July 1969: Toying with the Counterculture

By 1969, the American counterculture was inescapable, even in popular culture.

It slipped obliquely even into Green Lantern 70 (July 1969) in a story written by John Broome.

“Happiness was what the stranger offered the world … but all he brought it was … tragedy!” proclaimed the ad copy for the issue, with a cover showing a painfully thin, weeping figure astride the fallen body of Green Lantern (and wearing what appeared to be one of Captain Comet’s old discarded costumes).

In 1969, the idea of a naïve and well-meaning superhuman alien stranger had an obvious reference point: Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which had lately become a bestseller and something of a countercultural bible.

The novel had been based on an idea Heinlein got for his wife Ginny for turning Kipling’s Jungle Book into a “Martian Book.” What would Mowgli be like if he’d been raised by aliens?

The answer turned out to be Valentine Michael Smith, a painfully thin Martian-reared boy who gained telepathy and telekinesis from his extraterrestrial upbringing, but lost the human tendencies to be jealous and dishonest.

Green Lantern’s stranger turns out to be not a Martian but a toy. The defective and rejected robot from the planet Ghyra just wants make people laugh, but ends up causing a lot of trouble (His name is “Hilar,” as in “hilarious”).

Countercultural references are peppered throughout. Clearly, DC knew the this new youth culture was out there, but didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“First the mods -- then the hippies -- now this!” remarks a passer-by when he spots Hilar. 

A cop who tries to arrest the innocuous Hilar as a “student revolutionary” finds himself reflexively hurled aside by Hilar’s powers. 

Those powers prompt a criminal gang to recruit the innocent, a mess that requires the giant green hand of the Emerald Gladiator to sort it out.