The worst part about Chris Condon’s Green Arrow run is that there isn’t more of it.

Green Arrow Vol. 5: Crimson Sands isn’t perfect, neither in Condon’s writing nor in Montos' art, but this run earns a lot of good will with topical, gritty, street-level Green Arrow stories that pay obvious homage to the Mike Grell years, if not also Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams. So much good will, even, that many of this volume’s flaws end up additive, reinforcing that 1980s “done by hand” aesthetic rather than taking away from anything.

That’s a heck of a place to be, and I’m stymied this run didn’t continue, short of that from interviews it kind of seems like Green Arrow Vol. 4: Fresh Water Kills was maybe supposed to be a one-off and that this run was popular enough that at least we got Crimson Sands. I don’t know; I don’t know enough to understand why DC would want one tonally different volume to follow Joshua Williamson’s three super-superheroic volume, but maybe it was a matter of getting the Green Arrow series out to issue #24, or something (Condon would ultimately go to #31).

Condon’s won himself a fan in me, at least. Maybe I owe it to him now to check out his Peril of the Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery series from DC’s new Vertigo.

[Review contains spoilers]

Fresh Water Kills saw Green Arrow Oliver Queen pit, essentially, against pollution and corporate greed; here, Green Arrow battles the drug trade and corporate greed. Drug addiction is a particularly hot topic as regards Green Arrow, and indeed Arsenal Roy Harper, nee Speedy, is here. Following Williamson’s Green Arrow: Reunion and etc., Roy’s daughter Lian has both been resurrected and aged up, making this significantly the first time we’ve gone through a Roy Harper drug story (there’s no small amount of Roy Harper drug stories) where his daughter is old enough for him to explain it to and street-tough enough to relate.

On one hand, clearly the sleazy corporate pharmaceuticals guy at the beginning is the villainous Crimson Archer going around causing overdoses. There’s little subtlety here in that regard, less a lack of mystery than that it’s just really on the nose — which, again, would be a major flaw if the book weren’t already channeling a 1970s–1980s “of course Green Arrow’s ward is a junkie” kind of aesthetic. But on the other hand, from Green Arrow shouting at a ripped-from-the-headlines “pharma bro” to the remarkably sweet, un-angsty heart-to-heart between Oliver and Roy, to the tense, trippy pages of Roy coming upon the Crimson Arrow’s victims, Condon and Montos are already winning by the end of the first chapter, and that goes a long way to balance the thinness elsewhere.

Arguably, too, Condon doesn’t give sufficient deference to Roy having been shot in the chest with a hypodermic full of drugs; whether addict Roy ingests the drugs on purpose or by accident, it’s still a problem. If that’s connected to Lian finding Roy up on the hospital roof, maybe or maybe not thinking of jumping, that’s a point on which Condon is perhaps too subtle. But let’s let this be a happy story; for those of us who were there for Justice League: Cry for Justice some 16 years ago, seeing Lian leaping from the rooftops in Speedy colors alongside her father has been a long time coming.

(Curiously, at the same time DC had Lian taking after her father here, she was also decidedly taking after her mother in Justice League: Cheetah and Cheshire Rob the Watchtower. Kind of an uncharacteristic oversight on DC’s part, who noted Roy Harper’s absence from Titans to be in Green Arrow, though nothing another writer couldn’t solve with a throwaway line.)

As with Fresh Water Kills, the Crimson Archer turns out to be Oliver’s fault-ish. This time it’s not connected to Oliver’s billionaire playboy days, but rather a Vietnam War-era mission Ollie took where he taught bow and arrow skills and one of his compatriots went rogue. Again, the lo-fi of the whole thing is wonderful, how it would make a lot more sense in a comic from 1980 than 2025, though I’m not sure what Condon’s talking about — did the CIA draft Oliver as himself or as Green Arrow? What is the “Soviet-sized blot on [Oliver’s] record” referring to? I give Condon the benefit of the doubt — he tied Fresh Water Kills to Mike Barr’s 1983 Green Arrow miniseries — but this one I couldn’t figure out.

Is Green Arrow a good parent? Most reports from Roy Harper would probably say no; if anything, maybe it depends on who’s writing. Which is why Condon’s final chapter, Green Arrow #31, is such an accomplishment, deserving of appearing in “best of” Green Arrow collections and defining the character ever more. We are still in the grittiness of Grell, a young girl subjected to her father’s rage, but this set parallel to a rooftop conversation between Arrow and his detective friend Lena Benítez. Clearly she’s the little girl, the obviousness of which swiftly becomes irrelevant, so well does Condon depict how Oliver makes the child feel heard and cared for.

There may be some projection here as to who Condon thinks Green Arrow is and what he’s like, though surely there’s an aspirational Green Arrow presented here. But moreover, I was taken by how Condon, in the span of one issue — and even maybe just the last three pages of the flashback — does convincingly demonstrate that this Green Arrow has almost a supernatural talent for talking to kids. Condon is simultaneously juggling the adult Lena’s flashback narration, the young Lena’s dialogue, and Oliver’s dialogue, and you walk away not just being told by Lena that she “felt seen,” but rather you think, “That’s really what that looks like.” That’s monumental in the span of just 20 pages.

I’ve rewritten this conclusion a few times, going back and forth as to other telling scenes in Green Arrow Vol. 5: Crimson Sands I might want to highlight. For instance, there’s the controversial way in which Team Arrow handles the Crimson Archer — not controversial because I disagree with Chris Condon, but because I believe Condon’s writing of the characters but I’m not sure I agree with their solution, which is a level I don’t think mainstream comics achieve often enough. Or is it Condon positing one hero cop carrying naloxone on him rather than presenting the Star City police as ineffectual across the board?

Such a good dozen or so issues. So sad it’s over.

[Includes original covers]