Vitaeleous

@Avenging-X-Bolt I'm still waiting for my new JLA issue to come, but that Baz/Arrow team is looking really interesting. I apologize for earlier inconsistencies; I hadn't actually realized that DC was making a differentiation between The Justice League and the JLA. So, my bad. However, Baz and Arrow. With Lemire's new take on GA, and the kind of waves Simon Baz has been making, I see a lot of potential for that team-up. I've done a fair bit of ranting on these boards about Green Arrow and his loss of cultural relevance. Baz is one of the more socially relevant characters in DC's line-up today, and maybe he'll pull Ollie back into the thick of things the way he was meant to be. I guess we'll see.

Somewhat stoked that we've finally found a DC artist willing to draw an archer's hand correctly, instead of in some ridiculously overdramatic and completely impractical configuration.

Three cheers for Tim Horton's coffee!! The nectar of Canada.

@ltbrd: Interested in your breakdown analysis of the show. I like the way you've approached; I don't agree with everything you've said. For instance: I would most definitely disagree and say that this is and brand new depiction of Green Arrow. The character has changed a lot, making the jump from page to animated screen, to live-action in Smallville, and now to his own live-action series. The animated version was pretty damn close to the comics. He was left-wing, the liberal voice of reason the League needed to keep their heads on straight. The costume was the same, all was well. Smallville was an interesting leap. Really high-tech compound bow with sights and the whole nine yards, but using primarily his signature gadget arrows. I find the tech crucial to understanding the character. He's using the absolute cutting edge of an ancient technology to deliver technologically enhanced projectiles to non-lethal effect. But look at Ollie in Arrow. He has no extensive interest in tech; his archery is bare-bones, artful, traditional. He uses a recurve with broadheads designed for nothing less than hunting. He out to kill. And because of that edge we have to look at the character completely differently. If nothing else, it sets him apart from Batman. But you also have to consider the political side of it. In the '80s Green Arrow lost his company, his fortune, and turned socialist. He was a hero for the people, left-wing in a time when we were all scared of communist takeovers. It was a big deal. It made the character relevant, but it's all been dropped and the character has flipped; he's involved in the company, he's rich, living it up, and more than that the show itself is playing along to a highly capitalist trend. Archery is popular. The Hunger Games, Brave, The Avengers, Robin Hood; there's a lot of money to be made in archery these days, and Arrow is capitalizing on that, using a character whose heyday was built around rejection of capitalism. So, I would argue that this is a completely different incarnation of the Emerald Archer; he has to be, in order to make sense to us in the context we're encountering him in.

Now, I might have an answer to your questioning the name change, because that also had me intrigued: why would they change the comics' perfectly good Star City into StarlingCity? So I did some digging. And some reading. And came up with a hypothesis. If you've read Mike Grell's 1987 Longbow Huntersrun you may have realized by now that Arrowis channeling Grell pretty directly. Longbow Hunterswas keystone for a number of reasons. It was the first time comics saw Green Arrow deliberately take a life, making a blatant shift from his trademark gadget arrows to plain old broadheads. The character was never referred to as Green Arrow; in fact, the whole time Grell wrote the character there was no real mention of superheroes. If Ollie ever interacted with other characters from the DC universe (Hal, for example) it was on a man-to-man basis, not as heroes. He never wore a mask. And Grell decided to move the character to Seattle, a city notorious for its uncontrollable population of...starlings. So my theory is that, as a nod to Mike Grell and the way he helped shape the character, the CW has opted for a name that echoes the city we all associate with the character but has a referential connection to the setting Grell chose for the Emerald Archer.

The show's doing a lot of this, actually. Blending different parts of the character, using his past mythos as a toybox from which they can pull whatever tickles their fancy. Like Speedy. Right now she's a pretty accurate blend of Roy Harper, the first Speedy, whose drug addiction merited the publication of a letter from the mayor of New York complimenting Denny O'Neill on his social consciousness and Mia Dearden, the ex-prostitute and the first HIV-postive comic book character who became the second Speedy. Both these characters carried a lot of weight in their comics. Both of them presented issues that really hit home for readers. And I have a feeling that having them blended in the form of Ollie's sister is going to lead to some incredible drama in the future (for the record, "drama" is not always a bad thing). So, I see a lot of potential in this character that is seemingly being dismissed by the majority of viewers.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Now, imagine it as drawn by..Liefeld.

@JonSmith: I'm going to weigh in here, and try and provide a little depth. The biggest difference I see off the bat (or from The Bat...unintentional pun, I swear) is the willingness to take a life. Ollie's experiences on the Island hardened him, turned him into a hunter and a killer. This is where it becomes clear that the show is drawing heavily on Grell's 1987 work with the character in Longbow Hunters, the first time comics ever saw Green Arrow willingly take a life. Batman is built around this core principle that he will never, under any circumstances, take a life. The tenet's been there from day one, and he's stuck to it. We're seeing Ollie start out as a killer; he's being confronted about his willingness to kill, but he hasn't changed. not yet. There's a lot of potential development for the character there. So, that's one big difference.

Another is the death of the parents matter. Bruce lost his parents, both of them to a murder he witnessed as a kid. He used to blame himself for the death, but he's long since gotten over that (or he had...I don't really know where New 52 Bats stands on that issue). He knows that his parents were doing a lot of good in Gotham, and he sets out to fix the city the only way he knows how, and honour his parents' memory. Not too different from Ollie, at first, trying to fix the broken city he loves. But his motivation is a lot different. He's not continuing his father's work, he's trying to repair the damage his father did. He saw his dad kill himself, and he still has a mother. He also has a lot to discover about his mother, but that's another topic. There's also a matter of age at time of parents' death; Ollie was a lot older and a lot more worldly when the tragedy happened. he has a better understanding of it than Bruce was capable of that night in Crime Alley. There are many similarities, but because of these key differences the characters have been shaped very differently.

The idea of the rich, playboy alter ego is a hold-over from the inception of these characters. Green Arrow was literally created as a facsimile of Batman in the early '40s. He had an Arrow-plane, an Arrow-Car, an Arrow-Cave, was summoned with an Arrow Signal, and fought alongside a young sidekick in red. So it's no wonder we're still seeing parallels between the characters today. What's interesting is to consider why the playboy is an effective alter-ego for each hero. The alter ego should, theoretically, be an effective opposite of the world's perception of the hero, so that it'll never be assumed that one is the other. So. no one guesses that the bumbling and foolish Clark Kent is actually the heroic, stupidly buff Superman. So if the playboy persona is the opposite of both Batman and Green Arrow, but they don't stand for the same thing, how does that work? Food for thought.

@cborg: I like the way you think, sir. You could be on to something there. There's a second part to the Arthegall story that connects it more closely to comics, specifically to Iron Man, and that's the issue of control. Arthegall is accompanied by his iron man, but he doesn't necessarily control it. Sometimes, when Arthegall is unwilling to deal out strict justice and opts for a more humane route, the iron man steps in a does something drastic of its own accord. It is a partnership, but the iron man is still acting on his own steam. Tony Stark has, in the past, had similar issues with the control of his suit. So it'd be interesting to see, as you said, the excessive humanity of Flash balanced with Cyborg's struggles to retain that which he has left. We've already seen Cyborg's immediate and unwavering decision in a time of crisis to get a breathing upgrade; the guy doesn't hesitate to do what he knows has to happen. I think it's a solid and intriguing hypothesis. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the JLA.

Well, I'll be the first to admit to never having read Days of Future Past, but Millar has yet to let me down. His work writing the Ultimate X-Men was exceptional, and his other books exhibit a really solid understanding of character development and drama. His involvement with Kick-Ass and Wanted and the role he's taken with Marvel in their recent films shows the guy is dedicated to the translation process of comic-to-screen. Having such a talented storyteller backing a guy like Singer, who has been involved in all of the X-films' successes and none of their failures, I can't help but feel this bodes well for the franchise. Not to mention Singer helped produce the webseries H+, which you should watch if you haven't already. Another nugget of faith for this director.

@cborg: I like what you said about him being more a weapon than a teammate. I've been reading through Jason "Doctor Comics" Tondro's book Superheroes of the Round Table, exploring the influence of Arthurian lit on modern comics. He cites one old tale where a knight named Arthegall is accompanied by and enchanted iron figure, and "Iron Man", if you will. Arthegall is the Knight of Justice; that's his mission, to make sure Justice has its day, but he himself doesn't have the power to make it happen. His Iron Man is his enabler, the power that lets him carry out that mission, and as such the Iron Man and Arthegall come to be seen as a single force. So consider the idea of Cyborg as the power that enables the JLA to do what they're trying to do. Maybe he comes across as more of a weapon than a teammate, but without him they'd be pretty ineffectual. It's role we aren't used to seeing in super teams, but it has roots in historical literature and shouldn't just be disregarded.

As artists, are we expected to post our work here, or submit through a PM?