10 Subtle Changes That SAVED Iconic Comic Book Characters

3. Ditched The Batman Comparisons - Green Arrow

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DC Comics

People joke about Green Arrow being a knock off of Batman all the time, both in and out of the DC universe, and for good reason: that's exactly what he was when he started out.

Big money, lives in a mansion, young ward, superhero cave, even an arrow themed car to drive around in. It's enough to make one wonder, when they go back to read those original comics, what possessed DC comics to keep such a redundant character around at all?

Well, when Green Arrow was folded into the larger DC universe, they found the perfect spin on the character to separate him from Bruce: have him lose his fortune, and become a hard-travelling lefty in the late 1960s. (Oh, and he also grew a Van Dyke beard, which is pretty important too.)

The change came courtesy of Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams' Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic, which cast Queen opposite Hal Jordan, a space cop who embodied establishment, conservative politics.

It gave Olly an identity that was all his own, to the point where the biggest gripe people had with the Arrow TV show when it first started out was how it seemed obsessed with being everything that had been holding Green Arrow back to begin with: a ripoff of Batman.

Contributor
Contributor

John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?