Oliver Queen

44 years ago - Oliver Queen is born in Star City, son of industrialist Robert Queen.

34 years ago - 10-year-old Oliver begins to hunt in Arizona with his father, Robert Queen, learning to Bow Hunt from Benjamin Nez, a hunter from the Navajo reservation.

28 years ago - 16-year-old Oliver's father dies while at sea. Oliver becomes an unruly teenager, angry at the world.

26 years ago - 18-year-old Oliver accesses his trust funds, and begins traveling the world.

25 years ago - 19-year-old Oliver meets Sandra Hawke in Fiji. He is stabbed and they are both thrown overboard and presumed dead when his Yach, the Queen’s Gambit, is raided by pirates. He finds himself on the starfish-covered beach of an unnamed island, having to hunt and forage to survive and protect himself from dangerous predators.

24 years ago - 20-year-old Oliver discovers abandoned drug production facilities on Starfish Island.

22 years ago - 22-year-old Oliver hides from drug traffickers who return to Starfish Island to use the production facilities, including their leader Chien Na Wei. Seeing them bring on slave labor and work them to death, Ollie works to undermine their production and free the workers.

20 years ago - 24-year-old Oliver successfully shuts down all drug production on Starfish Island and frees the workers, but they are killed when the facility is carpet bombed in retaliation by Chien Na Wei. Ollie is the lone survivor.

19 years ago - 25-year-old Oliver finds the pirates that raided his yacht, the Queen’s Gambit, mooring off the beach of Starfish Island. Taking them out one by one, he maroons them on the island as he takes back his ship. He alerts the Navy to their location when he is rescued. Returning to Star City, he finds it impossible to return to his old life, creating a modern Robin Hood persona, the Green Arrow, to secretly protect the people of the city from the corrupt, powerful elite.

18 years ago - 26-year-old Oliver begins unraveling the web of corruption in Star City, disrupting the drug trade. He is able to leverage his position to claim a place on the board of Queen Consolidated, allowing him to move among the wealthy elite who control Star City.

17 years ago - 27-year-old Oliver first meets Arthur Curry, saving him from The Fisherman. He is attacked by mob enforcer Lester Buchinski, and first meets Bonnie King, an Olympic archer who continually tries to become his partner.

16 years ago - 28-year-old Oliver is challenged as Green Arrow to a contest with archery phenom Malcolm Merlyn. When he loses Merlyn frames Green Arrow for murders he himself committed, forcing Oliver to go on the run until he can prove his innocence, exposing Merlyn as the killer. He begins sleeping with Bonnie King.

15 years ago - 29-year-old Oliver discovers that the drug trade in Star City is part of Chien Na Wei’s organization. Bonnie King’s shoulder is shattered by Na Wei with a crossbow bolt, ending her career as Miss Arrowette. Posing as a possible new financier as Oliver Queen, he infiltrates Na Wei’s island headquarters, overcoming her security and taking her into custody.

14 years ago - 30-year-old Oliver Queen is contacted by Arthur Curry and the Justice League for his expertise in international drug trafficking. Meeting Dinah Lance, he agrees to join the League. When Malcolm Merlyn is hired by William Tockman to kill Chien Na Wei while she is being moved from Star City Police to Federal custody, Ollie has to flee with her across the city to keep her safe. Merlyn ultimately kills her & shoots Ollie off a building, taking him out of commission for months.

13 years ago - 31-year-old Oliver travels to Arizona to help track the killer of Benjamin Nez. He takes in his grandson, Roy Harper. When Roy helps him stop a new Star City vigilante, Eric Needham, he begins training Roy as his sidekick Speedy. Dinah Lance starts to work in Star City more often, their relationship with Oliver becoming more serious.

12 years ago - 32-year-old Oliver & Roy Harper work continually to thwart the new criminal organization run by Danny Brickwell from taking over the syndicates left vacant by the defeat of Chien Na Wei.

11 years ago - 33-year-old Oliver manages to take full control of Queen Consolidated. He tries to stop Shado as she tracks and kills her father's murders, but ultimately joins her.

10 years ago - 34-year-old Oliver learns that Malcolm Merlyn plans to target Queen Perdita Vladek of Vlatava for the League of Assassins as she returns to her country to assume the throne. Escorting her across Europe, he defeats Merlyn in another ongoing archery battle before fighting the Queen’s uncle Werner Vertiz. He, Roy Harper & Dinah Lance are able to bring in Danny Brickwell. Dinah moves in with him.

