April's
Justice League of America #7 was a pretty significant issue, chronicling a major turning point in the life of Roy Harper, the former Outsider, former Titan, former Checkmate operative and former sidekick to Green Arrow Oliver Queen. He joined the Justice League, a move which was so counterintuitive as to seem unnatural (he's
third on the list of super-archers the Justice League is friends with), but not one I would complain too loudly about, as I love Roy Harper. (
As a character, perverts). He also changed his costume, something former Teen Titans seem to do every couple of years. And, perhaps most drastically, he changed his codename for the third time, from Arsenal to Red Arrow.
Do all of these changes make sense within the context of Roy Harper's fictional history? Do they make
less sense than some of the other changes effected in other stories over the years? In order to answer these questions, we'll need to look back at Roy Harper's career*, through the prism of his clothes. Because really, in the world of superheroes, clothes really do make the man (and, of course, woman).
SPEEDYFirst drawn by: George Papp
Worn in: Every single Speedy appearance.
Distinguishing characteristic: Just like his mentor’s costume, only in a different hue. Except for one odd difference. While Green Arrow’s costume is all green with red accessories (boots and gloves), save his hat, which is green. Speedy’s costume is all red with yellow accessories,
including his hat and bow. I don’t know why this is.
Roy Harper first appeared in a short story in 1941's
More Fun Comics #73, alongside his mentor, Green Arrow Oliver Queen. They pair quickly garnered cover feature status and managed to hang onto it for much of their book's existence as a superhero book from then on, though it wouldn't be long until
More Fun switched to straight humor. Green Arrow was a straightfaced riff on the Batman formula, right down to the details—Green Arrow had an Arrowcave, Arrowplane and Arrowcar to compete with Batman's Batcave, Batplane and Batmobile.
Speedy, then, began his life as a Robin rip-off, with a typically generic name. The crimebusters would go on to join the original Seven Soldiers of Victory, get lost in time and saved from time during a classic JLA/JSA team-up.
Crisis on Infinite Earth's continuity rejiggering retroactively removed Green Arrow and Speedy from the team.
The super-team Speedy is most associated with, however, is the Teen Titans. He wasn't one of the original four founders, but he was a frequent guest-star and one of the earliest additions to the line-up.
The most famous Speedy story of them all, however, is one in which Roy Harper is revealed to be a junkie. Even though it only lasted
two issues, it's still pretty much the only Speedy/Roy Harper-related story anyone remembers.
ARSENALFirst drawn by: Tom Grummet
Worn in: New Titans #99-#114,
Zero HourDistinguishing characeristic: So…purple.
Just as Roy Harper/Speedy's creation was inspired by Dick Grayson/Robin's, his
re-creation would also follow Dick Graysons. Dick had come out from under his mentor Batman's shadow and adopted a new codename symbolically divorcing himself from Batman and positioning himself as a peer rather than a subordinate to the other adult superheroes in the DCU, becoming Nightwing. Harper became Arsenal.
His new look was very...well, let's just say it was "of the times," shall we? As for the codename, it signaled a shift of emphasis away from being just another crack shot with a bow and arrow to a guy wh was an all-around crack shot. Availing himself of Dayton tech, Harper created for himself a brand-new suit, full of gadgets and various projectile weapons he could throw with great accuracy, like boomerangs and bolos.
Here he is introducing himself to Nightwing (and readers):
This particular costume was (thankfully) rather short-lived, but the codename and weapons specialty would stick for quite a while.
Right up until
JLoA #7, actually.
ARSENAL 2.0First drawn by: Tom Raney and Stephen Jones
Worn in: Arsenal Special #1,
Batman + Arsenal #1,
New Titans #115-#130,
Teen Titans: “Titans Then and Now”
Distinguishing characteristic: The first completely mask-less costume Roy Harper wore, and the start of his usage of sunglasses as a mask.
