Green Arrow

• 1. Introduction

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  Green Arrow first stepped onto a comic book page in More Fun Comics No. 73, which was released on the 19th of September 1941 and carried a cover date of November 1941. Another hero debuted in the very same issue: Aquaman. By day, the archer is Oliver Jonas Queen, a rich businessman who owns Queen Industries and enjoys celebrity status in Star City. That public glamour is the cover story for his life as a vigilante. He is also said to be the world's greatest archer, with a quiver of trick arrows that includes glue, tear gas, grappling hooks and even kryptonite. The questions are why a hero assembled from borrowed parts outlasted so many of his contemporaries. Why did writers keep tearing his life down and rebuilding it? And how did a minor archer end up at the center of television universes decades later?

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• 2. Borrowed Roots

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  Mort Weisinger created Green Arrow, and he built the hero from parts that were already lying around. Artist George Papp designed the look, and the obvious model was Robin Hood. Weisinger also drew on a movie serial called The Green Archer, which was based on a novel by Edgar Wallace.

  The larger debt was to Batman. Green Arrow had a teenage sidekick named Speedy, an Arrowcar, an Arrow-Plane, an Arrow-Cave and an Arrow-Signal. Like Bruce Wayne, Oliver Queen was a wealthy playboy. He even had a clown-like arch foe named Bull's Eye, who echoed Batman's Joker. The first origin stories for Green Arrow and Speedy appeared in More Fun Comics No. 89.

  Green Arrow began as a back-up feature, yet within four months he and Speedy had replaced Doctor Fate and the Spectre on the cover of More Fun. Historian Mike Benton, writing in Superhero Comics of the Golden Age, credited Speedy's appeal, since teenage sidekicks were the current rage. In the winter of 1941, the pair were also one of five back-up features promoted in Leading Comics No. 1, one of the earliest team-up books.

  The feature stayed in More Fun until issue No. 107 in January 1946. It then moved to Adventure Comics, running from No. 103 in April 1946 to No. 269 in February 1960. Appearances in World's Finest Comics continued until issue No. 140 in March 1964.

  That longevity was Weisinger's doing. He kept Green Arrow as a back-up to the headlining Superboy, and Superman-related titles were all but guaranteed to succeed. France Herron was the primary scripter from 1947 to 1963. In 1958, a short run was written by Dick and Dave Wood and drawn by Jack Kirby. Adventure Comics No. 258 even sent a younger Oliver Queen into an encounter with Superboy.

  Because the character stayed so steady through the 1940s and 1950s, he escaped the Silver Age makeovers that the Flash and Green Lantern received. Unchanged also meant unremarkable. In 1969, an artist named Neal Adams would start to change that.

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• 3. Pickup Truck Politics

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  In The Brave and the Bold No. 85, cover-dated August-September 1969, artist Neal Adams gave Oliver Queen a Van Dyke beard and a costume of his own design. Writer Denny O'Neil then rebuilt the personality to match, in Justice League of America #75. In that issue Queen lost his fortune and became an outspoken advocate for the underprivileged and the political left. The story also made teammate Black Canary his love interest.

  In the early 1970s, O'Neil and Adams paired Green Arrow with Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, in a series that tackled social and political issues. The two heroes stood for opposite viewpoints. Green Arrow wanted radical change, while Green Lantern was an establishment liberal who trusted existing institutions. O'Neil described the contrast this way: "He would be a hot-tempered anarchist to contrast with the cerebral, sedate model citizen who was Green Lantern." Queen pushed Jordan to look past his strict obedience to the Green Lantern Corps and help people who were being neglected or discriminated against.

  The pair set out in a beat-up pickup truck to find America. Along the way they met corruption, racism, pollution and overpopulation. One story, in issues #78-79, was widely read as an allegory for the Manson Family murders. O'Neil has stressed that it was really about the authoritarian left.

  Green Lantern (vol. 2) #85-86 revealed that Speedy, Green Arrow's ward, was addicted to heroin. He recovered with the help of Black Canary. The story drew a huge public reaction, including a congratulatory letter from New York mayor John Lindsay.

  Praise did not translate into sales. Green Lantern had been in steep decline before Green Arrow joined it, and the series ended with issue No. 89 in April-May 1972. Its final arc ran as a back-up in The Flash Nos. 217 through 219. That arc turned inward, following a Green Arrow haunted by the guilt of having killed a man.

