Oliver Queen’s life is in shambles in this Green Arrow #23 exclusive

Writer Benjamin Percy has put Oliver Queen through the wringer during the last year of Green Arrow. He’s been forced to confront the malevolent nature of his family’s company, was framed for murder, and is currently watching his home city get overrun by chaos as a quintet of villains tries to turn Seattle into the occult Star City. “The Rise Of Star City” is Percy’s most devastating story yet, reuniting him with the phenomenal Juan E. Ferreyra to rain destruction down on Oliver’s life. With Seattle in crisis and Team Arrow’s forest base freshly burned to the ground, Oliver is pushing away the people that care about him. Basically, everything is going to shit, and this steady escalation of the narrative’s stakes has made Green Arrow one of the highlights of DC Rebirth.

The art team is also largely responsible for this series’ success, and editor Andy Khouri has teamed up Percy with an outstanding line-up of collaborators that realize his stories with style, emotion, and clarity. Ferreyra is a remarkable talent that handles all aspects of the artwork, delivering bold panel compositions, inventive page layouts, and beautifully evocative colors. This exclusive preview of this week’s Green Arrow #23 is filled with smart, effective choices, like the overlaid tree trunk on the third page that adds depth of field in the first panel and breaks the second panel’s action into two distinct beats. Using two pages for the final shot of Oliver falling to his knees intensifies his despair in that moment, and if Ferreyra is working on an issue, readers can expect visuals that are deeply tied to the emotional content of the script while also providing the spectacle that is an essential part of superhero comics.