The smartest thing Diggle does is keeping Oliver grounded in the “real world”. The series is mostly focused on the action scenes, and in only a general sense, showing Oliver change from a spoiled playboy to a socialist. Jock is certainly one of the best artists working today, and as was clearly evident in the last series they worked on together, he fits well with Diggle’s bigger-than-life action scenes. Their blending of non-stop action and solid character development allow the story to flow at a fast pace and have the reader wanting more. Diggle and Jock take this framework origin of the playboy who is shipwrecked on an island and learns to survive by hunting with a bow and arrow to return a socialist superhero, and update it to feature betrayal, money, and drugs. In Green Arrow’s case, his origin has really not been dealt with for decades, and frankly, most are probably only aware of it’s generalities. As well, the old cliché, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” regularly applies. The reason origin stories are sometimes the most difficult to tell are because the readers hold the current origin in such nostalgia, particularly if a character’s origin has not been tampered with for years, or in some cases, since the character’s inception.
Luckily, Diggle and Jock’s tale falls into the former category and not the latter. Sometimes they work - such as Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s Batman: Year One or John Byrne’s Superman: Man of Steel - and sometimes they go down in flames and are soon forgotten, such as John Byrne’s Spider-Man: Chapter One. Re-telling an origin story is a tricky thing. Enter the writer and artist of Vertigo’s The Losers, Andy Diggle and Jock, to re-tell the tale of how Oliver Queen became Green Arrow. While the character has been re-vamped a few times, one thing that has not been approached in a while is the character’s origin. This did not last long, however, as Clerks director Kevin Smith soon began writing a new Green Arrow series which re-introduced Oliver Queen to the DC universe. During the 1990’s, DC Comics killed off the character, replacing Oliver Queen with his son Connor as the new Green Arrow. The character of Green Arrow has certainly had its ups and downs over the years.
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