8 Creators Who Secretly Defined Your Favourite Heroes

8. Dennis O'Neil And Neal Adams - Green Arrow

Dennis O'Neil is a name that'll crop up quite a few times here - so great is his influence on the superhero genre.

O'Neil emerged as a force during the Bronze Age of Comics alongside frequent collaborator and artist Neal Adams. Both presided over a defining period for Batman during the early seventies, but the duo's stint on Green Lantern/Green Arrow is often hailed as their most important work.

The story saw a number of firsts for DC, let alone Green Arrow. O'Neil and Adams injected a contemporary current into the title by using Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen to travel a United States reflecting on the social change of the 1960s. DC were no strangers to including political commentary in their work (the original Superman was about as working class and anti-corruption as you could get), but the company had never really been so overt before. Over the course of the comic, O'Neil and Adams tackled the lack of progress made in regards to Civil Rights, the emergence of drugs and the role of the hero in championing social justice, seeing Arrow and Lantern clash repeatedly throughout.

So, in one instance, the comic championed a new approach for DC in respect to social commentary, but it also redefined Green Arrow too. Adams outfitted the character with his trademark Van Dyke beard, while O'Neil divested from the shoddy Batman analogue that came before by reimagining Queen as a left-wing firebrand watching out for the little guy.

It's stuck ever since, to the point where the modern Arrow couldn't be further apart from his original incarnation.