Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow: Hard-Traveling Heroes, Deluxe Edition collects their critical issues that demonstrated the power of mainstream American comic book writers to discuss and engage with critical issues in the early 1970s. This volume collecs Green Lantern nos. 76-89 and The Flash nos. 217-219 & 226. Beginning with their April 1970 story, “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” O’Neil and Adams engaged with the civil rights movement and the work yet to be done, acknowledging that superheroes fighting far-off monsters and defending alien planets are overlooking the systemic issues in the United States.

When the Guardians of Oa challenge the Green Lantern for his effort to help people stand up to slumlords, he decries, “Some hideous moral cancer is rotting our very souls!” Where Adams portrayed Green Arrow gesticulating in typical superhero fashion for most of this speech, he portrays Green Arrow with a horrified face in the last panel as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy’s portraits appear behind the costumed adventurer. Arrow’s words move the Guardians of Oa, leading them to send one of their number to Earth disguised as a human to travel the country like Jack Kerouac and learn about the problems facing Americans.

In the August 1971 story “Snowbirds Don’t Fly,” some teens attempt to mug Green Arrow while in his civilian identity as Oliver Queen. One shoots him with a crossbow and Queen recognizes the arrow as one of his own. He and Green Lantern find where the teens reside, with one begging the building manager to let him in. The begging teen cries and shakes, leading Green Lantern to reveal his ignorance as he fails to recognize the symptoms of withdrawal. Green Lantern and Green Arrow convince the young addict to take them to the flophouse of the other teens, where Arrow finds his sidekick Speedy amongst the strung-out youths. He believes that Speedy was working undercover to find the man behind the narcotics ring. Noticing that Speedy appears pale, Green Arrow recommends he rest while they pursue the leaders of the drug ring. Throughout the story, Green Arrow and Green Lantern moralize about drug use, showing their shock that anyone would use heroin. Through Speedy, O’Neil and Adams offer a more sympathetic voice, contextualizing the emotional pain a young person might feel and how they could turn to drugs to ease their feelings of pain. Rather than listen, Green Arrow disregards Speedy’s pleas. Later, he’s shocked to catch Speedy in the act of shooting up.

Other stories touch on counterculture cults and even adapt concepts from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Though O’Neil writes in his introduction that he has no desire to look back, preferring to look forward, these comics remain essential reading both for their impact on the industry and for how they influenced later stories. O’Neil and Adams’s comics played a role in the national discussion by distilling these issues into short-form narratives that readers could easily understand, even as they reflected racialized discourses about drug use and poverty. Beyond that, Speedy’s drug use remained a part of his backstory through several different industry reboots and the showrunners of the CW’s Arrow even incorporated it into their plot. This volume is a must-read for all Green Lantern and Green Arrow fans. ( )