Green Arrow has become a social justice warrior character under recent Rebirth comics, reflecting contemporary political issues and questioning how a billionaire can fight against inequality. The character struggles with his wealth conflicting with his Robin Hood inspiration of fighting against the wealthy elite. Previous 1980s comics portrayed Green Arrow as a more lighthearted vigilante who still promoted fair notions of justice without being as angsty as other vigilantes. Vigilante justice in comic books helped normalize violence operating outside the law but still aiming to submit criminals to the justice system without killing opponents.

1. Super Social
Justice Warriors
DC Rebirth’s Green Arrow and the Comic Culture Wars
Anastasia Salter
Assistant Professor
University of Central Florida
Twitter: @anasalter

6. Benjamin Percy, interviewed on Green Arrow Rebirth #1, May 2016.
http://archive.is/wCPni#selection-1117.2-1143.107
Green Arrow is a social justice warrior. Green Arrow has his finger on the
pulse of the moment. We're channeling the zeitgeist. If you've been reading
the newspapers over the past few months, you've encountered headlines
that we have considered filtering into — slanted versions of — into the
series.
And the thing that I've struggled with, since taking Green Arrow over, is his
billionaire status. This is a Robin Hood figure. And the pull quote from the
trade, without question, will be, "How can you fight the man if you are the
man?"
That's a question that Black Canary poses to him.
Green Arrow has lost his fortune before, but this will be the first time that
he's complicit in that loss.

12. Scully, Tyler, and Kenneth Moorman. "The rise of vigilantism in 1980 comics: Reasons
and outcomes." The Journal of Popular Culture 47.3 (2014): 634-653.
Green Arrow [in the 1980s] gave Americans a more easy-going vigilante,
suggesting that you did not have to be brooding or conflicted to carry out
justice. Though he questioned his methods in issue #19, there was little
reason to fear he might lose his attitude and become an extremist like the
Punisher or insane like Vigilante. He remained an attainable character—a
relatively average guy who was really accurate with a bow and arrow. It was
almost to suggest that anyone could be a vigilante. Perhaps this was one of
the reasons why it carried the “Suggested for Mature Readers” label across
its covers. It was another series to give Americans an escapist fantasy, one
that showed them a new side of a familiar face, a character who had
provided social advice in times past and now arose to do so again. Green
Arrow demonstrated that a character could clean up the streets and still
have a regular life; he was easy to like and he was easy to sympathize with,
but most of all, he possessed a sense of fair play and strong, dependable
notions of justice.

14. Stoddart, Mark CJ. "‘They Say It’ll Kill Me… but They Won’t Say When’: Drug
Narratives in Comic Books." Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 13.2
(2006): 66-95.
Vigilante justice was normalized within comic book drug narratives.
Characters like Daredevil, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, and Spider-Man
worked outside the boundaries of law that have governed the official
institutions of criminal justice (i.e., the police, courts, and prison system).
However, there were well-defined rules of the game for the ritualized
violence of supervigilantism. This model of legitimate vigilantism was
governed by two principles. First, the superhero vigilante worked as a
complement to the official justice system. While violence was a ritualized
part of hero-villain interaction, the ultimate aim was to submit the villain to
official processes of criminalization and punishment (which occurs off-page).
Second, while the hero may have used violence, he or she did not kill the
villain.

16. Gates, Geoffrey. "‘Always the Outlaw’: The Potential for Subversion of the
Metanarrative in Retellings of Robin Hood." Children's Literature in Education 37.1
(2006): 69-79.
Is the reader invited to see Robin Hood as a conservative outlaw
defending universal values, or as an innovator—a social reformer at
work in the forest?
Conventionally, Robin Hood has come to Sherwood Forest after a
skirmish with the law. At variance is the seriousness of Robin’s
lawbreaking and his class background. These are rather important
issues as they set up our understanding of Robin Hood’s reasons for
being outside the law, the nature of his ‘alternative society’ in the
forest, and prefigure how his eventual reincorporation is to be
understood. In Michael Morpurgo’s storybook Robin of Sherwood,
Robin and

18. Singer, Marc. “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of
Race.” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp. 107–119. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/2903369.
The idea of the split identity, one of the most definitive
and distinctive traits of the superhero, is also one of the
most powerful and omnipresent figures used to
illustrate the dilemmas and experiences of minority
identity. The concept has a long pedigree in the ories of
race, beginning in 1903 with W. E. B. Du Bois's The
Souls of Black Folk and his concepts of the veil and
double-consciousness.

20. Bainbridge, Jason. "“This is the Authority. This Planet is Under Our Protection”—An
Exegesis of Superheroes' Interrogations of Law." Law, Culture and the Humanities 3.3
(2007): 455-476.
Superheroes reflect perceptions of failed or
deficient law. They are therefore another vehicle
for thinking discursively about law because of
what they can say about society and its
perceptions of the effectiveness of law, in the
context of their manifesting a pre-modern,
sacralised, view of embodied justice as opposed
to modern constructs of law.

22. Eric Francisco. “Trump Forced 'Green Arrow' to Double Down on Political Comics.”
October 2017. https://www.inverse.com/article/37378-green-arrow-dc-comics-
donald-trump
In October 2016, writer and novelist Benjamin Percy told Inverse he
was introducing “a certain orange-faced candidate” into his Green
Arrow series for DC Comics. The character, Nate Domini, soon appeared
in the six-part “Emerald Outlaw” saga, as an entrepreneur-turned-
politician who rode a nationalistic, xenophobic platform to win Seattle’s
mayorship.
Green Arrow is the most political series at DC,” Percy tells Inverse on
Friday of New York Comic Con, a year to the day of our original
interview. He adds that “channeling Trump” into the series was both
“natural and inevitable,” and though Trump himself isn’t in the comic,
the series will always have something to say in the wake of his
administration’s actions.

24. Thank
you!