling her Silver Age self. It happened to be the portrayal Morrison said he liked that gave him the idea to pit Supergirl vs Mary Marvel in Final Crisis (with Supergirl winning of course). Because he liked how sweet Supergirl was. Which is very telling of how little Grant was actually reading the DCU titles at the time. The irony being that Supergirl/Kara was consistently portrayed as a brat and obnoxious who actually held herself out as "jail bait" (with that term being used) for her older roomate, Cap Boomerang Jr. This version of Supergirl had ALREADY been compromised and mind-controlled by Darkseid in her first Loeb/Turner arc (aka the story beat Morrison gave to Mary). If anything Mark Waid's portrayal of Kara in B&B was the outlier of how Supergirl was portrayed in DC Comics at the time and yet a major plot point of Final Crisis came from it.

Also I really can't look at the pre-reboot, pre-Identity Crisis comics with Black Canary and Batman in the same manner. The idea that Dinah would work in Gotham for years with Bruce's "kids", would become BFF's with the former Batgirl, would occasionally turn him off (as in JLA or BoP) in non-Bat title without a smidge of guilt over the fact you know she voted to mind-wipe him, never really felt guilty about it (canon since unlike Ollie and Zatanna she never apolgized) which in turn twisted his mind and made him not trust anybody (this also is canon per Johns in the same JLA story) just made me changed how I viewed all BC's interactions with the Bat-Crew even past that date. It made her out to be a very duplicitious person. One of the reasons I loathe Identity Crisis. Its a horrible story if you like the DC heroes AS heroes. It ruined a LOT of characters (not just Zatanna, who took the biggest hit). And the BC/Batman was never really addressed after the truth came out whenever they ran into each other (contrasted again with Zatanna since the event defined her relationship with Batman). We never found out if Babs ever knew what her partner did to Bruce. We know Dick never knew because his attitude towards BC never changed. And whenever Batman showed up in BoP he was usually portrayed as the heavy with the event never brought up even in passing in Dinah's thought boxes.

[ozaline]

Supergirl's portrayal changed radically around New Krypton where it was revealed that she had massive Kryptonite poisoning that was responsible for her rapid mood swings, her delusions and the fact that she was under the impression she was on a mission to kill Superman. She also acts in a much less sexually aggressive manner after this point... both New Krypton and Final Crisis are 2008 stories, so the Johns writing potentially works.

Now while the Kryptonite poisoning rationale allowed Sterling Gates to move on from the mess previous writers had made of her book in terms of them not knowing what to do with her and making her a perpetual brat who would literately bail out of storylines at their climax (see the Kandor/1 year later storyline), and I really liked the way she was portrayed from New Krypton until the reboot, I didn't like that she seemed to become sexless afterwards. It reinforces the idea that a woman who is sexually aggressive is "crazy" in some way.

Now there are legitimate reasons why romance/sex would become less of a priority for at this point she starts forging familial bonds with Lana as a surrogate mother (and briefly being reunited with her real mother) and she might have felt there was less of a void to fill... I just find the timing somewhat unfortunate.

[theflames]

I think the 'slutshame' from Ollie is a real stretch, but he's not exactly charming here.

Babs laughs him off, as she should, he's ridiculous haha.

Plastic Man is creepy as fuck. Why did editorial let that happen?! :| I'll stick with my goofy Brave and the Bold Plastic Man from the animated series...

[icon_uk]

I don't think it's stretching it at all, he's asserting that it's the way she's dressed that led him to take an entirely inappropriate action.