Green Arrow by Joshua Williamson and Sean Izaakse

[Rakzo]

Funnily enough, Deadshot works as a Green Arrow villain just as much as a Batman villain (at least he's better than Deathstroke).

Maybe even better than as a Batman villain now that I think about it and I believe Christos Gage understood that when he wrote his Deadshot miniseries.

[M@Bowers2014]

Finally went up for digital preorder on Amazon, hooray!

I noticed that too this morning and immediately put it in my Comixology Wishlist.

[Riv86672]

Funnily enough, Deadshot works as a Green Arrow villain just as much as a Batman villain (at least he's better than Deathstroke).

Maybe even better than as a Batman villain now that I think about it and I believe Christos Gage understood that when he wrote his Deadshot miniseries.

^^^Man, that’s a natural rivalry right there.

[Frontier]

Funnily enough, Deadshot works as a Green Arrow villain just as much as a Batman villain (at least he's better than Deathstroke).

Maybe even better than as a Batman villain now that I think about it and I believe Christos Gage understood that when he wrote his Deadshot miniseries.

It's a fair point though Deadshot's appearances in the Arkham games gave him a lot of Bat-Villain cred.

[Digifiend]

Ad and new logo

[Frontier]

Ad and new logo

I like it .

[Rakzo]

I also must say that I'm very excited for Williamson's Green Arrow after how damn good his Superman is (Something that I didn't even have high expectations to begin with).

[Riv86672]

Ad and new logo

^^^Man, nearly everything about this book is just WORKING for me. So hyped.

I like how Connor isn’t brandishing his bow on the cover. He’s really evolved imo, into a martial artist who uses a bow, as opposed to an archer who knows martial arts, so that pose he’s in makes perfect sense.

[Digifiend]

Yeah, and Roy has a crossbow. Since he took the name Arsenal, he's not been exclusively a longbow user, so it makes sense to show him with a different weapon.

[Riv86672]

Yeah, and Roy has a crossbow. Since he took the name Arsenal, he's not been exclusively a longbow user, so it makes sense to show him with a different weapon.

^^^Good point!
Like how in the design sheet posted a few pages back you can see a pair of nunchucks at the small of Roy’s back. Nice touch.

[Lucas 35]

New interview of Joshua Williamson and Sean Izaakse

https://aiptcomics.com/2023/03/30/sh...ontent=vc-true

And here are some of the parts I found most interesting:

AIPT: There’s a kind of big moment, for many if not all readers, when the first issue reintroduces Lian Harper, Roy Harper’s daughter. Is that a big moment in this book or does it maybe deserve to be more understated?

JW: Superman was designed to be very accessible; anyone could pick this book up. Sean and I are huge Green Arrow fans, and we’ve been fans our whole lives. We know the mythology and the history really well. So this comic is a bit more for people like Sean and I.

So, Lian in particular, that was a very tragic thing that happened almost 15 years ago. And we’ve sort of teased it over the last few years, because she was in she was in Catwoman and she’s been a Detective Comics. there were plans to try to touch on that story in Teen Titans Academy and Catwoman, and it didn’t happen. But here it felt like it was actually the right opportunity. As we’re coming out of Dark Crisis, and this idea that everything is much more fun and light again, to bring her back in at this point I think makes sense. People who are hardcore DC fans for the last 20 to 30 years, they’ll be immediately pulled into that and really know what’s going on. But people who have never read Green Arrow before, when they read get to that scene, they understand the emotions, but I think it’s not as heavy without getting into spoilers.

AIPT: Josh, in some other interviews, you’ve mentioned wanting to play around with Oliver’s own rogues gallery. Anything more that you want to share about specific villains or other plans?

JW: I just wanted to take a moment to like shine a spotlight on some of Oliver’s villains. I think if you actually went out and you started asking people who are Green Arrow’s villains, I don’t think they would be able to fill in a very big list.

Whenever I start a new book, I always make a lit of villains. I started thinking about where they’re at and how I want them to play in the story and what they mean to Oliver and how they challenge whoever that character is. We don’t see that many villains in the first two issues; we actually are going to use some new villains as well in the first two issues. But as we go, we started shining more and more spotlights on them because I wanted to flesh them out and then also show why they can be scary. They’re not just jokes or anything — they’re actually dangerous. If you look at the cover, you can basically see who’s gonna be in the book. I think there are a couple of villains that were Oliver’s that haven’t really been fleshed out over the last few years that I wanted to play with.

AIPT: Josh, in some other interviews, you’ve mentioned wanting to play around with Oliver’s own rogues gallery. Anything more that you want to share about specific villains or other plans?

JW: I just wanted to take a moment to like shine a spotlight on some of Oliver’s villains. I think if you actually went out and you started asking people who are Green Arrow’s villains, I don’t think they would be able to fill in a very big list.

Whenever I start a new book, I always make a lit of villains. I started thinking about where they’re at and how I want them to play in the story and what they mean to Oliver and how they challenge whoever that character is. We don’t see that many villains in the first two issues; we actually are going to use some new villains as well in the first two issues. But as we go, we started shining more and more spotlights on them because I wanted to flesh them out and then also show why they can be scary. They’re not just jokes or anything — they’re actually dangerous. If you look at the cover, you can basically see who’s gonna be in the book. I think there are a couple of villains that were Oliver’s that haven’t really been fleshed out over the last few years that I wanted to play with.

One in particular, I don’t want to say just yet because that would spoil the whole thing, but there’s definitely some surprises. Sean read [Green Arrow] issue #3 last week, and there was a bunch of stuff that Sean didn’t know was coming in. And Sean you saw what appeared on the last page and said, ‘Yeah, that’s a big deal.’ All it takes is a couple pages to reintroduce a character and show why they’re cool. Or hope is if the book gets extended past the six issues, then we get to play around with more and more of the villains.

I remember when I was working on the cover, I even said to Josh and [DC editor] Ben Abernathy, ‘I’m a bit out of the loop, so which Count Vertigo, is it the new guy or what’s going on?’ And they came back and said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I didn’t even do a design sheet for him; I just designed it on the cover, as I was drawing it, and I’d merge the older and the newer looks.

There hasn’t been a Green Arrow book for a while. And as I was saying to a fellow artist the other day, Green Arrow has always felt like one of those books that’s kind of experimental. It was very noir-ish, and you had these artists that weren’t necessarily superhero artists. They were grim, gritty kind of things — that was Green Arrow. And, for the ones that I read anyways, there were always new characters and villains. I feel like a lot of his classic villains that were on the cover had these very plastic looks — not dated, but they need to be updated for a new era. You want them to look a certain kind of cool for a more modern audience, and so I’ll always try and add a little bit. And with drawing villains, you can just go a bit crazy with designs and stuff.

AIPT: We have time for one more question. We talked about where Oliver’s at, and so does that mean we might see more of an emphasis on Roy and Connor?

JW: You see the role he [Oliver] has in issue #1, and then he gets significantly more screen time in issue #2 and same with issue #3. As much as this is Oliver Queen’s book, Sean and I from the beginning have said this is a Green Arrow family book. So it’s him but it has a lot of Roy and Black Canary and Connor Hawke, and then other characters as we add. Oliver’s even narrating things, and so even the scenes he’s not there he still has a presence. But I think, to us, it’s always a Green Arrow book.

[Riv86672]

^^^Love the news about Lian!

The balance they’re trying to strike as a solo title that’s also an Arrow Family book is ambitious and I appreciate the effort.

[Frontier]

Lian reuniting with her family and refurbishing Green Arrow's Rogues Gallery sound like wins to me .

[Lucas 35]

[Riv86672]

^^^Love. This.