  Solo stories followed as back-ups in Action Comics, starting with No. 421, with Elliot S. Maggin as writer for several years. When Green Lantern/Green Arrow relaunched in 1976, with O'Neil writing and Mike Grell drawing, the social themes were gone. Oliver became a newspaper columnist, and in World's Finest No. 255 in 1979 he lost a run for mayor of Star City. In May through August 1983, he finally headlined his own four-issue miniseries, which began his rivalry with Count Vertigo. Mike Grell, the artist of that 1976 relaunch, would return in 1987 with a far grimmer vision.

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• 4. The Longbow Hunters

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  The 1987 miniseries Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters began with a routine job against a group of drug runners. Writer and artist Mike Grell then turned it into a tragedy. Black Canary was captured and brutally tortured, and Oliver responded by killing her attackers. The series also introduced Shado, a Japanese archer whose family had suffered in a World War II internment camp. She later raped Oliver and became pregnant, and the son she bore was named Robert after Oliver's father.

  The revamp launched an ongoing series in DC's mature audience line, and Grell wrote the first 80 issues. He dropped the gadget arrows and moved Oliver from Star City to Seattle, Washington. The tone turned gritty and urban, and Green Arrow often used deadly force. Oliver gave up his mask and was never actually called Green Arrow. Black Canary was never shown using her sonic scream.

  Grell also kept the hero apart from the wider DC Universe. When Hal Jordan appeared, he wore street clothes and went by his civilian name. Grell filled the gap with his own cast. Seattle police Lieutenant Jim Cameron despised Oliver's vigilante killings. Renegade CIA agent Greg Osborne began watching Queen. Mercenary Eddie Fyers started as an adversary and became a companion of necessity after Oliver had to flee Seattle over false accusations of aiding terrorists. Grell's run ended with Green Arrow vol. 2 No. 80, shortly after Dinah dumped Oliver.

  In 1992, Grell also reworked the origin in the four-part series Green Arrow: The Wonder Year. His Oliver was a thrill-seeker who inherited the family business very young and was changed by time on an island. During his first adventure in Star City, he met an old flame, the former college radical Brianna Stone. She warned him that if he kept carrying his bow, he would one day have to use it for real.

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• 5. Death and Resurrection

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  With issue No. 63 of Green Arrow vol. 2, still under Grell, the series left the mature audience line that had evolved into Vertigo. After Grell departed, the book was written mostly by Kelley Puckett and drawn by Jim Aparo. Oliver began turning up in superhero titles again, including Green Lantern (vol. 3) #47, where he helped rescue Hal's longtime girlfriend Carol Ferris and her family from one of Hal's enemies.

  The 1994 miniseries Zero Hour pushed him into a darker moment. Grief over the destruction of Coast City drove Hal Jordan to destroy the Green Lantern Corps in a bid to remake the universe. At a pivotal moment, Oliver was forced to shoot his old friend. Around the same time, Connor Hawke was introduced and revealed to be Oliver's son from a previous relationship.

  In Green Arrow (vol. 2) #100-101, Oliver infiltrated an eco-terrorist group called the Eden Corps and died stopping them from detonating a bomb that would destroy Metropolis. Superman tried to intervene. Oliver rebuked him for suggesting that Superman sever the arm attached to the bomb. The exchange paid tribute to Frank Miller's 1986 work The Dark Knight Returns. Later, in the Quiver storyline, Oliver admitted that he had refused for two reasons: his own troubles at that point, and the practical fact that he would be useless as an archer with one arm.

  Connor Hawke took over as Green Arrow, with Chuck Dixon writing, until the series was canceled at issue No. 137. Connor proved less popular than his father. Oliver returned at the start of the 2000s in Green Arrow (vol. 3), in the Quiver arc written by Kevin Smith and illustrated by Phil Hester and Ande Parks.

  The resurrection was deliberately flawed. During his final hours before sacrificing his life in The Final Night, Hal spoke with Oliver's soul in the afterlife. They agreed to restore a version of Oliver with no soul, so that the real Oliver could stay in Heaven. The copy also lacked any memory of The Longbow Hunters or what followed. Oliver reasoned that things went wrong for him after he was driven to kill for the first time.

  For some years the resurrected Oliver worked as a vigilante in Star City, unnoticed by his superhero friends. When he learned the truth, he was left uncertain about what he was. The grandfather of Stanley Dover then tried to use Oliver's soulless body to gain power over a monster bound to his grandson. At the climax, Oliver's soul returned from heaven and helped Connor fight a horde of demons. The Beast consumed Dover and left. Oliver was wealthy again, because Dover had moved his finances into Oliver's name, and he gained a new sidekick in Mia Dearden, the new Speedy. Smith followed with a shorter arc about a super-powered serial killer calling himself Onomatopoeia, who targeted Connor.