9 years ago - 35-year-old Oliver is tested by Ben Turner for the League of Assassins, but Dinah Lance proves to be the bigger threat. He is present when the Justice League votes on what to do with Arthur Light after he attacks Sue Dibny on the satellite, and votes not to alter Light's mind. Discovering that there is a web of corruption running through many of the businesses owned by Queen Consolidated all across the country, Oliver embarks on a cross country trip with Hal Jordan to untangle it. They track down & imprison Noah Kuttler.

8 years ago - 36-year-old Oliver uncovers the corrupt elements of Queen Consolidated with Hal Jordan's help. He returns to Star City, where he discovers Roy Harper's addiction. Furious after a decade fighting drug operations, he kicks Roy out of his home. Dinah Lance takes Roy in and helps him, ending her relationship with Ollie.

7 years ago - 37-year-old Oliver begins to open the properties owned by Queen Consolidated as low-income housing, creating free clinics and food distribution centers across Star City. Tracking a growing war among the Yakuza operating in Star City, Ollie discovers that it is being instigated by Shado, who shoots him with an arrow during their encounter, but nurses him back to health before she gets away. They become romantic during his recovery. He confronts the Royal Flush Gang and finally imprisons Werner Vertiz when his diplomatic immunity is removed. He works with Helena Bertinelli as they track the same criminal syndicate, and she begins adapting some of his methods.

6 years ago - 38-year-old Oliver meets Connor Hawke, the son of Sandra Hawke. They track the pirates who raided the Queen’s Gambit to find an artifact that was lost, leading them to the pirate enclave and their horde, which they return to Fiji. He reconnects with Sandra, and learns that Connor is his son. When Malcolm Merlyn traps executives of Queen Consolidated in their building, Oliver has to fight to keep them alive with the help of junior programmer Felicity Smoak, leading to a final confrontation on the roof of the building before Merlyn is finally captured.

5 years ago - 39-year-old Oliver's son Connor Hawke travels to Star City to get to know him. Oliver first meets Mia Dearden, helping save her from her life on the streets and giving her a home, very aware that he did not do the same for Roy Harper. He starts to seriously question if his role as Green Arrow is the best way he can help people. He and Helena Bertinelli have a brief affair.

4 years ago - 40-year-old Oliver is brought into space by Rip Hunter to help Kyle Rayner stop Hal Jordann from breaking time. He works with Grant Emerson, admiring the young man's talent and potential. He tries to talk Hal down, but when Hal murders Grant, Ollie knows Hal can't be saved and is forced to kill him. He retires as Green Arrow, passing the mantle to his son Connor Hawke, who is so successful that William Tockman retaliates by destroying Oliver's penthouse.

3 years ago - 41-year-old Oliver begins campaigning for mayor of Star City. He helps train Mia Dearden as she takes on the role of Speedy.

2 years ago - 42-year-old Oliver is elected Mayor of Star City. Felicity Smoak, Roy Harper, Mia Dearden & Melanie Wayland stop William Tockman's attempt to undermine the election with staged violent protests, while Connor Hawke prevents an assassination attempt by Malcolm Merlyn. Roy speaks to him for the first time in years. Forgiveness is a big ask, but he allows Ollie to meet Lian Harper for the first time.

now - 44-year old Oliver orders the Star City Police to arrest Commissioner Ricardo Diaz, putting his political career at risk until Felicity Smoak reveals that Diaz is secretly operating as the drug kingpin Drakon. Ollie begins commissioning The Harper Centers, harm reduction facilities for drug users around Star City, publicly talking about his own failure to provide care for someone he loved. Dinah Lance returns to Star City and asks him on a date.

Not every superhero winds up as the figurehead for a whole squad of characters. It's not necessarily a metric of how successful or popular they are, sometimes it just naturally follows that a particular character will wind up with enough sidekicks or partners to field a baseball team. Green Arrow was actually one of the few superheroes to have persisted to the modern day that were invented with a sidekick already intact, but I think it's also relevant that his superskill is probably one of the most easily transferable. It's hard to explain why there are so many human Green Lanterns, but it makes way more sense that people around this guy keep also learning how to be good at archery.

There's a lot more going on with Oliver Queen than just his legacy as Green Arrow, though. This is a character that really makes himself known, broadly influencing so much of the evolution of the characters around him. This is our second pass at his timeline, since the first one didn't really do him justice, so I hope you like the update!

