The linked PDF file is the original text of the paper I presented at the First International Conference of Robin Hood Studies, held at Rochester, New York in October 1997.
Russell Crowe as Robin Hood
The conference itself was a fun weekend for me. My experience for years of literary conferences had been annual excursions to Mythcon. So it was interesting to step out of the comfort zone for this conference. The theme was about how Robin Hood appeared in and impacted popular culture (which became the title of the volume that contains an edited down version of this paper, Robin Hood in Popular Culture, edited by Thomas Hahn, published in 2000).
“Robin Hood and Green Arrow: Outlaw Bowmen in the Modern Urban Landscape” was written at a time when in the realm of the DC Comics, the character Oliver Queen, known as Green Arrow was dead. But in comics, characters don’t always stay dead, and such has been the case of Oliver Queen. He’s back in action, pretty much carrying on the same way as before, except that as of April 2008(when I initially uploaded the paper), he’s finally married his “Maid Marian”, Dinah Lance, the Black Canary. Update (June 2011): As with so many things in comics, they let the Dinah and Ollie relationship crash, so the pair are once again split.
Update (May 2016): Green Arrow has moved into new popular culture territory in recent years with the television series Arrow. The show has made certain variations in the comic book “mythology” of Oliver Queen, but the character remains an archer crime-fighter working outside the law enforcement structure.
