Cover: Neal Adams

Green Lantern #79

Sep 1970 · DC · 0.15 USD

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“Ulysses Star Is Still Alive!”

About this Issue

Green Lantern #79 is the fourth chapter of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams's landmark 'Hard-Traveling Heroes' run — a story arc that fundamentally redirected superhero comics away from Silver Age abstraction and toward engagement with real American social crises. This particular issue took on Indigenous land rights and treaty violations at a moment when those subjects were essentially absent from mainstream comics, making it one of the earliest Bronze Age stories to put Native American justice front and center. The issue's dramatic core — Hal Jordan insisting on working through legal channels while Oliver Queen advocates direct action — crystallized the ideological tension that made the entire O'Neil/Adams run so electrically readable, using superhero genre conventions to stage a genuine philosophical argument about reform versus rebellion. As part of a run widely regarded as marking the beginning of the Bronze Age of comics, #79 contributed to a body of work that shifted what the medium was allowed to say.

In "Ulysses Star Is Still Alive!", Green Lantern and Green Arrow take on a powerful environmental and cultural clash, standing with Native Americans fighting to protect their ancestral land from destructive logging. Written by Denny O'Neil and illustrated with striking detail by Neal Adams—whose dynamic pencils and inks define the cover—this 1970 issue blends social commentary with superhero action, leaving the fate of the land’s legal claim hanging in the balance.

writer Denny O'Neil · artist Neal Adams · inker Dan Adkins · letterer John Costanza · cover Neal Adams

ComicBooks.com Value

Our Model is In Beta

Raw (Fine) $36

CGC 9.8 · 2 in census $2,409

CGC 9.6 · 15 in census $800

CGC 9.4 · 25 in census $304

CGC 9.2 · 37 in census $203

CGC 9.0 · 27 in census $145

CGC 8.5 · 34 in census $108

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CGC 8.0 · 33 in census $88

CGC 7.5 · 26 in census $84

CGC 7.0 · 9 in census $84

CGC 6.5 · 20 in census $58

CGC 6.0 · 8 in census $58*

CGC 5.5 · 5 in census $58

CGC 5.0 · 3 in census $58*

CGC 4.5 · 5 in census $55*

CGC 4.0 · 5 in census $52*

CGC 3.5 · 3 in census $43*

CGC 3.0 · 1 in census $38*

CGC 2.5 · 1 in census $29*

CGC 2.0 none in existence

CGC 1.5 none in existence

CGC 1.0 none in existence

CGC 0.5 · 1 in census $20*

* estimate — limited direct-sales data at this grade

Our model’s value — refined as new sales data arrives · CGC census counts shown where available

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History

The issue emerged from editor Julius Schwartz's decision to partner Hal Jordan with Green Arrow beginning with #76 (April 1970), a concept Neal Adams himself helped push — he had seen that Green Lantern's sales were slipping and proposed pairing the straight-laced space cop with the more volatile, street-level Oliver Queen, with Denny O'Neil, a former journalist, writing the scripts. O'Neil brought his reporter's instinct for real-world stakes to each installment, and #79 reflected the AIM-era tensions over treaty rights that were very much in the news around 1970. The interior story credits — confirmed against Julius Schwartz's own editorial records — are script by Denny O'Neil, pencils by Neal Adams, inks by Dan Adkins, and letters by John Costanza, while Adams also penciled and inked the cover; the story was structured in a formal three-chapter 'prologue plus chapters' format that gave it a literary weight unusual for the period.

Trivia · 8 facts

Cover date: September 1970 (on-sale July 1970); published by National Periodical Publications (DC Comics) under the Comics Code Authority seal.
Story title: 'Ulysses Star Is Still Alive!' — 22 interior pages scripted by Denny O'Neil, penciled by Neal Adams, inked by Dan Adkins, and lettered by John Costanza; Julius Schwartz edited. Credits confirmed from Schwartz's editorial records.
Cover pencils and inks by Neal Adams; cover colored by Jack Adler (credit confirmed from the 2004 collected edition).
The plot centers on Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Black Canary becoming entangled in a Native American tribe's dispute over century-old lumber rights — one of the earliest mainstream superhero stories to directly address Indigenous land and treaty rights.
Black Canary (Dinah Drake Lance) appears alongside the two heroes, continuing her role as an active participant in the road-trip arc rather than a supporting figure.
The story's closing passages incorporate quotations from Norman Mailer's 1968 Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning nonfiction novel 'The Armies of the Night,' an unusually literary touch for a superhero comic of the era.
The story is formally divided into a 'Prologue' (pp. 2–4), 'Chapter 1: The Quest of Green Lantern' (pp. 5–11), 'Chapter 2: The Quest of Green Arrow' (pp. 12–16), and 'Chapter 3: The Last Stand!' (pp. 17–22).
The issue has been reprinted extensively: in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #2 (Paperback Library, 1972), the DC 1983 reprint series, the 1992 'Hard-Traveling Heroes' trade paperback, the 2000 Green Lantern/Green Arrow Collection, the 2004 and 2012 DC collected editions, Showcase Presents: Green Lantern Vol. 5 (2011), the 2015 Absolute Green Lantern/Green Arrow, the 2018 Hard-Traveling Heroes Deluxe Edition, and international editions in German, Dutch, and Spanish.