Oliver Queen's Comic History

Green Arrow appeared for the first time in November of 1941 in issue #73 of More Fun Comics (which also features the first appearance of Aquaman). The inspiration of a superhero version of Robin Hood is pretty clear, but in practice despite the obvious visual reference he arguably owes more to Batman. So much of what Green Arrow was was cribbed almost entirely from that playbook; the Arrowcar and his kid sidekick Speedy were clearly the focus, while the whole archery thing was just his gimmick.

This version of Green Arrow persisted as a backup feature for several decades, and this was how he looked when he debuted in issue #4 of the Justice League of America in '61, the very first character added to the team after it's creation. Sharing a team with Batman meant that there was less focus on all his Batman-like trappings, meaning more attention was paid to his status as an archer. His membership in the League kept him a prominent enough character until a Batman / Green Arrow crossover in 1969, in The Brave and the Bold #85. In a story by Bob Haney, legendary artist Neal Adams redesigned the look of Green Arrow, and in doing so, really FINALLY created the character we all know today.

Neal Adams happened to be an archery enthusiast in real life, and incorporated a lot of real-world archery stuff like his forearm protectors and three-finger gloves. He also, of course, added Oliver's iconic Errol Flynn goatee, instantly rendering the entire concept of this character having a secret identity impossible.

Justice League writer Denny O'Neal continued to evolve the character, creating a romance between him and Black Canary that would largely go on to define both characters, and making him lose his fortune and become more of a crusading liberal, contrasting with some of the other heroes on the League. The two Neals would then collaborate on a revamp of Green Lantern's ongoing series, retitling the book Green Lantern / Green Arrow, and begin the now-classic 'Hard Traveling Heroes' storyline, using these two contrasting characters to explore all sorts of real-world issues. More than anything else, THIS is the character that most defines who Green Arrow is, an idealistic champion of the little guy who stands up to systems of power.

The book eventually reverted back to a Green Lantern solo series at the onset of the 80s, and Oliver got his very first solo book in a four issue miniseries by Mike Barr & Dick Giordano. It's a very good-looking series, but the main things that stand out are the relatively small role of Black Canary, and the references to Oliver Queen, Columnist for the Daily Star, an idea carrying over from the old series. It's an interesting attempt to create a more elaborate secret identity for Oliver, but... come on. The beard.

By the tail end of the 80s most major characters were being redefined Post-Crisis with some sort of small story establishing their new status quo. For Oliver, that was Longbow Hunters, a three-issue miniseries by writer and artist Mike Grell, which was then followed by a new ongoing series. For the most part, Oliver remained pretty much the same character with no major changes to his backstory at all, but some of the playfulness of Green Arrow was de-emphasized, and the types of stories he occupied underwent a subtle shift, taking on a more 80s action movie tone.

Also, I do get into this more on Black Canary's page, but it's fairly clear that Mike Grell didn't always want his hero to be in a relationship, so while she was in the book she was often sidelined and Oliver was depicted interacting with many other women, a quality which other writers down the line would pick up and use as an excuse to depict him behaving pretty badly.

Grell stayed with the series until issue #80. Within the next year or so, writer Kelly Puckett created Oliver's son, Connor Hawke. by issue #100, under new series writer Chuck Dixon, Ollie found himself trapped in a elaborate crashing-plane-with-a-bomb-onboard situation where he can only survive by cutting his arm off (a reference to his future appearance in Frank Millers Dark Knight Returns), but he finally opts to die saving everyone. handing the series over to Connor as the new Green Arrow.

Oliver returned in 2001 in a new ongoing series. In an introductory arc by Kevin Smith (yes that Kevin Smith) we discover that he's been brought back by his old buddy Hal Jordan, who was now the Spectre. Smith would be followed by several different writers, including a solid run by Judd Winick when Oliver ran for mayor of Star City (which he'd actually done before, back in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #87 in 1971). Oliver also appeared in a lot of Justice League adjacent comics during this era, including both the replacement League in JLA by Joe Kelly and again in his JLA Elite. This is the period I'm personally most familiar with, and I came away with a bias thinking Oliver was a particularly unpleasant character with no filter, and was often uncomfortably toxic with his female teammates.