In the wake of
Zero Hour, Arsenal took over as team leader for a new group of Titans, which were introduced in
New Titans #0 (in fall of '94, our time). He had changed costumes again, this time wearing a sort of non-costume costume consisting of black body armor and lots of pockets for weapons and such. At the time, his favored weapon seemed to be a crossbow, a nice cross between the bow and arrows he grew up shooting and the firearms he had started using while an agent for Checkmate. Presumably, the amount of gold in the costume was also meant to evoke his time with Checkmate.
Here's another view of the costume, as drawn by Dan Jurgens:
This was actually a pretty good luck for Roy—light years ahead of the purple outfint, anyway—although it was impractical in at least one way, as Nightwing was only too happy to point out when the original Titans (sans Donna) convened to check up on the new group of mid-90's Titans shortly after Roy's group had disbanded:
This was in the "Titans Then and Now" story arc of Jurgens' volume of
Teen Titans. At the end of the story, Roy would pick up his next new costume.
ARSENAL 3.0 (“Red Arrow” style) First drawn by: Dan Jurgens
Worn in: Teen Titans, The Millennium Giants storyline, the first three issues of
Arsenal,
JLA/The Titans,
DC One MillionDistinguishing characteristic: Just like
Kingdom Come, without the beard and hat and lame-ass belt buckle.
In late '97, Roy would get his next new costume, this one greatly inspired by the one Alex Ross designed for an Elseworlds version of him. In the previous year's
Kingdom Come series, Harper was one of the scores of background characters that filled up all those crowd scenes. Though he's not named in the story proper, Ross dubbed him "Red Arrow," and he basically wore Green Arrow's Satellite Era costume, only in red. He even grew his beard out like Ollie's:
I didn't re-read the whole book, but after giving it a good, thorough flip-through, this is the only panel I found in which Roy gets a line:
Still, it's not a bad costume design, and Roy Harper's never really had one of those. So it's easy to see why Jurgens might have jumped on it. He lost the beard because while that might spark a "heh" of recognition/appreciation in a self-contained Elseworlds story, it would be both creepy and stupid if Roy grew it in the DCU. He also lost the hat and the "R"-shaped belt buckle, giving Roy a hood, so that the costume was something of a mix of GA's Sattelite Era and Mike Grell-designed costumes. Only red.
As for the reason he donned it, the villain the two teams of Titans were up against in "Then and Now" was named Haze, and he had the power to create illusions and make them real. He claimed to have plucked the image from Roy's head, while showing off his power and his ability to grant his foes' every desire:
The costume only lasted about a year, but of all of the one's Roy's worn in the DCU, it's probably my favorite. He continued to appear in
Teen Titans for several issues, rocking this very suit, and generally lookign pretty awesome. Here he is in
Teen Titans #17, as penciled by Jurgens and inked by Phil Jiminez:
If Jurgens thought the "Red Arrow" look was an appropriate one for Roy, the next
Titans writer Devin Grayson didn't agree. She wrote four-part 1998 miniseries
Arsenal (as well as co-writing
JLA/Titans and writing the early issues of
The Titans). One of the events of the
Arsenal miniseries was to change Roy's costume...
again.
Here he shows the "Red Arrow" look off to his mentor's ex-girlfriend Dinah "Black Canary" Lance, who doesn't have quite the emotional reaction to it that Brad Meltzer would writer her having nine years later:
Later in the series, he meets and teams-up with Connor Hawke, his mentor's son and replacement as Green Arrow, for the first time. During a moment of male bonding, he explains why he has no desire to be Green Arrow:
After the "Red Arrow" costume gets blown to shreds, he returns home to change, explaining to Dinah that it was a little weird dressed in a red version of Ollie's costume while fighting alongside a Green Arrow:
You don't want to make a habit out of changing costumes? Oh Roy, I think it's a little late for that.
ARSENAL 4.0 (Navajoh theme)First drawn by: Rick Mays
Worn in: The Titans,
Green Arrow: “Archer’s Quest,” the last two issues of
ArsenalDistinguishing characteristic: Brown-nessess, Native American-looking arrow head/feather design
I didn’t much mind this one. Mays draws it really well in this particular series, and while the busyness of the design and the specicifity of the sytlized arrow icon didn’t translate to every artist’s’ drawing style very well, it looked okay upon introduction. With some minor tweaking (losing the arrow symbol, for example) it would have been fine. Roy doesn’t really need a
costume-costume anyway, as his time with the armor costume proved.
