One of my favorite moments in comics comes from the 1970 Green Lantern / Green Arrow run. Green Arrow rescues a kid from getting run over by a train, and rather than celebrate the victory, he laments that the city didn’t have a park where this kid could play safely. He considers running for mayor, and the rest of the Justice League talk him out of it.
As a kid, it was the first time I saw a comic look at the reader and say, “Yeah, these capes really are just fantasy. If you want the world to be better, you can’t leave it to other people.”
The Green Arrow was always a leftist activist analog. The problem with a serialized shared universe that parallels the real world is that you can never actually fix the problems that exist in the real world or else you lose that connection to it, but that also generates frustration too.
Like “cool” you can punch all the bad guys in Gotham, but why aren’t you eliminating poverty? Why aren’t you reforming corrupt the local government and police force? You fight alien invasions, but what have you done about ethnic cleansing and genocide? What about nuclear proliferation?
It was kind of nice in Superman (2025) that they actually had Superman dip a toe into addressing large scale real world issues with the invasion he stops and then deal with the aftermath of it. But that was about as complicated as we’re likely to see that real world parallel get unless they just turn the new DCU into a wholly different sort of world, a near utopia but police by the whims of a handful of ultra-powerful metahumans.
One of my favorite moments in comics comes from the 1970 Green Lantern / Green Arrow run. Green Arrow rescues a kid from getting run over by a train, and rather than celebrate the victory, he laments that the city didn’t have a park where this kid could play safely. He considers running for mayor, and the rest of the Justice League talk him out of it.
As a kid, it was the first time I saw a comic look at the reader and say, “Yeah, these capes really are just fantasy. If you want the world to be better, you can’t leave it to other people.”
The Green Arrow was always a leftist activist analog. The problem with a serialized shared universe that parallels the real world is that you can never actually fix the problems that exist in the real world or else you lose that connection to it, but that also generates frustration too.
Like “cool” you can punch all the bad guys in Gotham, but why aren’t you eliminating poverty? Why aren’t you reforming corrupt the local government and police force? You fight alien invasions, but what have you done about ethnic cleansing and genocide? What about nuclear proliferation?
It was kind of nice in Superman (2025) that they actually had Superman dip a toe into addressing large scale real world issues with the invasion he stops and then deal with the aftermath of it. But that was about as complicated as we’re likely to see that real world parallel get unless they just turn the new DCU into a wholly different sort of world, a near utopia but police by the whims of a handful of ultra-powerful metahumans.