The Green Team: Boy Millionaires

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"Green Team" redirects here. For the communications agency, see Green Team Advertising.

The Green Team is a fictional comic book team of rich-kid adventurers whose only published starring appearance made it cult item by a legendary comic creator. The team appeared in DC Comics' 1st Issue Special #2 (May 1975), created by writer Joe Simon (the co-creator of Captain America and legendary artist Jack Kirby's longtime collaborator) and artist Jerry Grandenetti.

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[edit] Publication history

The Green Team's only published adventure appears in 1st Issue Special #2, a try-out magazine of DC Comics.

Following the Green Team's debut, they appeared in one panel of Animal Man #25, written by Grant Morrison. Morrison sends Animal Man into Limbo to eventually find himself standing in front of Grant's own home and meeting his creator. On his way through Limbo he runs into a town populated by many of DC's characters that have been forgotten. These included Ultra the Multi-Alien, Max Mercury, Red Bee, the Space Canine Patrol Agents and the Green Team themselves. When Animal Man happens across them they beg him to get them out of limbo and offer to bribe him with sacks full of cash.

They also appear in a single page of Adventures of Superman #549, where they meet the Newsboy Legion and Dingbats of Danger Street, financing a youth center for the two street gangs.

[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 1st and 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 page in 1st Issue Special #2 (May 1975) explained, their jumpsuit uniforms had many pockets for money, with special locks, and they carried 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[edit] Unpublished stories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.

[edit] References