Adams is proud of the page’s message - and just as proud of his draughtsmanship. To put it in contemporary terms, this was the moment superheroes got woke.Īt the time, Green Lantern sales had been down in the dumps, and this page helped turn its fortunes around, launching the series to acclaim and unprecedented mainstream media attention. Green Lantern!” Adams, an expert in human anatomy, slumps Hal down in the final panel O’Neil gives the hero a pathetic response to the man’s query: “I … can’t …” No one had played with the dynamite sticks of black dissatisfaction and white guilt like this in the genre before. “How you work for the blue skins … and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins … and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with - the black skins! I want to know … how come?! Answer me that, Mr. Photo: Neal Adams Cornelia Adams and John Costanza / DC Entertainment. That isn’t enough for his accuser, whose wrinkled face is so energized that it spills over from the second panel to the third. Green Lantern - civilian name Hal Jordan - is a human who was long ago drafted into an intergalactic police force by cyan-colored aliens and spends his days battling cosmic villains and palling around with fellow members of the Justice League. The page is a deceptively simple collection of words and pictures that, thanks to Adams’s art and writer Dennis O’Neil’s script, altered the course of the superhero genre. 76 in which an elderly black man accosts the white superhero Green Lantern for being insufficiently attentive to the concerns of people of color. In fact, it’s one of the most notable pages in the history of the American comic book: a scene from 1970’s Green Lantern No. Ensconced behind a drawing board in his Manhattan studio, clad in his trademark incompletely buttoned dress shirt and loose tie, Adams is in the midst of recalling the creation of one of his most famous pages. “Not too many people draw black people as well as I do,” the (white) comic book artist Neal Adams says with a smile.
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