Turn up the juice, Hal! – Green Lantern #106

As one might guess from the title of this post and the action on the above cover, I’m a bit ambivalent (to say the least) about Oliver Queen. While I respect the character’s pluck and balls of steel — he does, after all, work in a world of superhumans who could crush him with hardly any effort at all — his penchant for dismissing as fascists anyone whose politics are anywhere to the right of his extreme-left stands can wear thin rather quickly. Sometimes I want to ram one of those stupid little boxing glove arrows of his right in his ear.

And, on top of all that, to me he’s always looked an awful lot like Sam the Snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:

The green haberdashery, the whiskers, the little hats with feathers in them perched on top of their heads, the dark, shadowy eyes — need I go on? Since Rudolph is a treasured relic of my childhood, perhaps that UNCANNY resemblance is Ollie’s saving grace.

On to this issue. “Pull up an iceblock,” if you will.

The action in “Panic…In High Places and Low” continues from the previous issue, and finds Green Arrow, Black Canary and a couple of other random souls stuck on a snowy mountain and trapped in a downed plane. To make matters worse, they’re confronted by a hellish monster (one that looks a sort of like a Gene Colan-drawn beast from an issue of Night Force I looked at a while back):

There’s not a lot of Plan B when the arrows don’t work, is there?

The other half of this verdant duo is dragging the villain Sonar back to the crook’s homeland of Modora. Sonar is quickly acquitted of all wrongdoing, which is the opening of a rapid series of blunders for Hal Jordan:

Yeah. Let the corrupt Euro-trash bums lead you down into a dungeon on trumped-up charges. And you have a power ring because…?

Oh wait, you don’t:

Fortune favors the moronic, however, and a well-timed avalanche gets Hal his ring back and apparently his wits, too:

Things aren’t going all that well for Green Arrow and Canary, but some well-timed assistance from Air Wave brings Hal to the rescue:

Hal feeds the monster some calcium (turns out that the tentacled blob is Itty, an old friend of his) and the sated beast heads on its merry way.

Denny O’Neil wrote this one, with Mike Grell and Bruce Patterson teaming for the art chores. I like Grell’s art quite a bit, but no matter what he’s drawing his pencils always scream “WARLORD!” to me. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s sort of the comic book equivalent of typecasting, I guess. And while I normally enjoy O’Neill’s scripts, Green Lantern letting himself be manacled and de-ringed was a bridge too far for me.

I’ll let Mr. Queen’s long-lost twin sing us out: