When I first jumped onto the New 52 (about 8 months into it), one of the first titles I picked up was ‘Green Arrow’. Oliver Queen has always been a favourite character of mine, and I was keen to see what direction DC were taking him in after the reboot. I dropped it soon after. The issues written by Ann Nocenti were almost painful to read and I ditched the title pretty quick.

Jump forward to issue #17 and Jeff Lemire takes over writing duties. ‘Green Arrow’ suddenly goes from being one of the worst books of the New 52 to being consistently one of the best. In the space of a few issues, Lemire completely turned the title around, forgot about all the oddness that had gone before, and just wrote a very different comic book to the one we had been subjected to.

Granted, New 52 Ollie still isn’t the goatee’d charmer we all loved before the reboot, but he’s a damn sight more tolerable now than he was in the beginning, and Jeff Lemire has managed to ‘ground’ the title by moving away from the over-the-top boring bad guys, instead building interesting arcs and making both Oliver and his supporting cast that little bit more human. Oh, and Andrea Sorrentino’s art certainly hasn’t hurt the title either.

Hopefully you’ll agree with me here, but let’s hear your thoughts!

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The writer of this piece was: Alan Shields aka (Al)
You can also find Al on  Facebook