DC’s brand new Absolute Universe gets darker, angrier, and far more grounded than you might expect. Absolute Green Arrow #1 is not a superhero comic — it’s a murder mystery drenched in class rage, corporate corruption, and one woman’s desperate search for answers about a dead man she once loved. And then, just when you think you understand what kind of story it is, a corpse covered in impossible, glowing eyes tears the floor completely out from under you.
Act One: Star City Burns
A Lesson in Examples
The comic opens not with a hero, but with smugness. Two wealthy men — one of them almost certainly Jubal Slade — sit in a glass penthouse above Star City, drinking expensive wine and congratulating themselves. One is on the phone, dropping the kind of name that stops conversations: Oliver Queen. He warns that anyone who crosses them will end up just like Oliver. Hector Hammond’s guards are ex-military killers. The system is locked up tight. They are untouchable.
They are wrong.
A single green arrow punches through the air with an iconic onomatopoeia — THUNK — and finds the first man’s skull. His companion panics, running to gather his bodyguards, only to open a door onto a room full of the already-dead. One of the guards is still barely alive, his face grotesquely deformed — skin warped, a bulging red eye erupting through flesh — the result of a poisoned arrowhead making contact. These are no ordinary arrows.
The survivor sprints for a fire escape, begging whoever is out there to name a price. From the shadows above emerges the Longbow Killer — skull-masked, draped in dark green, a full quiver across his back and bladed weapons at his sides — staring down with those crimson eyes and offering just one word in response to the offer of money: “An example.”
Storytelling Note
The caption during this sequence tells us: "Details are still unreleased concerning the death of billionaire Jubal Slade — a tech entrepreneur best known as co-founder of the electronic trading platform GreenArrows Trading." The comic immediately frames the opening murder as a public event — the city knows about it. The killing isn't secret. It's a message.
Social Media as Greek Chorus
In a formally brilliant choice, writer Pornsak Pichetshote uses social media feeds as the story’s Greek chorus — ordinary people making sense of chaos in real time. We see TikTok-style videos about Jubal Slade’s death, discussing his sexual misconduct allegations, the rumors of trafficking minors to a private island, and the fact that Oliver Queen — Slade’s own co-founder and former partner — was murdered just months earlier with his case still unsolved. One creator asks what everyone is thinking: is there a bigger story here?
Then we cut to a celebrity appearance gone sideways. A woman with striking white-blonde hair shoves through an autograph mob with zero courtesy, eventually snapping and punching a rude bystander. A caption dryly notes: “I’m shocked you were just suspended.” This is our protagonist, Dinah Lance, and she is having a very bad week.
Act Two: Dinah Lance Is Tired
The Therapy Call
The chapter properly begins with Dinah on a video call with her therapist, Dr. Annie Green. The session is tense, guarded, and quietly devastating. Dinah is a woman armored in deflection — she redirects every personal question into a lecture about social neuroscience studies and wealth’s effect on empathy. She knows, intellectually, that money suppresses the brain’s capacity to relate to others. She knows why the rich she guards are the way they are. And so she shuts down her own mirror neurons on purpose. She shows up. She does the job. She feels nothing.
Or so she tells herself. The therapist notes that last session, Dinah used the word numb.
We learn the shape of Dinah’s life: former cop, former rising MMA star, now a bodyguard for hire because the money is better and she has bills — specifically, her sick father’s medical bills that insurance barely half-covers. She’s moved back home. She is enduring this life for him. A sister security firm has just offered her a mysterious “special assignment,” but she doesn’t yet know what it involves.
Malcolm Merlyn’s Offer
Dinah arrives at Hammond Tower in the pouring rain. The building is massive and menacing, its corporate name blazing above the Star City skyline. Inside, Malcolm Merlyn — cold, precise, and possessing a dossier on Dinah that feels distinctly invasive — makes his pitch. The assignment: protect Reese Tyler, former CEO of Tyler Pharmaceuticals.
The backstory on Tyler is not flattering. Tyler Pharmaceuticals made billions by concealing the highly addictive nature of their opioid medications. A million deaths. Five times as many addictions. When a class-action lawsuit finally came, Tyler filed for bankruptcy — but his billionaire friend Hector Hammond swooped in, bought the company’s assets for nothing, installed Tyler as the head of the newly-rebranded Hammond Pharmaceuticals, and the two men walked away from the settlement entirely richer than they began.
