I’ve written about this run before (in the Top 100 Comic sagas thread back in 2017) , so to save time and mistyping, please allow me first to quote myself. ☺

I know, I know… these are issue-of-the-month morality plays replete with ladlefuls of leftover 60’s liberal pieties, overtly obvious analogues and a tendency toward preachiness.

HOW-ever, I’m going to have to pull rank and haul out the old, “Ya hadda be there” response.

Nobody in mainstream comics was doing anything close to what Adams and O’Neil were attempting here. We’d already seen O’Neil’s naturalistic stories and Adams’ photo-realistic style resurrect “The” Batman, and when O’Neil let his freak flag fly about so many issues that were dividing the country -- governmental corruption, racism, environmental destruction, pollution, women’s lib, conformity in a culture driven by consumption, the trial of the Chicago Eight (!), and of course, drug addiction – readers like me were first stunned and then elated.

By “readers like me,” I mean teenagers who had been set adrift by the sea-change that had begun with the JFK assassination. Thanks in large part to the power of the press, much that we had taken for granted about our country and our culture had been exposed as hollow pretense and we found ourselves on the other side of a deep divide. Realizing that you’ve been lied to, or that you just hadn’t been paying attention, made “readers like me” that much more receptive to O’Neil, Adams and their four-color pilgrims’ progress.

To see two DC heroes, who were so “establishment” that they made the Anderson family in “Father Knows Best” look like the Manson Family, and particularly two than whom no one had been stodgier, hit the road Easy Rider style to “look for America” was mind-blowing, if I may use a quaint expression.

Read it as a story created in reaction to a tumultuous time and you can forgive at least some of O’Neil’s ham-fisted characterization and melodramatic missteps. Adams’ art, though, is less of its time; in fact, I think it far outshines most of the work he's done in the years since. In Green Arrow’s facial expressions, he captures perfectly the anger and frustration many readers felt; in Green Lantern’s face and body language, he caught equally well the sense of bewilderment and disillusionment others felt at noticing “The Man” behind the curtain.

And I still think that the old black man, forever, ironically, and appropriately nameless, who confronts Green Lantern so simply and so eloquently is one of the greatest of all comic book characters.

I still feel this way. Yes, Hal Jordan had saved the world countless times, but his confrontation with the nameless black man didn’t negate all that he had done. Rather, it highlighted how his God’s-eye view of the world insured that he never saw what was staring him in the face every single day that he walked the streets of Coast City. This was a guy, remember, who could zip between dimensions, roam the universe, and do all the other traditional super-heroic things, but had never had it occur to him that he might also use a portion of that ring-power to make life a little better for the people living right down the street who had it worse than he did.

O’Neil was, in his own clumsy way, force-feeding "relevance" into comics, yes, but he was also doing what would later be hailed as deconstruction, taking a stab at what has by now become a staple of comic books: what would be the “real world” role of a super-powered being? Granted, Green Lantern was a title that centered around space-spanning, extra-dimensional adventures, not street-level crime, but the interest in that type of comic was plummeting. Remember, O'Neil was doing all this in a comic destined for cancellation because of poor sales. This was an “If we’re going down, we're goin' down in flames” kind of moment, after all.

And, let's face it, "No Evil Shall Escape My Sight" wasn't some artsy, ironic quotation O'Neil made up to suit his thematic purpose; he was holding GL to the letter of his own law.

Was he violating GL’s pre-established character? No more, I’d argue than John Broome had done when he turned test pilot Jordan into tourist guide/pilot Jordan, then into insurance adjustor Jordan, or than Gardner Fox had done when he subsequently turned him into an insurance salesman, and then into a toy salesman, all in the space of two years. 

And if he was indeed the Dharma bum Gaiman calls him in the excerpt quoted by rberman , a wandering searcher bouncing from job to job, an epiphany like the one he experiences in GL 76 ain’t exactly out of the ordinary. I'm not suggesting at all that Broome and Fox saw it that way, but as some have said, a writer’s intent and the perceived result aren’t always the same thing.

To aggrandize that run of GL is a mistake, okay, but to minimize it is also a mistake.

PS: Unrelated, but related: weren’t Fox and other longtime DC employees let go because of their demands for a health insurance plan?

A quick check showed that, yes, he was part of that group. DC froze him out in ‘68, which is when and perhaps why his prose output increased.

Having had that argument about Watchmen like a couple hundred times...I don't necessarily disagree. 

I think it's still special. And I WAS there.

I think it's still special. And I WASN'T there