Review by C.J. Bunce
Comparable in every way to the team-up with Green Lantern and Black Canary in the famed Dennis O’Neill and Neal Adams run on Green Lantern in the early 1970s beginning with Issue #76, Mike Grell would take over the artwork on the O’Neill/Adams run sporadically for the next ten issues and create more than 80 issues about the bow-wielding superhero for the next two decades. A four-issue series featuring Green Arrow would prove relatively unnoticed in 1983 (without Grell onboard), but in 1987 everything in comic books would change as Grell returned to Green Arrow with his three-issue series The Longbow Hunters. Hot on the heels of the previous year’s groundbreaking, prestige format series The Dark Knight Returns, The Longbow Hunters was the perfect dark and gritty follow-up story only this time it presented the superhero lead inside the ongoing narrative of the DC series at the time. It was Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance, relocating from Star City to Seattle, and the DC Universe became more grounded in reality. The success of The Longbow Hunters gave Grell the opportunity to take Oliver Queen (referred to in-story as Green Arrow only once in his stories) to the next level in the late 1980s, cementing the superhero as a title character in his own right. DC Comics has reprinted The Longbow Hunters, and in recent years it has been peppering the market with reprints of Grell’s fantastic storytelling and sometimes artwork for 80 issues from 1988 to 1993. DC Comics has now released the last of Grell’s incredible run on the Green Arrow monthly in its ninth collection from the series, Green Arrow: Old Tricks.
Green Arrow: Old Tricks is an even greater DC release because it also bundles in Grell’s last work of the era on Green Arrow in the 1993 four-part mini-series Green Arrow: The Wonder Year. Unlike the past few years of the monthly series, which was illustrated primarily by Rick Hoberg and inker John Nyberg, Grell both wrote and illustrated the official Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths origin story in this mini-series along with inker Gray Morrow. Along with the origin story that would stand until writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock’s mini-series Green Arrow: Year One in 2007, we see a flashback of Oliver Queen in the heyday of his 1970s “man of the people” political activism. As for the story at the end of Grell’s run on the monthly comic and the mini-series, Grell went out with a bang. The stories both hone in on the women in Queen’s life, primarily Dinah, but also Shado and a fling with a local woman half his age, all while Queen is out battling bad guys inside and outside of the city. Grell’s story is great and the artwork by Hoberg and Grell equally vivid and compelling.
In the section of Green Arrow: Old Tricks reprinting the monthly ongoing series are four stories: the two-part “Trigger,” the single-issue “Auld Acquaintance,” the three-part “Killing Camp,” and the two-part “New Dogs Old Tricks.” The most memorable to readers of the series will be the New Year’s Eve story “Auld Acquaintance.” After 80+ issues of Oliver Queen messing up his romance with Dinah Lance, she finally says “goodbye” for good in the series pretty 75th anniversary issue. Oliver then gets away from it all thanks to a story that calls back to Grell’s own real-life intelligence work, as Queen teams up with Eddie Fyres in a good ol’ James Bond-inspired adventure.
This edition continues the concept many readers in the 1980s first took note of with Green Arrow Issue #1, and its more expensive “New Format” with a “Suggested for Mature Readers” label on the cover. Full-edge bleeds of the artwork were synonymous with this series, which transitioned back with the rest of the superhero books at DC in Issue #81. This new compilation re-creates the same memorable color and page stock. As with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, with Grell’s Green Arrow series kids and adults were given a completely new, equally brilliant and exciting view of comic books.
The book also reprints all of the cover art from Issues #73 to #80 and The Wonder Year mini-series, all created by Mike Grell.
Of the nine reprint compilations published by DC Comics since its Volume 1 in 2013, this is probably the best volume of the series. Order your copy of Green Arrow: Old Tricks today from Elite Comics, your local comic book store, or here at Amazon.
