Wild Dog

It’s time for another installment of Pointed Commentary, where returning Arrow watcher Chris Haley and newcomer Emma Lawson dig into the details of Team Arrow as they clean up the filthy, crime-ridden streets of Star City. This week’s episode, “The Recruits,” finds Green Arrow spread thin between his crusade to fight crime in a costume and his daily duties as the new mayor of Star City. But will his new team of vigilante hopefuls ever be able to work together? James Bamford directed the episode from a script by Speed Weed and Beth Schwartz.

I honestly thought we were past the point where superhero TV and movies could surprise me anymore. I mean, we're two years out from a movie where a Celestial showed up on screen and an Academy Award-nominated actor talked about the Nova Corps, and last year's TV season brought us Gorilla Grodd as a full-on telepathic talking super-gorilla who fought the Flash and an entire show about the Atom, Captain Cold and Hawkgirl flying through the time stream to fight Vandal Savage. We are, I thought, long past the point where just telling me a character's going to show up on a TV show is worth getting excited about. And then the CW announced that Wild Dog was going to be on Arrow.

If you're not familiar with Max Alan Collins and Terry Beatty's Wild Dog, the simple explanation is that he's DC's version of the Punisher. I don't know if that's exactly what they were inspired by, but it's hard not to look at the two characters and see a pretty huge influence in Wild Dog and how he works, especially when you consider how popular the Punisher was getting in the late '80s. The thing is, Wild Dog doesn't really feel like he's meant to be an equivalent as much as the product off someone reading comics about a perpetually grumpy vigilante who runs around with a giant skull on his chest and saying, "Well we can do something weirder than that."

Q: What are some concepts in comics you feel were woefully underused? - @daveexmachina A: There are definitely things out there that never quite got the attention that it seems like they deserve. There are cool concepts that hit at the wrong time and tweaks to the status quo that were swept away in favor of going back to basics, and there's one that I can think of pretty easily that seems like it should've been the next big thing and got dropped like a hot potato instead. And believe it or not, I'm not talking about Wild Dog.

A few weeks ago, Kyle Starks, the insanely underrated creator of The Legend of Ricky Thunder, Adventure Wizard and Punch Captain, made a promise on Twitter. He said that if he got 200 followers, he'd write and draw a 15-page fan comic starring DC's Wild Dog...

Here at ComicsAlliance, we value our readership and are always open to what the masses of Internet readers have to say. That's why we've given Senior Writer Chris Sims the punishment pleasure of stepping into the grand tradition of the Answer Man as he responds to your reader questions...