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Green Arrow: Year One by Andy Diggle and Jock
01/07/2008 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
pub: Titan/DC comics. 160 page graphic novel. Price: £16.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-84576-727-6. Buy Green Arrow: Year One in the USA - or Buy Green Arrow: Year One in the UK  check out website: www.titanbooks.comand www.dccomics.com
The introduction by Brian K. Vaughn stipulates that if the first issue doesn't hook a reader these days then a new comicbook isn't likely to succeed. He doesn't actually define whether this is the appeal of the story, character or artwork although I suspect the latter is seen more as the hook to the modern purchaser.
Back when I was reading DC comics in the 60s, the origin story would be at most a couple pages before going on to 'present day' adventures with little regard to how the super-hero got the way he or occasionally she got there. Today, whether this is sophistication from other media, there is more of a need to know what makes a character tick and the life journey taken getting to the current stories, hence the many extended origins that have been released in the past couple decades.
If anything, Oliver Queen's origin back in the 60s was determined by a couple sentences. A shipwrecked millionaire getting by on a desert island with only a bow and arrow. Finally rescued, he becomes a super-hero, very much in the manner of Batman, with his trick arrows, Arrow-car and side-kick, Speedy. He had little personality beyond that and a really basic costume and it wasn't until the late 60s Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams took GA under their wing with Green Lantern that everything clicked together and gave him a social conscience which has been with him ever since.
With such a basic origin, there is always room for expansion. The British team of writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock (aka Mark Simpson) do this showing how reckless multi-millionaire Oliver Queen doesn't manage his life too well. He gets taken for a ride or rather a cruise by his employee Hackett and gets dumped at sea when the latter can't kill him. He revives on a seemingly desert island and lives using his bow and arrow. That is, until he discovers the island's crater centre hides poppy fields and an enslaved village population looking after it. From this start, we get the seeds or rather the starting quiver for the transition of Oliver Queen into Green Arrow.
The immediate thing I get from a page flick through is that the artwork is very minimalist relying on the emotion of the scene than the detail. Nothing wrong with that. Viva lá difference. There's enough room in the comicbook world for a variety of styles. From an editor point of view, I would have thought the bigger gamble would have been would they have enough of a readership for this style outside of Jock's own fan base.
Having said that, Andy Diggle's script hangs the story together and makes it readable. Green Arrow's origin was never going to go beyond being pretty basic so being elaborate was never likely to enter the equation. It'll be interesting to see where Year Two takes it.
My instincts would say this book's style is more like an acquired taste. If you like Green Arrow and know the work of these two creators then you'll know what to expect. If you're not 100% sure, try to get a page flick.
GF Willmetts
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