DC Finest - Green Arrow - The Longbow Hunters

Collects Detective Comics Annual #1, Green Arrow #1-8, Green Arrow Annual #1, The Question #17-18, The Question Annual #1, Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters #1-3

This was an impulse buy when I was in the shop not too long ago.

I have The Longbow Hunters in a collected edition. I enjoy that story. I wanted to see a bit more of where Grell took Green Arrow having only seen the Urban Hunter version of GA in The Longbow Hunters and The Question. I enjoyed re-reading the Longbow Hunters. I know that it doesn’t age well as with the male hero having to save the poor female but I still like the story.

The issues of GA in his own series that followed were pretty good. In #4, though … there’s a deal with a canister of some deadly compound … some mercenaries are all trying to find it. The mercs end up wrapping it in an explosive for some reason and Ollie suddenly has the detonator remote and blows it up. Then, he pulls the guy down from a cliff who should’ve had the remote. I didn’t really get that sequence of panels. I double-checked to see if the pages needed to be side-by-side for a different flow or something and no … they didn’t.

Ollie appears in the Question #’s 17 and 18. Gosh, I’ve read those issues so many times. I first read them at my friend’s house. Then I bought my own copies of the originals. I’ve read those multiple times and I read them again in The Question Omnibus. They’re still pretty good.

After all of that, Denny O’Neill takes over the writing and its very different. In The Longbow Hunters, Oliver talks about not hunting animals. In The Question annual, he appears with a dead rabbit that he had killed referring to hunting small game to “keep a man sharp.” Oliver himself seems very different as O’Neill writes him.

We ultimately end the book with the three “Fables” annuals penned by O’Neill ( Detective, Green Arrow, and The Question ). In my humble opinion… O’Neill uses Batman, Green Arrow, and The Question to ultimately tell a story about his creations Lady Shiva and O-Sensei.

I enjoyed re-reading The Longbow Hunters and most of the GA series (along with The Question #17 and #18). The rest of it isn’t for me.

Recommendation: Your mileage may vary.