Osgood Peabody wrote:
"MMM - I don't know how far you've read into the 60s series, but to me it peaked with issues #40 through #61.  After that Gil Kane left the title for about a year, and the fill-in artists (Jack Sparling, Mike Sekowsky IIRC) were less than stellar.  Then Kane returned, but with Broome doing less and less work, a lot of other writers were pitching in, and the series became very uneven.  There are a few gems to be found here and there (a 2-part story involving Sinestro and Star Sapphire comes to mind), but sales were plummeting (as they were on most DC titles in the late 60s) and Julie decided he had nothing to lose by turning it over to O'Neal and Adams."

I'm still missing a ton of 60's DCs in general, but my impression is that the more the decade wore on, the more DC tried to "Marvel-ize" some of their characters, in a desperate attempt to compete against a product they just did not understand.  When it came to the last-ditch desperate changes-- in this case, O'Neil-Adams-- you had a writer who may have been the worst of all possible choices for a book about a space cop-- a left-wing liberal radical who HATED cops. O'Neil's entire "take" on GL was to have Green Arrow bad-mouth him and try to make him look wrong in all cases and just plain stupid.  In the long run, it didn't help-- and the book was cancelled. The problem is, a lot of "fanboys" who became pros LOVED that run, not realizing just how "wrong" it was for GL, and in the decades since, have repeatedly tried to somehow recapture it, in the mistaken belief that "turning GL upside-down" would make it work better.  It NEVER DID, and NEVER WILL.  (Look at the disaster that happened when O'Neil took over as editor for the ACTION COMICS WEEKLY run.)

What has, frankly, astonished me in the last few years is how Geoff Johns' run on GL has been-- to my eyes-- the BEST the book has EVER, EVER been.  Between the regular GL book and GL CORPS, the GL mythos has been treated more "proper" than perhaps it ever has-- at least, since the very earliest Broome-Kane issues.  Instead of making the series "different", they're just doing it "better".

Last Edited By: profh0011 Mar 26 10 6:57 PM. Edited 1 times.