Green Arrow, as cheesy as he was sometimes portrayed with all the trick arrows (Net Arrow, Boxing Glove Arrow, Boomerang Arrow), was always one of my favorite heroes when I was growing up. When I got tired of wanting to grow up to be Batman, I'd want to be Green Arrow. Especially when he got changed from playboy to radical leftist and bleeding heart. That bearded free spirit with the attitude of sticking it to the man was just what I needed to grow up on in the 1970s. Oliver Queen taught me to think outside the box and question life and a number of other things.

He still remains as DC Comics' most radical hero. Mike Grell created The Longbow Hunters and pushed away the trick arrows for a time, getting Ollie back to his roots as a cutting-edge back street brawler, then enjoyed a long run on the strip. Chuck Dixon shortly followed Grell and even killed Ollie off long enough to give us a new Green Arrow in Connor Hawke.

Even though he'd died and gone to Heaven, Ollie come back in issues penned by Kevin (Daredevil, Clerks) Smith. Lately Judd Winnick has married him off to Black Canary and invented a whole new Speedy for this generation.

But Andy Diggle (The Losers) got the green light to pen the adventures of Oliver Queen's Year One origin, while so many longtime DC Comics heroes are getting spotlight treatment. I really enjoyed Diggle's run on The Losers as well as some of his other forays, but I didn't know if he was the right guy for Green Arrow. As it turns out, Diggle was just the guy to bring Ollie once more to the masses.

Diggle's scriptwork is excellent. He moves the story along and finesses the characters and relationship through dialogue and action, and the overall effect is like watching a movie with first-person voiceovers. An added bonus in the graphic novel contains the first few pages of the actual script Diggle turned in to the editor and artist. He didn't just put the words on the page, he actually planned where the action would go and how it would be revealed.

In the beginning, Oliver Queen was a playboy with more money than he knew what to do with. He rambled and tried extreme sports to fill the gaps in his life, constantly trying to find his happy. Diggle does a masterful job of portraying that, and even ties in the Robin Hood touchstones of Errol Flynn and Howard Hill's longbow at a fundraiser where Ollie really makes an idiot of himself.