Even as he proposed to Dinah and the book became Green Arrow/Black Canary, Oliver seemed to have steered away from the crusading do-gooder from the era of Denny O'Neal. His series continued, replacing itself with new volumes, running right through the New 52. He was briefly reimagined to operate more like his popular live-action CW series, before they eventually returned to a more classic depiction of the character. Modern Green Arrow really leans heavily on nostalgia, showing the small family of supporting characters Oliver has built around himself for years.

Our Oliver Queen Story

Longtime readers of our site probably noticed that the original story we built for Oliver Queen wasn't what you'd call charitable. I mentioned earlier that a lot of the depictions of Oliver in the late 90s and 2000s kind of leaned into the idea that he hadn't been the best mentor and wasn't a great partner... they always seemed to suggest that he was still a good PERSON, but I just never picked up on that. I would even look back at the classic stories of this character and just kept seeing a person who was just always TALKING. My notion of the character was basically a selfish blowhard with a shaky grasp on the ideas of fidelity or consent, and our timelines reflected that.

I'm extremely grateful to the readers of this site who have FINALLY managed to get me to realize that I was over-emphasizing depictions of the character that really weren't accurate to who he was supposed to be. The whole idea of this website is to create what feels like the ideal version of a character, and we were doing the exact opposite of that. We needed to deliberately scale all of that back, find the parts of his story that really show his strengths, and then work out the best way for them all to fit together into one cohesive story. You know, what we NORMALLY do.

We emphasized story beats that show him growing and evolving, like his time on the desert island (which is now MUCH longer than it's usually depicted), or the way he slowly seems to take more and more ownership of himself and his city. Because of the involvement of China White in his Year One origins, we managed to make a lot of his character tie into stopping drug traffickers, and we used that as an explanation for his invite to the Justice League, and for why his response to learning about Roy's drug use was so volatile. We DO want to keep that one failure of his, the failure to provide the proper support for Roy, both because its a foundational part of Roy's story, and also because we wanted to see Oliver have to work to understand that he was wrong, see him atone for it.

We liked the idea of depicting his transition from the original Golden Age costume to his classic Neal Adams look, and actually decided to have that happen as a result of his time traveling with Hal Jordan. He should come back HUMBLED, growing his goatee because his actual priorities have changed, having learned that sometimes it's not enough to talk a good game. We want to see out Oliver start to show what would really happen if a billionaire started to actually throw off the yoke of capitalism and started working to undo the systems of power that feed all the harmful parts of society that other superheroes just try to punch. Canonically a lot of the crusading liberal ideology showed up after Oliver had lost his fortune, but we'd much rather see what an idealistic anti-capitalist billionaire would actually look like!

Oliver & Dinah

This was another part of our timeline that needed to be updated, because for a long time my contention was that the version of Ollie I knew just wasn't a good partner, and therefore Dinah really deserved better, and that this relationship was holding her back as a character. I was basing my opinion on the often problematic depiction of the relationship starting in the Mike Grell series and on into the 90s and 2000s, when Joe Kelly managed to really make him an unlikeable character.

But this, again, shouldn't have been canon. It was a mischaracterization, all fed from people over-emphasizing Grell's take on the characters. The core of these two is really going back to the classic Justice League stories, and the relationship depicted by Denny O'Neal. This is a classic depiction of two people who are both wildly attracted to each other, and who really do find a counterpart to themselves in each other that they both can see is making them better.

I do absolutely think they need to break up for a time. I think Oliver needs to be a character with shortcomings that he needs to overcome, and I think that its really this relationship that provides the most important window into that growth.

Oliver Queen's Future

One thing we really tried to do with Oliver's timeline was show, as he matured and learned more about the ways he can help the people of Star City, he starts to realize that ziplining between buildings and shooting boxing gloves at people really only gets you so far. He should start to realize that he can do more by implementing real social change. When his costumed career culminates in having to kill one of his oldest friends to keep him from breaking time, we really love the idea that he actually decides, on his own, that he should retire.

Comics have lots of legacies, where heroes pass their mantles down to their successors, but very few of them have such a clearly defined post-superhero career that is so clearly a natural next step for that character's evolution. We really enjoy the idea of the Green Arrow mantle being passed on to Connor and all the new innovations we can implement there, but it wouldn't be worth doing if Oliver Queen retiring and becoming the Mayor of Star City wasn't such a perfect way for his narrative to unfold.

We also ended with the first hint that Dinah might be open to SOME version of them getting back together. We wanted him to show that he really has changed, and while that's not EVERYTHING that has to be done to reignite their relationship, we wanted to make sure we establish that this is a very good first step.

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Shado