John Seavey’s Storytelling Engines: Green Arrow

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by Brian Cronin | March 4, 2008 @ 4:53 AM | 11 Comments |

Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Click here to read John’s description of what a Storytelling Engine IS, anyways. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Green Arrow

(or “There Ain’t No ‘There’ There!”)

Boy, does Green Arrow have a lot of trick arrows. In ‘Showcase Presents Green Arrow Volume One’, we see the luminescent arrow, the vine arrow, the lava arrow, the jiujitsu arrow, the heli-spotter arrow, the ricochet arrow, the flashlight arrow, the firecracker arrow, the umbrella arrow, the boomerang arrow, the rain arrow, the cocoon arrow, the jet arrow, the rope arrow, the acetylene arrow, the fountain-pen arrow, the dry ice arrow, the flare arrow, the balloon arrow, the two-stage rocket arrow, the net arrow, the siren arrow, the boxing-glove arrow, the fake-uranium arrow, and in one notable story, the cat arrow, which was an arrow with a stuffed cat on the end.

You tend to notice the trick arrows a lot in a Green Arrow story, and not just because some of them are so ludicrous that you can’t imagine them being fired. They’re notable because they’re really the only thing that is notable about Green Arrow in the 1950s and 60s. The character really doesn’t have much of a storytelling engine at all. His character is essentially lifted wholesale from Batman (millionaire playboy who secretly fights crime with a teen sidekick), and indeed most stories begin with Oliver Queen and Roy Harper sitting at home when they see the “Arrow-Signal” in the sky. Star City, his home, is really just a name; there’s nothing to give it any real character or sense of place (unlike the moody Gotham, the sunny Metropolis, or even a real-world city like New York.) Heck, Green Arrow doesn’t even have his own version of Commissioner Gordon to discuss cases with–he usually just grabs some nameless desk sergeant to get the details of the latest crime. Outside of Speedy, his ward, and Arrowette, who makes an appearance or two (complete with her powder-puff arrows, hairpin arrows, lotion arrows, needle-and-thread arrows, and hairnet arrows, comics being the bastion of Women’s Lib that they are.)

He doesn’t have any villains to speak of, either; for the vast majority of the stories, he fights counterfeiters, jewel thieves, and the other various and sundry criminals that populate big cities who don’t need to put on spandex outfits and give themselves sinister names. In short, pretty much every element needed to fill in a storytelling engine comes up either blank or hastily filled in, sometimes by copying off his neighbor’s paper. Which seems odd, at first, since I’ve been saying all this time that a good storytelling engine is important to a strong-selling book. If Green Arrow is so under-prepared, why is he still around?

The answer is simple: He was a back-up feature. These stories all ran in the back of other comics (usually ‘Adventure’ or ‘World’s Finest’.) Meaning that a) they didn’t have time to sketch in all the other elements that make up a complete storytelling engine, because they were trying to work in a complete story in eight pages, and b) they didn’t need to worry about a complete storytelling engine, because people didn’t pick up the book just to read Green Arrow’s adventures. The stories could afford to be more formulaic, which saved the writer from having to come up with too many ideas (excepting, of course, for the trick arrows, which is clearly where all the creativity was going.) Green Arrow could afford to be a “generic” super-hero, because he was riding the coat-tails of Superman and Batman.

Later, as he developed his own character (right around the end of this volume, in fact) he developed more of a personality, became more distinctly different from millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. He lost the trick arrows, developed more of a supporting cast, and today, he’s got a storytelling engine all his own. Which is another important point to remember; when you’re starting from almost nothing, it’s very easy to add these things in later. Easy, and if you want your character to be anything more than a second banana, vitally important.

Comments below

11 Comments

Thok

March 4, 2008 at 8:18 am

I’m surprised there’s no mention of Robin Hood in this article, given that’s clearly part of the original appeal of Green Arrow and another reason they could treat him fairly generically.

Sallyp

March 4, 2008 at 8:45 am

And yet…I possess a strange fondness for Ollie’s trick arrows. It seemed as though each one was more magnificently ridiculous than the one before. I’m torn between the Christmas Tree-Decorating arrow, and the vacumn arrow, that scooped up Lois’s broken pearl necklace.

