So, Green Arrow, a supposedly heroic character, commits an act of premeditated murder. And he’s sent to Belle Reve, right?
No?
Oan Sciencell? Takron-Galtos? Phantom Zone?
Well, he’s at least kicked out of the Justice League, right?
Not even that, huh?
So the DC universe is a place where even the good guys can get away with cold-blooded murder in the name of “edginess?”
Or an embarrassingly adolescent approach to “mature” story-telling.
Whichever.
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Wait, wasn’t the thing that originally ruined GA’s life when he killed someone?
One of the greatest social achievements has been to create systems where “justice” isn’t an arbitrary decision by one or more people based on their own opinion and/or feelings at any one time. Yes, no-one who isn’t an idiot wouldn’t argue that the legal systems of the West aren’t massively flawed. But no-one in their right mind would claim that a system of vendetta is in any way whatsoever a superior system to the law. It’s reprehensible that DC should make such a deliberate attempt to argue that the rule of law should be replaced by the rule of shooting folks through the head with steel-tipped arrows whenever a “super-hero” considers that appropriate.
Out here in the real world, millions of people are engaged in negotiating improvements to the justice system. Several times in my life I have literally had my very livelihood, my good name, saved by the rule of law. (It’s often a teacher’s lot to face quite false accusations & without the rule of law, god knows how things might get sorted out.) Literally billions of folks on the planet Earth would possess much better lives if they had access to a Western-style system of justice. But “JUSTICE” to DC Editorial is, effectively, the opposite of law. It’s worse than an immoral stance to take, though it is surely is immoral. It’s PROFOUNDLY stupid. Didn’t anyone have the intelligence or guts to stand up and say “I won’t take part in this comic book.”?
They should be ashamed of themselves. I do mean that. Absolutely ashamed.
The artist seems to have done reference for Prometheus by posing an 80s era original He-Man.
It’s all because Didio saw soldiers with guns in the subways after 9/11.
actually, that was the last page of the book.
The big storyline revolving the formation of the new Justice league involves Arsenal and Green Arrow. Green Arrow is not ‘getting away with it’ – he’s crossed the line, ruined his marriage and most of the JL seems to be hunting him.
He killed him…WITH CANADA!!!
Does anyone else find it odd that the character who is known for being super-liberal is the one the supports torture and capital punishment?
What’s amazing is that he kills him with a single arrow in three panels, when Prometheus seems able to fight the entire Justice League to a standstill for six or more issues at a time! Imagine the time and money savings if that’s how they’d started the whole damn series!
It took me a few seconds to realize that GA had killed Prometheus and not Marvel’s Paladin, which, as most people know, would not have been such a bad thing.
And after Prometheus went to the trouble of marking down North America’s finest taco stands. What a dick.
“Does anyone else find it odd that the character who is known for being super-liberal is the one the supports torture and capital punishment?”
You know what they say, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. Or had his sidekick’s arm ripped off. Or something.
Colsmi, the whole premise of superhero comics is that the “heroes” have superhuman judgment in determining whom to pursue and punish. Indeed, Alan Moore’s major works are all about the problems with that premise. So an appeal to the Western legal tradition doesn’t quite work in a world where we keep getting shown that there are people who have extra-special power to ascertain guilt or innocence.
That’s not a challenge to your basic argument, of course, especially since it’s GA we’re talking about. A superhero successfully pursuing a murderous vendetta could make a good story, I guess; but not this one.
Man, couldn’t Ollie just give him Parkinson’s Disease and beat the hell out of him?
Shouldn’t Green Arrow now be getting the kind of shit for this that Wonder Woman got for killing Maxwell Lord?
Is it just me, or is something really weird about the perspective in this shot? I’ve been staring at it for a while and it just looks really…off.
Awful, awful series. Mind you, series where heroes up and decide they need to form a new ‘pro-active’ team usually are…remember Force Works or Extreme Justice, or other 90s nonsense?
Josh: I totally agree with you that “a superhero pursuing a murderous vendetta could make a good story …”. That would allow the whole debate of the rule of law versus vendetta to be played out. And I agree with you that this story isn’t that one. Here, the dice are all loaded in favour of vendetta. The heroes keep crying “justice”. The heroes torture and kill “villians” crying “justice”! The whole story places justice in opposition to due process, and that’s something that popular culture does too much. The rule of law, to repeat the blindingly obvious, is the cornerstone of what we sometimes like to think of as civilisation. (I know the problems with that word. I’m using it as shorthand here.) It’s one thing to challenge the rule of law in its operational details. But to actually assault it as a basic premise of a major story is … well, it’s not a good thing, I’d say.
However, I’d have no problems with this if DC were capable of following through on what they’ve done. If The Atom does time for torture, and I mean serious time, then fine. And if Green Arrow goes away for 30 years, then OK. The heroes aren’t above the law and I’ve got no problem with it all. And, of course, we know the heroes won’t go down and do the time, and the whole issue will be ignored.
Of course, the moment you start playing around with super-powered characters imposing their version of the law, you get some very dodgy ideas coming centre-stage in the narrative. I do get this, I promise. But there’s a willing suspension of disbelief which can allow these stories to function until you get a major character behaving so terribly. So; Ray Palmer and Ollie Queen to jail for a long, long time. And I’ll get me coat …
I haven’t read the issue (and am not gonna, and you can’t make me) but to play devil’s advocate for a second: could Green Arrow have taken Prometheus in otherwise? If Ollie gave him a chance to surrender, or a warning shot, probably even if he put an arrow in Pro’s knee; it’s still entirely possible Pro could beat him to death. (Using one-legged kung fu from that helmet of his…) Ollie could probably make the argument that there was no time to call for backup as well. Ethically dubious, and not very sporting, but still.
Anyway, I’m kind of hoping Prometheus made knock-off versions of his helmet, and left them lying around to be opened in the event of his death, to get his killer, or whatever…
I have no problem with Ollie putting an arrow in Prometheus’s brain. Calling it justice is where this rings false.
I’m kind of reminded of one of the JSA stories where the mindwipers were dealing with the Dr Light revelation and Hawkman mentioned that he should have just killed Light when they found him raping Sue and that would have fixed the problem, and Ollie got all pissy about how that was a worse option than the experimental magic lobotomy was. Green Arrow has been so messed up lately that it’s hard to imagine what one of his fans must think about the way the character is written.
Heel turn?
Read the story today–too many holes in the plot.
My theory is that Prometheus is not dead; it’s a gimmick to get Green Arrow ala the 1970′s “Bat-Murderer” series of stories that DC ran.