Even in the heat of my teenage comic collecting, I never found much to admire in Green Arrow.  Oh, I came across him when he was in team titles, such as Justice League of America, but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to pick up any of his solo appearances.  What’s swung me around, and why I’ve recently bought a Green Arrow graphic novel, is the creative talent behind it: writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock.

Diggle and Jock were the British creative team behind the highly engaging political action thriller, The Losers, which is soon going to be a feature film and could well be a fine one in the right hands.  Diggle also had a knack for stripping down occult antihero John Constantine down to his essentials, making the character’s Hellblazer comic better than it had been for a long while.  So, put Diggle and Jock together again, and we’ll get to find out if the adage that there are no lousy characters, only unimaginative creators, is right.

The writer and artist have done a Year One with Green Arrow here, meaning they’ve gone back to the character’s roots with fresh eyes, as Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli did to devastating effect with their Batman: Year One way back when.  And the good news is, they’ve done a fine job.  Diggle takes his cues from action movies more than superhero comics, and spins a taut yarn about playboy Oliver Queen playing at extreme sports and having no concept of life until he comes across a drug-running scheme operating on a tropical island.

All a bit James Bond so far, and that’s fair enough, though Jock’s lean angular linework and David Baron’s simple but inventive colours give the pages a contemporary feel.  It’s expertly paced stuff, as Queen learns that his hired help is in league with gorgeous-but-deadly heroin smuggler China White, and seeks to parlay his extreme sports skills into the ability to survive long enough to triumph over the woman who has enslaved the island’s population to producing opium for the drugs trade.

So, Queen gets to find purpose in life, and hone his athleticism and combat skills, and there’s even a kind-of-credible explanation for his unlikely abilities with a bow: as a child, Oliver was introduced to the man who coached a screen Robin Hood in his archery skills, who reckoned that the youngster was the greatest natural bowman he’d encountered.  Now, with survival at stake, and social justice in the mix too, Oliver fulfils that early promise to become a lethal archer, picking off his opponents with improvised arrows.  Sure, it’s kind of hokey, but it works, and that’s what matters.

Green Arrow in this incarnation is to comics what Jack Reacher is to multi-million selling paperbacks: a hero you can drop into pretty much any kind of situation where fighting skills, a knack for survival, and a moral compass are what make the difference between the forces of evil triumphing and good enduring for another day.  So far it doesn’t seem that DC have followed up this Year One, which came out in individual issues in 2007, with a series that picks up where Diggle and Jock have left off — but maybe there’s hope for that in the future, or for a feature film that follows the template this collection establishes.

Andy Diggle is now working over at Marvel, and I’ve yet to be inclined to pick up any of his work there as the publisher seems determined to get creators to tie all their stories together in ways impenetrable to the casual audience.  I love the comics medium, but nothing kills it for me surer than ‘events’ which bring different titles together, and spawn new ones in their wake: I follow writers primarily, artists to a lesser extent, and I want to see them creating stories that make sense in their own right, rather than contributing their pieces to what amounts to a clumsily moving pulp format Rubik’s Cube that disintegrates when exposed to critical intelligence.