The detail is almost unbearably on the nose, and that's the point. This isn't hyperbole for a comic book — it's a stylized mirror of actual opioid crisis mechanics. These are the men Dinah is being asked to protect. These are the monsters she must guard with her body.
Before Dinah can process any of this, Merlyn asks the question that changes everything: had she spoken to Oliver Queen or Jubal Slade before their deaths? She says no — not since they were neighbors. The story drops into the past.
Eight Years Ago
In warm yellow-and-teal flashback panels, we meet the people they used to be. Oliver Queen — bearded, passionate, and relentlessly chatty about corporate influence on democracy — moved into the apartment next door. He was, by Dinah’s own narration, “an annoying, self-righteous loudmouth who wouldn’t shut up.” They were dating within the month.
His roommate was Jubal Slade — nerdy, brilliant, socially disastrous — who burst in on them in bed one night to excitedly show Oliver the prototype of an app he’d been coding: a fee-free, no-minimum stock trading platform that could democratize investing. Oliver, who saw everything through the lens of redistributing wealth and power, was immediately on fire with it. Dinah was skeptical of Jubal. But she saw what Ollie saw in the idea.
Ollie raised the financing. Jubal wrote the code. GreenArrows Trading launched to 250,000 sign-ups in its first month and eventually reached ten million users, transforming the industry and making both men billionaires. Oliver branded everything with his green arrows — becoming the public face of the operation — while Jubal stayed in the background. By that point, Dinah was long gone. She’d caught Oliver cheating.
When Jubal’s sexual misconduct allegations emerged, Oliver pushed him out of the company. He was, the narration insists, trying to do the right thing. Then a few months ago, Oliver Queen’s body washed up on shore with his head bashed in. No one really knew what happened. Dinah had consumed every theory online — because you do that when your ex-boyfriend is a murdered billionaire.
Hammond’s Leverage
Back in the present: Dinah is shown the crime scene photos of Jubal Slade’s murder. The images are brutal and deliberate. Slade was tied up in his penthouse, impaled with two green arrows arranged in the shape of his old company’s logo. His eyes were repeatedly stabbed. His fingers severed. His genitals mutilated — specifically, and symbolically, the body parts he allegedly used to abuse minors. This was not chaotic violence. It was meticulously executed punishment.
The murder details have just leaked online. Social media, Merlyn says, is celebrating the torture. Simultaneously, a trove of emails has also leaked — detailing 26 accounts of Slade’s assaults on minors that he was never held accountable for. The public has context, and the public has chosen a side. Merlyn also reveals the suspect list his team has compiled: Roy Harper, Mia Dearden, and Tom Hallaway. Names that will mean something to DC readers. A work in progress.
Dinah tries to refuse the assignment — her dad is sick, it’s complicated — but before she can finish her sentence, Hammond and Tyler themselves walk in. Hammond is immediately predatory. When he learns Dinah is Oliver Queen’s ex-girlfriend, a former cop, and a professional bodyguard, he calls it kismet.
When she tries to decline, Hammond reaches over, takes the tablet from Merlyn’s hands, and deletes her father’s insurance coverage on the spot. Just like that. His father just lost all coverage, Dinah is told. He can’t pay for anything now. Show up Monday and be grateful they’re paying her.
The scene is quietly monstrous. No raised voice. No physical threat. Just the absolute certainty of power — and the total helplessness of someone outside it. This is the comic's thesis made literal.
The Lance Family Pride
Dinah goes home. Her father — third-generation police, a man who has never trembled — is shaking as he tells her his insurance was canceled. He blames himself for her hard life. In voice-over, Dinah tells us he’s always believed his only job is to make things easier for his child, and if her life is harder because of him, he has failed his only real responsibility. He has never let her see him cry. The Lances don’t hand people that kind of satisfaction. She holds him. And she decides.
Act Three: The Arrow Cave Ambush
First Day on the Job
On her very first day working for Hammond, Dinah discovers what Hammond has actually been after for months: Oliver Queen’s private bunker. His “Arrow Cave.” Hammond and Tyler have been trying to crack its security since Oliver died, convinced something important is hidden inside. They’ve finally broken in — and damaged the power lines doing so — but their own armed security is enough to keep them safe. Or so they believe.
