10 Smartest Decisions In DC Superhero History

8. Ollie Asks The Shade To Destroy His Personal Effects - Archer's Quest

Green Arrow Archers Quest
DC Comics / Phil Hester

The Archer's Quest is my favourite Green Arrow book for a host of different reasons. First of all you have Phil Hester and Ande Parks' gorgeous artwork, but when you factor in Brad Meltzer's sincere approach to the well worn comic book trope of death and resurrection - exploring how a character would navigate their own return, were they to ever actually shift off the mortal coil - you're left with one of the character's finest ever stories.

Oliver Queen is perhaps most synonymous with DC's Bronze Age books, thanks largely to the late Denny O'Neil's work on Green Lantern / Green Arrow together with artist Neal Adams, which completely transformed the character from 'ersatz Batman' into the left wing social justice warrior we know and love today.

He's also one of the publisher's most storied characters, and having undergone several different transformations since the creation of the DC Universe (Queen would change yet again in the 1980s, courtesy of writer/artist Mike Grell), there's more cause for him than any other character to take a trip back through memory lane - which is what Archer's Quest essentially does.

The main draw is Meltzer's sincere approach to the resurrection trope though, and it conjures an interesting revelation for Ollie. The book reveals how, in the event of his death, Queen had tasked known supervillain the Shade with destroying his personal items and memorabilia, lest one of his enemies used them against his loved ones.

Shade isn't as successful as GA would've hoped, forcing him to track down the remaining pieces of his past himself, but it's an important quest all the same. Villains have previously used memorabilia to hurt heroes where it matters most, something Dick Grayson found out the hard way during Scott Snyder and Jock's phenomenal Batman: The Black Mirror.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.