In addition to changing Roy's clothes, Grayson's mini also emphasized his "super-aim" ability, as he used a variety of objects—clipboards, picture frames, coins—as projectiles about as often as he shot arrows in the mini, and had him give up the use of guns. It took him four issues, but in the first one Dinah lectures him about having guns around the house and the message her daddy shooting them sends to Lian, and in the fourth he gives them up completely. Here are a few scenes dealing with that specifically:
ARSENAL 5.0 (Ultimate Hawkeye style) First drawn by: Ivan Reis
Worn in: Outsiders,
DC Special: The Return of Donna Troy Distinguishing characteristic: Lack of distinguishing characteristics
In 2002 Ultimate Hawkeye debuts, sporting the “super power” of super good aim, making him deadly with just about any thing that can be aimed and projected (a bow and arrow, guns, silverware, his own fingernails and drops of blood). It was the same “power” Simone emphasized in her
Arsenal miniseries. Her story beat Mark Millar’s
Ultimates out by four years, so you could make the case that Ultimate Hawkeye is something of a rip-off of Arsenal.
But then, you could also make the case that Arsenal’s newest look here is a rip-off of Ultimate Hawkeye’s…not only in their sleek, tight-fitting, non-costume costumes and favoring of sunglasses over masks, but right down to Arsenal’s clean shaven look, a drastic change from his shaggy-haired, stubble-faced look just prior to his redesign.
Here's Ultimate Hawkeye, from the cover of a 2002 issue of
The Ultimates:
And here's Arsenal's new costume, from
Teen Titans/Outsiders Secret Files & Origins 2003:
Other than its similarity to Ultimate Hawkeye's, there isn't really anything that terrible about this particular costume, which is another of Roy's not-really-a-costume type costumes. The jacket would come and go depending on the story, and when he appeared in the early issues of
JLoA, it was wearing a jacket-less version of this costume, only with a Speedy-style domino mask on.
However, throughout
Outsiders, Roy seems to have changed his mind about using guns (That, or writer Judd Winick and or/his writers skipped Arsenal's only miniseries):
RED ARROWFirst drawn by: Michael Turner and Ed Benes
Worn in: JLoA :“The Tornado’s Path,”
JLoA/
JsoA:“The Lightning Saga,”
Green Lantern: “Wanted: Hal Jordan,”
Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps Special #1Distinguishing characteristic: Looks exactly like mentor’s Satellite Era duds, sans hat, only in a different hue.
And that brings us to the first arc of the latest volume of
JLoA Here we see Roy, in the Meltzer-story version of his then-current Arsenal outfit (no jacket, domino mask instead of sunglasses), being asked to join the new version of the League by Dinah and Hal. Hal hands him a package, and Roy demonstrates why Ollie named him Speedy, by changing clothes speedily:
Dinah, who was pretty unimpressed by the sight of Roy in the Red Arrow costume a few years back, when she first saw him in it, and when she was grieving for the then-dead Ollie, now can’t help but cry tears of joy. Apparently, the belt buckle makes all the difference. (And as long as I'm being snarky, please not the flashback to Roy doing drugs; this is the first of two times in two consecutive issues that Meltzer will reference that story).
I like that Hal, who’s also starting to lose his shit a little, gave Roy an R-shaped belt, and then is like, “You can still call yourself Arsenal.” Yeah. The R’s just for “Roy.” Or “R-senal.” Whatever.**
Belt buckle aside, I still like this costume just fine. Maybe it could use a touch of black here or there, and a crossbow holster or utility belt for other weapons, but of all of Roy’s costumes, the Jurgens-era Red Arrow one is probably the best, and this one is a retreat to that.
I don’t really care for the rationale for the name change presented here—“Family business. Family name”—as Roy didn’t change his name to Red Arrow the last time he put on this costume, back when Ollie was dead and if there was a real need to fill the Green Arrow legacy, in Star City, and/or in Seattle and/or in the Justice League.
