We talked about this last time, I believe, but GREEN LANTERN (co-staring GREEN ARROW) was in something of a malaise at this time. It was still a book I bought faithfully, but I was finding myself less and less enamored of its content. Quite often, it felt like the logo was backwards, and that it should have been touted as GREEN ARROW co-starring GREEN LANTERN. Writer Denny O’Neil seemed much more at home writing the more grounded conflicts of Oliver Queen than the outer space menaces that Hal Jordan had to contend with. No disrespect to Ollie, but I was here for the Emerald Crusader.
The one development that I liked in this issue was the addition of Joe Staton as new regular artist. I liked Staton’s work, and he was a long-time GREEN LANTERN fan, a fact that I’d learned from an editorial page in FIVE STAR SUPERHERO SPECTACULAR, a Dollar Comic that included his first work on the character. Staton would become a fixture, and while he didn’t draw every issue for the rest of the run (and was even absent for sections of it) he was consistently the artist whom the book gravitated back to, all the way to the end of the line. There was an obvious cartooniness to Staton’s pages, but he also had a good sense of drama and power to his work, which I found appealing.
Last issue, substitute Green Lantern Guy Gardner perished after he attempted to recharge his ring from the Power Battery that had been destabilized by the touch of the murderous Crumbler. This month, Hal Jordan needed to seek out Gardner’s girlfriend, the psychic Kari Limbo, and let her know about his fellow Lantern’s demise. This being Hal, and being comics, the two immediately form a romantic bond even though Gardner’s body isn’t even cold yet. So that’s not wonderful. Meanwhile, after once again being attacked by a mysterious flying eyeball, Green Arrow has gone in search of its controller, while also keeping an eye out for the escaped Crumbler.
Ollie follows the trail back to an optometrist’s office, and bulls his way into the back room, where he’s ambushed by Professor Ojo, the creator of the flying eyeball. Ojo had also allied himself with the Crumbler just to keep all of the story threads neatly bundled together. The Professor attacks GA with a series of lights so bright that even Ollie’s own eyelids can’t protect him from them. But even blinded, he’s able to get off a bunch of shots that takes them all out, remembering where the lights had been positioned. But still, he’s vision-impaired for the moment, and the Crumbler wants another crack at him.
Elsewhere, GL has brought Kari Limbo to Dinah Lance’s florist shop, thereby compromising Dinah’s secret identity, the clod. Kari tells Dinah that Guy was the best man she ever knew, which is a pronouncement that leads one to question her sanity given how the character wound up developing going forward. Anyway, while she’s there, Limbo explains that she has actual psychic powers, and she experiences an episode where she hones in on the danger that Green Arrow is currently in, allowing his friends to race to Ollie’s rescue.
Ollie, though, doesn’t need a rescue, not from two chumps like the Crumbler and Professor Ojo. The Crumbler manages to disintegrate Ollie’s bow, so instead Green Arrow simply clocks him with an uppercut. GA moves to do the same to Professor Ojo, relieving the villain of his strange helmet–only to be brought up short by the fact that Professor Ojo has no eyes. I can remember this being a weird moment when I first read the issue, and somewhat creepy. Ollie’s momentary shock gives Ojo the opportunity he needs to strike the archer down–turns out that he can still see through his helmet, even though it’s been removed from his head.
The revived Crumbler is just about to finish off Green Arrow when Green Lantern shows up, just in case you forgot whose comic book this is supposed to be. Kari’s psychic visions have led him straight to the villains–but he’s caught off-guard when professor Ojo creates an area of absolute darkness, which he and the Crumbler use to slip away, as even GL’s ring can’t illuminate it. So once again, the pair has been stymied but a twosome of absolute pikers. Green Arrow isn’t happy about this development, but the Lantern is more sanguine. He welcomes Kari Limbo to the partnership, ratifying the fact that she’s going to be a recurring cast member from here on out, And we end on Hal’s emerging feelings for Kari, which seem truly icky given that Guy has been dead for only a day at this point. What a creep!
After the regular Rings and Arrows letters page, the book included another new edition of the Daily Planet plug page. As usual, it included an Answer Man column by Bob Rozakis and a silly comic strip by Fred Hembeck. I was really beginning to warm to the latter, even though half the time I still didn’t quite get the jokes.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
I picked this issue up in the back issues section of the comic book store in the city I was once living in, looking for villains not in Who’s Who. It would years later when I found out about Iron Man/Tony Stark’s Marianne Rodgers ( Telepathy, Telekinesis ( teleportation via her Telekinesis -marvel.fandom.com ) & Precognition ) [ Iron Man#36 ( April 1971 ) ] that it reminded me of Kari Limbo. I too found Professor Ojo without is helmet creepy ( like the assassin without a mouth on the Teen Wolf tv series ). For those who don’t know, Ojo is Spanish for Eye.
