Superheroes Behaving Badly III: Speedy

In 1971, DC Comics took a daring step forward by allowing the title Green Lantern/Green Arrow to deal with the issue of drug addiction by having Speedy, Green Arrow's sidekick since 1941, reveal himself as the owner of a heroin habit.

This would leave a trail of sometimes-noxious storytelling consequences, but it also showed that good writers can illuminate more sometimes when they allow superheroes to behave badly.

The Original Shocker

With the passage of close to 30 years since the original story, much of Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams' intended impact has faced from the tale where Green Arrow finds out his ward Roy Harper (and sometime partner in the persona "Speedy") has taken to mainlining heroin. The medium itself became more mature, or at least open to more mature themes, and subsequently often lapsed into the tawdry and repulsive, using the "adult" label as a smokescreen for occasional gratuitous grotesqueness and crass pandering. Nonetheless, O'Neil and Adams had an agenda with this story. Firstly, they intended to address the notion that drug addiction could rear its loathesome countenance in places that believed themselves immune. Secondly, they intended to shoot the props out from under the arrogance and self-congratulation of Green Arrow, whose sometimes pompous and moralistic outpourings suggested a complacency of just the sort that his adventures with Green Lantern sought to reveal in the rest of American culture.

Interviews with the principals who crafted this story suggest that they did not have an eye to the long-term consequences of the story. One may more easily relegate a character (however briefly) to the life of a junkie; but what do subsequent writers do when they have to inherit the character?

Briefly put, writers can show the character recovering, backsliding, or ignoring the issue. The third approach might provide a lazy out; the second, a morbid way to pick at old wounds until someone wisely decides to dispose of the offending character altogether, as an act of mercy both to the reader and to the wayward superhero.

Lame Echoes

During the classic Marv Wolfman run on The New Teen Titans, one scene appeared that sticks in the mind almost twenty years later as an obnoxious and unnecessary misuse of the history of Roy Harper. In a big fight scene between the Titans and the Bad Guys du Jour, a villain(ess?) uses some kind of psychic attack on him which causes him to relapse on the floor in the pangs of heroin withdrawal.

Watching Speedy lie on the floor, shaking and sweating, even in the hands of such talent as the peerless George Perez and the esteemed Mr. Wolfman evoked no small distaste in me as a reader. I do not mean to say that DC should altogether avoid dealing with the issue of Speedy's past, but if this single aspect of the character should not come to play the role of Kryptonite in the more uninspired Superman stories of the sixties. Speedy has only skills and no powers and does not need some grotesque special weakness for villains to evoke when they need a quick and easy out in a fight.

This provides the essence of an argument against allowing superheroes to do certain things as plot devices, particularly when writers feel about the issues involved in a way that makes them attempt to follow the continuing consequences of life choices that always come back to haunt the chooser. Should Iron Man comics deal in stories with supervillains with rays that drive the hero into delirium tremens? Should many stories with Hank Pym (in whatever incarnation) drive him to slap around his onetime spouse? A cheap device offends enough by its cheapness, but at least can provide some humor through redunancy and the use of theme and variations; consider, for instance, the interminable gag where Batman sneaks away between panels and someone (always) turns to goggle in disbelief and say something like "How does he do that?"

When the grotesqueness of a device puts it on a par with fingernails on a blackboard or the graphic detail of Peter Jackson's early films, but in a context that forbids humor, like heroin withdrawal or delirium tremens, both pride in craft and good taste come together to suggest that a writer choose to refrain from inflicting the scene upon readers.

A More Humane View

If a writer has the opportunity, he can take pieces, even ill-used and annoying ones, from a character's prior history and use these to weave depth into the character. Stupid scenes when super-villains use mental powers to make Roy relive the heroin withdrawal syndrome do not provide the end-all of subsequent reference to O'Neil's and Adams' original story. With the right touch, such a tainted past could provide the material for stories that deal in themes of redemption.

Of course, limitations of the medium and of the talent used to populate it can interfere with the best development of elements laid down by the more effective efforts of earlier writers. Therefore, in the often-dismal Action Comics Weekly, which carried a number of episodes of a Speedy story line, Speedy muses on redemption because someone has annoyed him by failing to demonstrate the desirable - nay, prescribed - views about a third party dying of AIDS.

However, the hints all appear in this one uncharacteristically thoughtful panel from said defunct publishing experiment. This mental soliloquy represents a plausible intellectual development by the onetime IV drug abuser. If the venue had allowed, perhaps this story could have developed into something that showed rather than told the conclusion the authors wanted the readers to reach; but DC comics of the period tended to swerve wildly from the nihilistic social Darwinism of pieces like "Wild Dog" and Vigilante to exercises in preachy excess, seemingly excluding only effective moral teaching. For example, DC stories might deal with AIDS awareness, but only through predictable and heavy-handed tales where a hero basks in self-righteousness because he does not make moral judgments against the terminally ill, while all the business-suited villains spew accusatory invective until the hero either beats them senseless or the sight of a dying man shocks them into the views and feelings the author wants them to have. This approach does not challenge complacency; it buttresses it.

Where subsequent comics use this (significant) footnote in the history of Roy Harper, a character who first appeared in comics in the 1940s, writers have an opportunity to work in themes of redemption. They also face a danger in that misuse of these themes may incline them to pursue themes of moral bankruptcy, in which writers declare the only evil in the recognition of evil. All depends on the character and talent of the writers who handle Speedy in the future.