Anthony Strand

March 4, 2008 at 9:33 am

So what was Green Arrow’s new storytelling engine, John? Will you do a follow-up post on that?

Doug Atkinson

March 4, 2008 at 12:40 pm

Weren’t many of these stories six pages, not eight? I remember thinking when I read the Showcase volume that a couple more pages would have given the stories a little more room to breathe and maybe develop a bit of a supporting cast. (Although we should be glad that the Quisp-like character they tried introducing in one story never took off, I guess.)

John Seavey

March 4, 2008 at 6:46 pm

I’ll do a follow-up on it if they collect the issues. Seriously, I’m not as familiar with Green Arrow in the 70s and 80s as I’d like to be, and certainly not enough to feel confident writing a column on it.

John Trumbull

March 4, 2008 at 7:49 pm

I’m SO disappointed to find out the cat arrow was just a stuffed cat. I’d always imagined it as a LIVE cat with a wooden shaft stuck up its ass.

Tell me the bad guys wouldn’t run.

Tom Fitzpatrick

March 4, 2008 at 9:13 pm

I miss the Mike Grell days.

I do believe that his version of GA didn’t use trick arrows way back when.

red-Ricky

March 5, 2008 at 12:02 am

Iâ€™m SO disappointed to find out the cat arrow was just a stuffed cat.

I know!!! At least Adam West had the decency to use live cats for his Cat Launcher!

And John… I think you forgot about Ollie’s classic Nose Picking Arrow (just sayin’).

Family Guy – Adam West’s Cat Launcher

Paul Wargelin

March 5, 2008 at 1:30 pm

“I miss the Mike Grell days.

I do believe that his version of GA didnâ€™t use trick arrows way back when.”

Yes, Mike Grell establishes in Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters that Oliver gave up the trick arrows because he came to rely on them too much and lost his edge as an archer. There’s a prominent image of a bunch of his trick arrows–including the boxing glove one–sticking out of a garbage can.

(However in Grell’s prequel mini-series Green Arrow: The Wonder Year, Oliver does use a trick arrow that he unintentionally created while target practicing–an arrow with a golf ball stuck on the end of it–which he shoots into a thief’s groin, although he was aiming at the man’s head.)

It was Mike Gold, Grell’s editor, who came up with the idea of Green Arrow as an “urban hunter,” keeping him out of the DC Universe proper to fight real world criminals such as corrupt businessmen, street gangs and serial killers, as well as CIA spooks and Yakuza assassins, on the streets of Seattle. The trick arrows didn’t fit the tone of the series.

The series also didn’t establish a rogue’s gallery either (ninja archer Shado and hitman-for-hire Eddie Fyers started off as Oliver’s adversaries, only to become his allies later on), a continuing element of his storytelling engine as John pointed out.

When Denny O’Neil developed Oliver’s left-wing personality in the pages of Green Lantern for the Hard Traveling Heroes stories, GA was standing up for the little guy and fighting real world villains. O’Neil set the stage with late 60′s-early 70′s social issues that paved the way for Grell to tackle those of the late 80′s-early 90′s. It is these stories where Oliver came into his own as a character and not just a second-rate Batman. Where Batman’s mission is truly to put fear into the hearts of criminals, helping the innocent is more of a by-product of his actions whereas Oliver focuses on the well-being of society’s victims. GA revels in the swashbuckling of battle while Batman thrives on dealing out punishment.

So even though the latest series devised a rogue’s gallery for GA including Count Vertigo (originally introduced as a GA adversary in Mike W. Barr’s 1983 mini-series, but that was for one issue only, as Oliver’s real adversary in the story was corporate corruption–did GA ever confront him again between Barr’s story and this series?), Brick, Onomatopoeia (has he even appeared since Smith’s run?), Merlyn, and Deathstroke (who actually was introduced into GA by Alan Grant in the post-Grell series), I’m not sure supervillains really work as part of GA’s storytelling engine. Regardless, none of them have developed a relationship to Oliver as being his greatest enemy–no Lex Luthor to his Superman, no Joker to his Batman.

Oliver’s greatest enemy is social injustice, and it is his calling to right those wrongs. He is the conscience of the Justice League, and as Batman said in Justice League Unlimited, Oliver’s job is to keep them honest and remind them that their responsibility is to the people who depend on them.

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