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While Professor Ojo without his helmet creeped me out, the Legion of Super Heroes foe Omen [ The Legion of Super-Heroes#309-310 ( March-April 1984 ) – a celestial being who observed the ending of lives but did nothing to save them ( dc.fandom.com )] did not. Very cool look, but twisted job ( At least when The Watchers do nothing to save lives and just watch the ending of lives, they also have been recording the history of those lives or planetary history ). Wouldn’t mind seeing Omen and The Watcher meet.
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Dang. The prodigious & benevolent letter Ben Oda (or someone else) got Joe Staton’s name wrong in the credits.
@Tom, Stanton, DE is near the Christiana Mall.
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Kari Limbo came off as a Roma stereotype even at the time. Her hair coloring choices were weird too, though now they seem perfectly routine.
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I always thought her hair was supposed to be a visible marker of her psychic talents, although it was never explained.
I always wondered if she had any connections to Cassandra Craft from the Phantom Stranger book or even Madame Xanadu , as she was in 1979 before her background was as established.
I liked these stories at the time. I saw it as Denny O’Neil trying to do a version of what Dick Giordano tried to do with the “Action Hero” line at Charlton about 12 or 13 years before: more “street level heroes and threats.
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He was definitely more comfortable with that — his JLA stories showed a fondness for the low-powered guys (Atom, GA, Batman) over the heavy hitters.
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I always liked Staton’s GL, too — very Kane-influenced (befitting someone who’d worked as Kane’s assistant), and lively.
It was a thrill for me to work with Joe on the POWER COMPANY one-shot that teamed Skyrocket with Hal…especially since he was a last-minute replacement for another artist who ghosted us. He drew the whole story in under a week, and it was dead-on perfect. Great storytelling, action, character acting, everything.
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I think that Hembeck cartoon is the first appearance of J’emm , Son of Saturn.
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I think I’d read Hard Traveling Heroes by this point so I was on my way to loathing Oliver Queen as a character. I’d eventually realize I didn’t like O’Neil’s writing much ever as well. Completism though, whatcha gonna do? Kari Limbo was where I started not liking Hal Jordan as well. There are countless ways of getting her in the cast without making Hal an even bigger douche than O’Neil regularly made him.
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Rereading O’Neil’s writing from that era I don’t hate Oliver Queen as much as find him ridiculous. He’s a rich guy who lost his money maybe six months before GL/GA started yet O’Neil ignores that and writes him like he grew up teething on Das Kapital.
And I’m not at all a fan of O’Neil’s writing.
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i liked a lot of Denny’s stuff. More than I liked Gerry Conway’s. I think Wein’s writing was tighter than Denny’s. Wolfman’s more sensitive. I think I liked Bates’s writing more than Denny’s, too. And Roy Thomas’s, depending on the character & direction.
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He’s basically Meathead from “All in the Family.”
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I thought O’Neil did a lot of interesting work, but I thought he bent the established portrayal of Hal Jordan to make it fit the stories he was telling in GL/GA # 76-*9.
Broome had written Jordan as a very competent idealist who liked to “tilt at Windmills” and sometimes trusted himself to “color outside the lines ” to do the right thing.
Something got lost with a potential great character,
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Yours is the best summation of Broome’s Jordan Ive read.
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Yeah. As a character Hal always seemed to me to be cut from the same cloth as James T. Kirk.
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I think Roddenberry and Broome based these characters on the same kind of people, really “hard-corps” pilots in the USAAF in the Pacific Theater in WWII. (Broome was an EM and Roddenberry was a bomber pilot.
The odd thing is that Kirk and Jordan were supposed to be written out in 1994 . . . but weren’t.
Time put Hal’s transition (and Scott Summers and Jean Grey marrying in its Translons feature in 1994 . . . .
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I wasn’t always the biggest Joe Staton fan, but he certainly deserved better than to have his name spelled wrong in the credits.
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I always liked Joe Staton, especially on Green Lantern and Legion. But I really don’t like Dave Hunt’s inks. I know it is better to remain silent, when you don’t have anything nice to say. But those inks seemed to put everything into…plastic. Strongly disliked it also on Curt Swan. Even when I was 10 years old!
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One man’s meat is another man’s poison. I loved Hunt. I even preferred him to Austin inking Byrne.
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Hunt was a very good background inker, but he never quite got the hang of faces, and when he had to finish layouts by an artist like Staton, he didn’t know how to fix the sketchier stuff a finisher should have fixed.
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