It took Smallville ten years and a television series finale before it got an ongoing comic companion, but the CW's new Green Arrow series, Arrow, will have a tie-in right out of the gate. With weeks to go before the show has even debuted on television, DC Comics has announced that it will have a comic tie-in, written by the series' executive producers.Following the lead of DC's Smallville Season 11, the comic incarnation of Arrow will debut first as serialized digital releases before seeing print in a monthly series the following month. Arrow the comic will be written by TV show runners Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg, with art on the ongoing series by Sergio Sandoval and Jorge Jiminez following a first issue illustrated by Mike Grell, a creator who enjoyed a long run writing (and occasionally drawing) the adventures of Green Arrow during the 1980s.

Talking to Comic Book Resources about the comic, Guggenheim said that "We loved the idea because (a) we love comics and (b) we sensed the opportunity to do something that struck us both as unprecedented. We come up with a lot of stories in the writers room, but only have 42 minutes each week to tell them. That leaves a lot of backstory left over that we like having the opportunity to tell. To our knowledge, nothing's ever been attempted on a scale like this before." That's an arguable statement - NBC's Heroes had an ongoing webcomic series written by the show's writers that expanded on unexplained back story and history from the television episodes, with the strips eventually collected for print by DC's Wildstorm imprint - but depending on how interconnected the two different Arrow stories get, there may be more to this than meets the eye, earning the boast down the line.

The Arrow digital comic launches on October 10, the same day as the television series debuts on the CW, with the print edition being released November 28.

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