Jeff Lemire adds 'Green Arrow' to his quiver of comics

Brian Truitt, USA TODAY | USATODAY

Jeff Lemire's Green Arrow probably won't be as shirtless or work out on a salmon ladder as frequently as his TV vigilante counterpart.

Yet the DC Comics series Green Arrow, featuring Lemire as writer and Andrea Sorrentino (I, Vampire) as artist beginning with issue 17 (available Wednesday digitally and in comic shops), is going the gritty, realistic route just like the CW show Arrow.

"I felt like doing a street-level crime-noir take on a superhero, like the best of the Batman or Daredevil stuff," says Lemire, who's mainly focused on horror and the supernatural with his other DC books, Animal Man and Justice League Dark.

While the new direction isn't a reboot of the 16 issues that writers J.T. Krul and Ann Nocenti had previously done on Green Arrow — which itself was relaunched in September 2011 — Lemire's run is a 90-degree turn and a completely different take on Oliver Queen and his emerald archer alter ego, filtered through Sorrentino's dramatic, high-contrast style.

Queen is the billionaire heir to Queen Industries who, after an extended ordeal on a deserted island, trained and survived to become the superhero known as the Green Arrow. However, Lemire aims to craft a journey of this privileged guy falling from grace and having to basically rebuild himself from scratch.

"To me, one of the reasons the first 15 or 16 issues of the series weren't connecting with people was because Oliver Queen still seemed very unrelatable and in a lot of ways very unlikable," Lemire explains. "He still seemed really arrogant and brash, and it was almost like the island, which was supposed to change him and give him a new perspective on life, didn't really work.

"When I thought of that, I thought maybe that's the story: Maybe the island was supposed to do something that didn't happen and now everything is going to fall apart as a result."

Green Arrow was never one of Lemire's favorites when he was growing up in the 1980s — partly because the character didn't really have a steady book till writer Mike Grell's more-hero/less-super limited series Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters in 1987 and his 80-issue Green Arrow series run beginning the following year.

Still, Lemire hadn't really thought of doing his own take on the superhero — who will also be a starring member of Geoff Johns and David Finch's Justice League of America, starting this month — but when he signed on, he grabbed onto the fact that if handled properly, Green Arrow is a rogue-ish guy a lot of folks can love.

"He's this guy who was handed everything anyone could ever want — money and this company and this legacy. He's just so privileged in everything, yet no matter what he had, his sense of self-worth was also so low he just felt he could never live up to what his father was and what he was supposed to be," Lemire explains.

"He's a character who is always struggling with his sense of self-worth and this pressure to live up to the public image of who he is. He can never do it as Oliver Queen, yet ironically when he puts on a mask and a costume, he can become this great person and in a different way lives up to that."

Queen has had two allies, Jax and Naomi, on his side working behind the scenes in Green Arrow, but Lemire says only one of them is sticking around. But the hero is getting a new best friend and right-hand man in Henry Fife, "the opposite of Ollie in every way," the writer adds. "They're a lot of fun to play off each other, and there's a lot of humor there."

Lemire is bringing back some characters from the old Grell run but also giving Green Arrow a new nemesis in the form of Komodo, a fellow archer who seems to know everything about both Oliver Queen and his masked superhero, has a connection to Queen's past, and comes after him pretty hard in order to dismantle his life.

"The mystery of who this guy is and why he's after Oliver Queen really starts to build," Lemire says. "We realize right away that Komodo is a far superior archer to Ollie and his better in every way. Every time he gets his feet back on the ground, this guy's there to knock him down again.

"It all leads back to a bigger mythology and mystery I want to build about Oliver's history and the island and his relationship with his father," the writer adds.

Lemire wants to grab as many new and old fans with the mystery and action as the new TV show has with Arrow star Stephen Amell running around with a hood and a personal sense of justice.

Both the series and the comic feature similar realism although Lemire had a few issues written and finished by the time Arrow premiered last fall. In a way, that was good for Lemire because he didn't have the show as an influence.

"People who enjoy the TV show, even though it's not directly linked, probably will be able to enjoy it just aesthetically," Lemire says of his Green Arrow. "The show is great just because it raises the awareness of the character, and anything like that can only help us, hopefully."