Monday, June 1, 2009

Bring On the Back-Ups: Green Lantern in "Let There Be Darkness!"

Y'know, a lot of folks think that when Green Lantern/Green Arrow #89 hit the stands on that fateful day in January, 1972, our two favorite Emerald Crusaders lingered in limbo until GL/GA was revived with ish #90 in May, 1976. Well, that's just not so! From May,1972 to May,1976, Green Lantern ran as the regular back-up (or an occasional guest-star in the lead story) in Flash (issues 217-243), while Green Arrow (along with Black Canary) was a semi-regular back-up in Action Comics during that same time period. So, here's a special treat that ya might not have even known existed! From Flash #237 (August 1975), here's a neat GL story by Denny O'Neil and Mike Grell called "Let There Be Darkness!"
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6 comments:

  1. RichardJune 1, 2009 at 1:48 AM

    One might also note that the backup stories in Flash #217-219 were not merely Green Lantern tales but in fact a final three-part Green Lantern/Green Arrow/Black Canary story by the team of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams...and one of the very best stories that creative team did with those characters, making a particularly nice capstone to their brief run.

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  2. Mark KardwellJune 1, 2009 at 6:12 AM

    I remember loving this as a one-month year old baby. Grandad!

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  3. BooksteveJune 1, 2009 at 1:19 PM

    If RAB above is referring to the story, "What can One Man Do?" he's right about its excellence but surprisingly it was NOT a Denny O'Neil story but rather a very early hit the ground running story by Elliot S! Maggin.

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  4. RichardJune 1, 2009 at 3:27 PM

    Not quite, Steve! Elliot Maggin's spectacular debut "What Can One Man Do?" appeared in Green Lantern #87. I refer instead to "The Killing Of An Archer" / "Green Arrow Is Dead" / "The Fate of the Archer" which ran as a backup in the aforementioned issues of The Flash. In this three-part story, Ollie is so horrified when he accidentally kills someone with an arrow that he smashes his bow and retreats to a zen monastery, vowing never to return to the outside world...but Hal needs to find him in order to save Dinah's life.

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  5. BooksteveJune 2, 2009 at 3:15 PM

    Okay, I remember it now! In fact, I remember tearing all three parts out of the FLASH comic and stapling them together to try to make an actual "issue" of GL/GA! Sorry I got mixed up but boy, Maggin's was good, too!

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  6. david_bMarch 11, 2010 at 7:42 AM

    Actually, I liked Mr. Grell initially when I read the first few issues of GL/GA's return in '76, but soon grew tired of his character drawing.

    I must have been spoiled by Neil Adams.., but the stories were nice.

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Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


Note to "The Man": All images are presumed copyright by the respective copyright holders and are presented here as fair use under applicable laws, man! If you hold the copyright to a work I've posted and would like me to remove it, just drop me an e-mail and it's gone, baby, gone.


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