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I have read exactly one Green Arrow comic in my entire life, Green Arrow #1, the first in the recently relaunched DC Comics series about the guy that shoots green arrows… and is named Green Arrow. I have no idea where Green Arrow comes from, what his back-story is, why he fights people with arrows, or why he even fights anyone at all. As of page 1, all I know is that his name is Oliver Queen, and he’s the super rich owner of a company that makes not-iPads called q-Pads.

However I do shoot arrows once or twice a week, both in a local indoor league, and at an outdoor range with a nice view of Lake Michigan and downtown Chicago. I shoot an Olympic style recurve bow. None of my arrows concuss, nor do they allow the control of boats; those are green arrows. My arrows are pretty straight-forward: they put holes in targets. Before we get to issue #1 “Living a Life of Privilege”, let’s talk about archery. To grossly oversimplify, the world of archery is divided into two camps – people that shoot targets, and people that shoot animals. Although I don’t get sad when people shoot animals (responsibly of course), I’m in the target camp. Target archery is all about repetition and repetition (see what I did there?). You stand the same way, draw the bow the same length, anchor the nock of the arrow in the same place, and get really good at not gripping your bow all tight. Because you know the exact distance to the target, it’s possible to adjust a bow sight to give you accurate shots, as long as all your repetitive motions are exactly the same every time.

Hunting is an entirely different skill set. You don’t know where your target is going to be. The repetition is still key, but now you have to adjust the angle of the shot based on your estimate of the distance. Hunters still use sights, but they’ll usually have multiple pins in them that represent different distances. Obviously, Green Arrow is a hunter, not a target shooter, he eschews sights altogether though, and just magically shoots arrows real good, as seen in the panel of Ollie blasting a computer-hackery arrow. Yes, some of his arrows hack computers.

So, how do you hit stuff if you don’t use a sight? Well there are two schools of thought there. One method uses the tip of the arrow as a sight. You anchor the nock of the arrow in the same place (typically under the chin), and then put the tip of the arrow a few feet below what you want to hit. It’s awkward at first, but it actually works very well. The second way, which I’ve never actually seen done outside of movies and Green Arrow #1, is to sight down the shaft of the arrow.

It seems to make sense to sight down the arrow, but in practice it just is not sustainable. There are ‘instinctive’ archers that don’t use sights, nor the tip of the arrow as a sight, they just build a lot of muscle memory that allows them to put the arrow where they want to, so we’ll assume that Oliver Queen is one of those. That said – if Oliver wants to seriously impress the nerd-archer set, he should consider anchoring his shot underneath his chin like a professional. His over under finger grip is reasonable, except that typically you use two fingers on the bottom and one on top, rather than just two fingers total. Of course bows and arrows are not a science, they are an art – so if Green Arrow wants to shoot like he’s in a movie, go for it. Don’t let Archery Haters get you down GA.

What about his bow? It’s pretty sweet – it starts out as a big old timey telephone,

Then expands into a compound bow that looks like a recurve bow,

The advantage to a compound bow (think, Dukes of Hazzard bow), is that the amount of force you use to pull it back tapers off to the point of being tremendously easy to hold at full draw. The cam system also allows the arrow to go super-duper fast. It is the typical choice of hunters, as it is a favor to the animal to make your arrow go super fast and hit pretty hard. The advantage of recurve bows is that they look way more badass, but are harder to pull back. I am a fan of recurve bows, largely because I am a fan of Lord of the Rings. Oliver likes the look of a recurve, but wants to make sure his arrows go super fast, plus it needs to be small enough to shrink down into a telephone thing. I would really like to have a technological super bow that stows away in my backpack. Just last week while stringing my bow, I didn’t get the string on there quite right, and only realized it a moment before my bow gave everyone at the range a physics lesson by completely exploding all over the place. It was terrifying. No one was hurt, but everyone looked at me like a bow had just exploded in my hand.

Anyway, bow safety aside, what does Green Arrow do with his green arrows? He fights bad guys. Why does he do this? Because he’s super rich? That is the only explanation I can gather from issue #1. He mentions some past event where something bad happened that he could have prevented, but didn’t. I guess that is what passes for back story so far. I can get behind the idea of a guy that does something, vaguely alludes to why he does it, but doesn’t exactly clear it up right away. I mean, Oliver is going to develop as a character over time, right? We don’t want to waste a whole issue #1 with his entire life story, right? Oliver is rich, he’s clearly modeled after a crime fighting Steve Jobs, just like Batman, and oh – a gazillion other rich crime fighters, perpetuating the myth that the only way we can prosper as a society is if rich white dudes enforce societal rules using a set of anachronistic weapons, working around the laws and systems that we, as a people, have agreed to abide by and rely on. Really though, a guy shooting green arrows is way cooler than people calling 911, or voting to maintain a healthy education system which encourages prosperity for all people, regardless of their economic background.

Yeah, a comic book about voting, about the everyday heroes that make our world possible, would just be… boring.

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