Green arrows begin raining down from the darkness above. The Longbow Killer has found them.
The ambush is immediate and overwhelming. Hammond’s ex-military bodyguards begin dropping. Dinah springs into action — she catches an arrow mid-flight and snaps it. Tyler gets scratched by an arrowhead and immediately begins screaming. Then one of the other guards fully transforms: his face erupting into the same grotesque, multi-eyed mutation we saw at the opening, green and tumorous and wrong. The arrowheads are coated in a poison that warps human biology into something monstrous.
Before Dinah can process this, an explosive arrow strikes one of Hammond’s vehicles with a massive detonation — the concussive blast sends Dinah flying through the air as everything erupts in fire and smoke.
The Killer Revealed
In a stunning full-page spread, the Longbow Killer stands against a wall of fire, bow drawn, absolutely in command of the chaos. Rafael Albuquerque’s art here is operatic — the skull mask glowing in amber and gold, the green of the costume vivid against roaring orange flames. Below, a stunned Dinah lies on the ground, her inner monologue fragmenting into single words: Get up. The killer. Green Arrow Killer. Move.
Then the Killer shifts to close quarters. Twin blades. A grapple wire. And devastating, almost inhuman speed. Dinah watches, dazed, as he tears through what remains of Hammond’s security team with a fluidity that defies comprehension. Her internal voice is almost awed: His form. His speed. Who the hell fights like this?
The killer reaches Hammond directly and seizes him. He names Oliver Queen and accuses Hammond of knowing what he did. Hammond, bleeding and terrified, shouts that he didn’t kill Oliver — it was someone named Carter. The killer’s response is cold: it doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger. All of them face consequences. He stabs Hammond — not fatally, but surgically punishing — before gunfire from the surviving guards forces him to retreat, his final words a promise: “Just wait and see what I slice away.”
Key Mystery Thread
Hammond's desperate claim — "it was Carter!" — is the issue's most significant plot thread. Does Hammond genuinely know who killed Oliver Queen? Is "Carter" a name on Malcolm's suspect list under a different alias? And how does this figure dressed in Oliver's colors and using his symbol connect to Oliver's hidden secrets?
Dinah, recovering from the blast, watches Hammond shriek as he stares at his severed arm. And in the most morally uncomfortable beat of the entire issue, she notices — with horror at herself — that she is smiling. Not because she’s sadistic. But because after a lifetime of watching men like Hammond destroy everything around them and face zero consequence, some cold, exhausted part of her finds relief in watching one of them finally suffer. The discomfort this creates in the reader is entirely intentional.
Act Four: What Ollie Was Hiding
The Secret in the Arrow Cave
Later. Hammond is rushed to the hospital. Merlyn and Dinah move through the wreckage of the Arrow Cave, flashlights cutting through the smoke-clouded darkness. Dinah turns over everything she knows — Oliver would have been disgusted by someone killing in his name, using his symbol. She remembers all their conversations about working within the system, changing things from the inside. Her grief and her confusion about who Ollie truly was are palpable.
Then Merlyn notices it: a wall that is fake. The explosion has jarred it loose. Dinah approaches and runs a hand along the hidden seam. The residue inside shows no one has accessed this compartment in months — it was sealed before Oliver died. This must be what Hammond was hunting. The secret Ollie hid. The thing the man who always tried to do the right thing through legitimate means was keeping from the world.
They push it open.
Inside is a body. A young boy — clearly dead for some time, and yet somehow perfectly, impossibly preserved, showing no decomposition. But that detail, as horrific as it is, is not the strangest part. The boy’s skin is covered in dozens of glowing eyes — amber and blue irises, each fully formed and open, erupting from the surface of his chest, his neck, his arm. They glow with a sickly supernatural light. A red-gloved hand reaches toward the arm from off-panel.
The caption delivers the issue’s closing gut-punch: …if only that was the strangest part.
In the final panel, Dinah stares into what she’s found — face lit by the eerie glow, red-eyed from exhaustion or tears or both — and says the only thing she can say:
“Dammit, Ollie. What the hell were you up to?”
— TO BE CONTINUED —
