William O’Pomegranate's Reviews > Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters

** spoiler alert ** Well, this hasn't aged well. Trigger warning for Sexual Assault

This was written during the height of the war on drugs and it shows. Green Arrow recounts his origin story. If you're familiar with his character you will know his origin is that he became standed on an island and had to fight off a group of bloodthirsty pirates to return home. However, it turns out this was all a lie. Instead of pirates, it was two stoned and unarmed hippies that he threatened with grievous bodily harm so they would take him back to civilization. He doesn't even try to ask them for help. After this, he has these criminals arrested because they were trying to grow some marijuana. For the actions of an ostensibly a liberal hero, it's all so comical.

Several times the comic establishes that crime has never been higher. I'd like to go off on a short tangent here criminals are constantly being shocked that Green Arrow would beat them up. How on earth did they expect him to handle them? With cupcakes and hugs?

The other significant part that really hasn't aged well is that Black Canary is kidnapped and sexually assaulted. Now I am not trying to suggest characters should never be brutalized in fiction but at least it should serve some purpose in the narrative. The authors have not even come close to achieving this goal. Green Arrow kills the men who have committed these heinous crimes and goes back to being a non-lethal hero immediately. Our female lead points out the hypocrisy of his actions and he totally ignores this criticism. The comic takes the stance that this issue has been resolved even though it hasn't been in the slightest.

The comic also drops its narrative focus and picks new ones up willy-nilly. It's incredibly jarring. The comic starts off by relating the dangers of drugs and the mental health issues of Vietnam vets. The Vietnam vet angle is quickly dropped for the horrors of Japanese internment camps . Then at the very end, everything is dropped to insert the Iran-Contra affair into the story. Mike Grell should have just stuck with one because this hodgepodge of unrelated narrative elements doesn't work.