  Brad Meltzer then sent Oliver and his former sidekick Roy Harper on a cross-country road trip to collect old possessions. The most notable was a spare Green Lantern power ring that Hal had entrusted to him. The story revealed that Oliver had known all along that Connor was his son and had even been present at his birth. He abandoned the boy and his mother out of fear of fatherhood.

  Meltzer went on to write the miniseries Identity Crisis, with Green Arrow among its main characters, investigating the murder of Sue Dibny, wife of the Elongated Man. It revealed that the League had mind-wiped villains to protect secret identities. In Justice League Elite, Oliver served as tactical consultant to a black ops team, where he had a brief affair with Dawn, wife of the team's magical expert Manitou Raven.

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• 6. Mayor, Bride, Exile

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  Judd Winick took over as writer in 2004 and made sweeping changes. Mia Dearden was revealed to be HIV positive. New archer villains such as Merlyn, Constantine Drakon and Danny Brickwell, known as the Brick, joined Count Vertigo and Onomatopoeia. The Riddler guest-starred along the way.

  After the 2006 jump of "One Year Later" following Infinite Crisis, Oliver was the newly elected mayor of Star City and rich once more. His new costume blended the Neal Adams look with Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters outfit. Flashbacks showed that he had survived a near-fatal attack and used his recuperation to retrain. He studied with several instructors, including a sensei named Natas, who had also trained Deathstroke. He became proficient in several martial arts, including swordsmanship, and fought both Deathstroke and Batman's rogue protege Jason Todd.

  A scandal ended his time as mayor, when he learned he had been secretly funding the Outsiders, who by then worked essentially as bounty hunters. He had never had much more than 50 percent of the city behind him. He agreed to resign in exchange for his successor leaving his social aid programs alone, and he resigned before the election to put a trusted person in charge. The series closed with Oliver proposing to Dinah, Black Canary.

  In 2007, Andy Diggle and Jock's Green Arrow: Year One offered the newest official origin. A rich, thrill-seeking activist is attacked, thrown overboard and washes up on an island, where he discovers a smuggling operation. Horrified by the slave-like conditions of the inhabitants, he starts taking the smugglers apart. In the final part, Oliver says a mutiny or a group of heroin dealers could serve as the cover story, nodding to the original origin and Grell's version.

  A four-part Black Canary miniseries followed, in which Green Arrow helped her place a girl named Sin in school. It ended with Black Canary accepting his proposal. DC then published three connected specials on the Green Arrow/Black Canary wedding. At the end of the wedding special, Black Canary is forced to kill Green Arrow after he appears to go mad and attack her.

  The new ongoing series revealed that the dead man was an impostor and that the real Oliver was being held hostage by a figure called Athena. During the rescue, Connor was struck by a bullet meant for Oliver and left in a vegetative state. Oliver and Dinah were officially married, since the wedding special had not really made them husband and wife, only to find Connor kidnapped. He was eventually found and recovered, thanks to manipulation by Doctor Sivana. With issue No. 15, Andrew Kreisberg took over as writer.

  During Blackest Night, Oliver became a Black Lantern and attacked his son, wife and sidekick. Connor said he had never really forgiven his father. The team stopped Oliver by freezing him with liquid nitrogen.

  In the Cry for Justice miniseries, the JLA foe Prometheus destroyed Star City, and an old friend named Moreno nearly exposed Green Arrow's identity. The bombings also killed Lian Harper, the daughter of Roy Harper. Green Arrow tricked the Justice League into releasing him, tracked Prometheus to his lair and killed him with a single arrow between the eyes.

  In the Rise and Fall storyline, Oliver then obsessively hunted Prometheus's allies. His JLA comrades confronted him, and he realized he had crossed a line and turned himself in. Black Canary returned her wedding ring and declared the marriage over. A jury sympathetic to his motives found him not guilty, but he was exiled from the remains of Star City.

  He chose to live in the mysterious forest at its center. In Brightest Day, Deadman's white ring had created that forest from the life energy of Earth. Meanwhile a hostile takeover brought a new owner to Queen Industries, who claimed to uphold the Queen family legacy where Oliver had failed. That self-proclaimed Queen had a connection to Oliver's father.

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• 7. Relaunches

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  In 2011, DC relaunched its titles with new No. 1 issues under the banner The New 52, and Green Arrow was one of the 52. Oliver now ran Q-Core, a communications company inside Queen Industries, and used it to fund and armor himself. He was based in Seattle again, helped by tech-genius friends. His romance with Black Canary, his friendship with Hal Jordan and his two sons, Connor Hawke and Shado's son Robert Queen II, did not survive the reboot.