If he was going to change his name to Red Arrow, that would have been the time to do it. Clearly, being Ollie’s legacy hero wasn’t as important to Roy back then as being his own man, so it seemed odd that he would do it
now.
And how did Hal arrive at the name, anyway?
A close reading of “Tornado’s Path” reveals a panel where Hal starts to call Roy by his first name in the middle of the battle, blurting out “R-“ before correcting by saying “Red Arrow.” This is kind of ironic, because it’s about the only time any character in Meltzer’s
JLoA run bothers to call a fellow hero by a codename.
In a more abstract sense, I think what’s really wrong with this whole renaming and the scene in which it is made official can be made clear if you instead imagine Nightwing/Dick Grayson in Roy’s place, joining the Justice League and putting on a different color version of Batman’s costume—maybe the light blue one—and saying he’s going to go by “Batwing” now because, you know, family business, family name***.
Over a fairly difficult period, involving a lot of bad costumes for everyone, DC eventually grew their first generation of sidekicks into League-level heroes of their own. Outside of Barry Allen, there wasn’t much chance that Wonder Woman, Batman, Aquaman, and Green Arrow were
all going to die (at least, not for longer than a few years, tops), and so the other Titans would never actually be legacy heroes like Flash III.
So Dick didn’t become Batman, he became Nightwing. Garth didn’t change from Aqualad to Aquaman (despite a couple of opportunities to do so), but Tempest. Donna Troy didn’t become Wonder Woman (well she
did, but only for two weeks or so during
World War III, and half of the first issue of the latest volume of
Wonder Woman), but Troia (and honestly, she still needs some work. It’s telling that nobody even
uses her superhero name, they just keep referring to her as Donna Troy because Troia is, you know, a really dumb name). And Roy didn’t become Green Arrow, but Arsenal.
Making him Red Arrow
now, not when Ollie died or in 1999 and Roy
was already dressing in a red version of a Green Arrow costume, just doesn’t make a lot of sense, and diminishes the character, making him just one more DC super-archer (alongside Green Arrow, Green Arrow II, Arrowette and Speedy II), and putting him back in Ollie’s shadow.
While it was a dumb move on Meltzer and DC’s part, like a lot of recent dumb moves (messing with the multiverse, slotting Ted Kord, raping and killing Sue Dibny, resurrecting Jason Todd, rebooting Wonder Woman), it’s probably one everyone’s just going to have to deal with from now on. Because if new
JLoA writer Dwayne McDuffie were to fix the problem, it would just add another level of problematic storytelling. The change itself doesn’t make any sense within the story-world—but neither would changing it back after the change. Maybe McDuffie can make it work. In the mean time, I guess “Red Arrow” it is.
Finally, while on the subject of Roy Harper's costumes, I should point out that I really like the costume that the producers of Cartoon Network's
Teen Tians series gave Speedy:
It really mixes the best elements of his better costumes, while keeping it nice, sleek and simple. If anyone ever figures out a natural way to change Red Arrow's codename back to Arsenal, this would be a good model for his
next costume. Change the red to black, and the yellow to red, and either take the "S" chest patch off, or replace it with an arrowhead or maybe A-shaped arrowhead, and you'd have a damn fine costume.
*
"But Caleb," you may ask, "That was four months and five issues of JLoA
ago, why are you doing this now?" Well, I've actually been planning it since April, but it took me this long to comb through my longboxes, reread all these old Arsenal stories, and get my books to a scanner. Additionally, JLoA
brought up another issue which I wanted to repond to with a big, long post, but that one required even more work than this one. So it's taken me a few months to find time to finally put them both together. Now that Brad Meltzer's short 13-issue run on the series has ended with Wednesday's JLoA #12
, it seemed like a good time to address some of the changes he effected in the series. Be sure to stop back tomorrow, when a guest-blogger will help me tackle another issue.**
I’m pretty sure I stole one of those remarks from an online conversation with fellow “Best Shots” shooter Kevin Huxford, but now I can’t remember which.***
I used this exact same example in a past review or two of Justice League of America #7.
