Denny O’Neil was, to my memory, the first comic book writer whose byline I recognized and looked for when I started reading comic books regularly. In such a visual medium as comic books, the fact that a writer’s name would mean so much to me, years before I started caring for comic book credits, is testament to his impact on my education as a comic book reader. His work with Neal Adams on the Bronze Age Batman books still defines my definitive Batman, the touchstone for all later Batmen (save for Miller’s, perhaps, but Miller is in a league of his own).
When O’Neil started writing the Batman comics (then the reign of supreme Batman-writer Frank Robbins, then at the top of his game), one immediately perceived a penchant for the Gothic, something one could apprehend right from the start in the somewhat failed story “The Secret of the Waiting Graves” in DETECTIVE COMICS #395 (1970).
O’Neil would go on to impact on the DC universe in indelible ways, from reviving the Joker (in his hands no longer a joke) to eradicating kryptonyte from Superman’s world (kryptonite was also turning into a joke with so many variant colored strains affecting Superman in so many weird ways). His most important impact, however, was clearly the transformation he operated on Green Arrow, starting with GREEN LANTERN #76 (1970), frequently hailed as a turning point in comic book history, by the inclusion of social concerns with a marked (and somewhat problematic) left-leaning bent. When I first read those stories (I confess my original aim in reading GREEN LANTERN, and then GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, was to delight my eyes with Black Canary), with the idealistic naiveté of youth, I thought them absolutely amazing. And, in some ways, they still are…. However, as one grows old one cannot ignore the huge propagandistic bent that weaken those stories, as such – one (in)famous moment has a black man demanding from Green Lantern what had he ever done for Blacks, an invective so silly that immediately brings to mind the famous Monty Python’s sketch “what did the Romans ever do for us?” from THE LIFE OF BRIAN (1979). That, however, is a matter from another post that I’ve been thinking of for some time.
O’Neil also left his mark on Marvel, but my channel to him then was DC Comics, and when he got back from his second stint on the House of Ideas, he grabbed me again with his rendering of the faceless THE QUESTION (1987-1992), with art by Denys Cowan, and the wonderful graphic novel featuring The Shadow, 1941 (1988), with art by another giant, Mitch Kaluta.
It is a sadly worn cliché to say that the world got poorer with Denny O’Neil passing away; but it is no less true. Fortunately, O’Neil was someone whose work - however polemical, however controversial - lives on, both on readers’ collections, reprint trade paperbacks, and the fond memories of pleasant reading hours. Even when one must disagree with what one is reading.
