Green Arrow!

[JDym]

Hey guys,

I'm starting to get into Green Arrow big time. Loved Quiver. My favorite GA moment so far happens in week 8 of 52:

(ollie shoots an arrow at a store owner instead of the thief robbing the guy)
ralph: you missed.
ollie: he said, "stop, thief". i aimed for the guy charging thirty bucks for disposable diapers in a disaster zone.


anyway, what should i get next? the volume after quiver or something else?

 

[Aristotle]

A lot of people will tell you that the series goes downhill from the Meltzer/Smith/early Winick days, but if you like that kind of Green Arrow story, I'd say you can get all the trades right up to the One Year Later jump. Honestly, I feel the entire series was solid.

If you like a harder-edged, grittier Green Arrow, Mike Grell's old series showed that side of the character, and ran for quite a few issues.

I think Green Arrow has been blessed with some pretty talented creators who get him as a character, albeit in different ways. There's the Neal Adams/Denny O'Neil run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, showcasing the origins of the political Ollie Queen we know and love. There's the Mike Grell run on Green Arrow, which gave the character some of the badassitude and wherewithal to be a serious hero. And there's the latest version, including the recently cancelled Green Arrow and the new Green Arrow/Black Canary, and this version synthesizes the previous two concepts with a dash of Kevin Smith, a very big helping of Judd Winick, and a little Meltzer/Bendis (they're basically the same guy.)

 

[JDym]

Thank you very much for the response. Very helpful, and now I can go forward.

 

[BrianWilly]

If you liked Quiver, I think you can safely get "Sounds of Violence" and "Archer's Quest." I highly recommend the latter, actually.

I also recommend Winick's first GA two collections "Straight Shooter" and "City Walls." Try those out, see what you think, and continue Winick's collections with caution if you like them; the general [accurate] consensus is that Winick starts off promising and gets worse with time.

 

[yenaled]

Archer's Quest a thousand times over.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

Archer's Quest was my favorite arc of the GA series.

 

[Aristotle]

The Kevin Smith and Brad Meltzer runs were by far the best of the series, but Winick did just find up until the OYL jump. At OYL, he certainly made a couple missteps, but I think they were still fine issues. GA/BC is off to a pretty decent start too.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

Winick's Green Arrow got bland pretty quickly to me. In the interest of fair disclosure, though, I am more of a Connor fan than an Ollie fan, and Winick mistreats Connor more than just about any other writer I've seen.

 

[yenaled]

The thing is Kevin Smith and Brad Meltzer had Ollie as the main star but handled Connor really well so as a primarily Connor fan I didn't feel let down at all and found myself actually caring for Ollie.

 

[Anubis]

So, if you don't really give a s**t about Connor, you oughta dig Winick's run too.

 

[Aristotle]

Right, and at the end of the day, I have NEVER given a **** about Connor. I think that's part of the reason Winick's run didn't bother me all that much.

 

[Anubis]

Same here I suppose. I'm pretty indifferent to the character.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

It does allow you to read Winick's run unencumbered by certain expectations due to following Connor's path as a hero and noting how it differed from Ollie's. That whole OYL flashback to the missing year, for example, struck me as a nice, fat "**** you, Ollie can do kung fu even better" to Connor and his fans. There was a nice balance with Ollie being the better archer, having more experience, and having a much darker edge while Connor was in the top five martial artists in the whole world and embodied spirituality and idealism--until that arc, when Ollie became super-badass martial artist, effectively erroding part of Connor's uniqueness. Then Dragon's Blood came in from the other end and moved Connor much closer to his father in attitude and experiences. Bleh. I hope Winick just kills Connor and puts him out of my misery.