The Green Team: Boy Millionaires
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The Green Team is a fictional comic book team of rich-kid adventurers whose only published starring appearance made it cult item as an infamous[citation needed] misfire by a legendary comic creator. The team appeared in DC Comics' First Issue Special #2 (May 1974), created by writer Joe Simon (the co-creator of Captain America and legendary artist Jack Kirby's longtime collaborator) and artist Jerry Grandenetti.
[edit] Publication history
Following the Green Team's debut, its only other appearance was in DC's Animal Man #25, written by Grant Morrison. In it, Animal Man visits a fictional-character limbo, where forgotten comic creations are left until they are written about again. The Green Team offers him as much money as he wants to free them. He is unable to, however, leaving the Boy Millionaires trapped until in limbo until they have stories written about them again.
[edit] Fictional character biography
The team consisted of Commodore Murphy, boy shipping magnate; J.P. Huston, oil tycoon; Cecil Sunbeam, a Hollywood film director known as "The Starmaker"; and Abdul Smith, a shoeshine boy who made a killing in the stock market. All that was needed to join the group was a million dollars.
The boys paid fortunes to anyone who could offer them a worthy adventure. In their only published story, they funded the "Great American Pleasure Machine", a sort of roller coaster ride that brings so much pleasure, it drives the villain of the piece insane.
As a text piece in First Issue Special #2 explained, their jumpsuit uniforms had many pockets for money, with special locks, and hid ticker-tape wristwatches, a chain of keys that would unlock any of their many labs and money vaults in far-flung lands, and a quarter-million dollars each that any of them could whip out at any time in the name of adventure.
[edit] Unpublished stories
This was the last official adventure of the boys, except for two stories in Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, a two volume collection DC Comics ran off on copiers to secure copyrights on the stack of unpublished material left over after the DC Implosion. In the first of the two unpublished adventures, the boys were pitted against giant lobsters and the Russian Navy. In what would have been the third issue, the Green Team face a villain called the Paperhanger who had special wallpaper that grew plants and trees, and who was a dead ringer for Adolf Hitler. They dispatch all menaces, then disappear into history in their private jet.