  J. T. Krul wrote the series first, followed by Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens, then Ann Nocenti. Critics and fans received none of those runs well. Beginning with issue 17, writer Jeff Lemire and artist Andrea Sorrentino took over and won better reception. They introduced mysteries about Oliver's time on the island and a mythology built around the ancient Arrow Clan and weapon-themed groups called the Outsiders. The villain Komodo turned out to have been the apprentice archer of Oliver's father and his apparent murderer.

  Shado told Oliver that she had a daughter by his father Robert Queen, named Emiko, whom Komodo had raised as his own. On the island, Oliver found that his father had survived and had disguised himself as one of Oliver's torturers, steering the transformation that created Green Arrow. Disgusted, Oliver took the relic called the green arrow and left Shado and Robert stranded. Robert later died saving Emiko from Komodo, and Emiko killed Komodo.

  From 2013, Green Arrow also headlined Justice League of America (vol. 3). It was a state-sponsored team assembled by Amanda Waller and Steve Trevor of A.R.G.U.S. as a hedge against the independent League of Superman and Batman. After Lemire and Sorrentino left at issue No. 34, Andrew Kreisberg and Ben Sokolowski took over. Kreisberg was the executive producer of the TV series Arrow, and Sokolowski wrote for it. They brought Felicity Smoak into the comics, and Oliver faced the magnate John King, Mia's father. After Convergence in April-May 2015, writer Ben Percy and artist Patrick Zircher brought a horror flavor and restored Lemire's characters, including Emiko and Henry Fyff.

  The 2016 DC Rebirth relaunch restored Oliver's Van Dyke beard and his romance with Black Canary, the first since 2011. Percy described the hero as a "social justice warrior." Emiko, once seemingly a traitor, took the code-name Red Arrow. That volume ended in March 2019 with an extra-sized issue No. 50.

  In November 2022, DC announced a new series by Joshua Williamson, with art by Sean Izaakse, following Oliver's disappearance at the end of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. It launched in April 2023, and on the 25th of April, the day of the first issue's release, DC said the six-issue miniseries would become a twelve-issue maxiseries. In it, Oliver appears to work for Amanda Waller and starts arresting his own family. He later learns that Martian Manhunter had created a telepathic implant to make him believe in Waller's goals. Afterward Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman agreed to bring back the Justice League.

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• 8. Screens and Other Earths

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  Outside fandom, Green Arrow had a single early appearance in the animated series Super Friends in 1973. In the 2000s he turned up in animated shows including Justice League Unlimited, Young Justice, The Batman and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The biggest step came in live action, when Justin Hartley played him in Smallville, first appearing in the sixth-season episode "Sneeze." Comics writer Mark Waid praised him, saying Hartley "nails Green Arrow perfectly." Geoff Johns said every line Hartley delivered was perfect.

  In Smallville, Oliver started as a vigilante in Star City, paired with Lois Lane in a romance. He then became Clark Kent's trusted ally. From season eight he was a regular and a childhood friend, and later teenage bully, of Lex Luthor. In the episode "Requiem," he killed Lex. He eventually married Clark's friend Chloe Sullivan. The comic continuation Smallville Season Eleven revealed their son as Jonathan Queen. Hartley turned down talk of a spin-off, feeling it would steal the spotlight from the show.

  In January 2012, following Smallville's end, The CW readied a new series around Green Arrow. Andrew Kreisberg, Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim developed it, and David Nutter directed the pilot. Guggenheim said the team wanted to chart its own course, so they cast a new actor. Canadian actor Stephen Amell took the role. Arrow premiered on the 10th of October 2012 and ran for seven full seasons, plus a final season of ten episodes that concluded in January 2020. It started a franchise called the Arrowverse that includes The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning and Batwoman.

  On the page, the multiverse produced stranger versions. In Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, the Earth-Two Green Arrow died while still wearing red boots and gloves. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, a one-armed Oliver holds the arrow nocks in his teeth, and in the sequel he is described as a "billionaire turned Communist." In JLA: The Nail he is a bitter ex-hero, and in Superman: Red Son he is a reporter at the Daily Planet. In Mike Mignola's Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham, he is a guilt-ridden Templar who carries magic arrows dipped in the blood of Saint Sebastian. In the Injustice universe, Superman mortally wounds him inside the Fortress of Solitude after wrongly fearing harm to Jonathan and Martha Kent.

  Even Queen Industries has outlived the man. It is mentioned in Batman: Arkham Origins and owns properties around Gotham in Batman: Arkham Knight, though Green Arrow himself is never named. In Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a Queen Industries building stands as a landmark in Metropolis.

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