Published 15 July 2026. Written by Pornsak Pichetshote, art by Rafael Albuquerque, colours by Marcelo Maiolo, letters by Jeff Powell. Chapter three of The Longbow Killer.
I covered issues one and two in detail already, including the suspect list and the name I think everyone has skipped past. If you have not read that, start there. This picks up where it left off.
The reveal everything else hangs on
Roy Harper finally turns up, and he arrives with the piece that reframes the whole series.
Hector Hammond, like a great many very rich men, is obsessed with living forever. To that end he acquired Tyler Pharmaceuticals. Not for its products. For one specific compound sitting in its research: Miraclo.
Hammond's scientists were told to turn it into a cure for ageing. They failed at that. What they found instead was worse, and better, depending on where you are standing.
They found a way to bring the dead back.
Every horror in this book flows from that single sentence. It is the answer to a question nobody in the story had thought to ask yet.
Why Miraclo matters, if you have never heard of it
This is the sort of deep cut that rewards knowing your Golden Age, so here is the short version.
Rex Tyler was a chemist who invented a compound he called Miraclo. Taking it gave him superhuman strength and speed for exactly one hour, which is how he ended up calling himself Hourman. He debuted in Adventure Comics #48 in March 1940, created by Ken Fitch and Bernard Baily, and became a founding member of the Justice Society of America.
He is one of the oldest characters DC has. He is also, historically, one of the most quietly tragic, because the miracle vitamin was always a drug, and the character has spent eight decades being written as an addict in a cape by anyone brave enough to say so out loud.
Absolute Green Arrow does not say it out loud. It does something colder. It takes the pill that made a hero and hands it to a corporation, and asks what a board of directors does with a substance that cheats death.
The answer, as ever, is that they scale it.
The test subjects, and the thing in the diner window
The results are not superheroes. They are victims.
Dinah finds one that is nothing but an empty suit of skin. Elsewhere there is a figure covered in eyes, glimpsed in the reflection of a diner window rather than shown head on, which is a far nastier way to stage it. Albuquerque and Maiolo let you catch it in the corner of the frame in warm yellows and oranges, so your eye takes a second to work out what it is looking at. By then it is too late.
That detail matters for a reason beyond craft. A body covered in eyes has turned up in this series before. What read as surreal horror in earlier issues has just been retroactively explained as a failed clinical trial. That is a genuinely clever piece of construction: the answer was on the page before you knew there was a question.
Absolute Solomon Grundy
And then the last page.
Solomon Grundy makes his Absolute debut, and he is the successful experiment. Not a swamp monster, not a curse, not a nursery rhyme. A man who died and was brought back by a pharmaceutical company that wanted to know if it could be done.
Grundy has always been a resurrection story. Cyrus Gold, murdered, dumped in Slaughter Swamp, returning wrong. This version keeps the shape of that and swaps the swamp for a lab, which is arguably more frightening because somebody chose it.
He appears as a cameo. He is covered in eyes, like the failures. He is clearly not the last we see of him.
The part everyone is skipping past
Here is what I keep coming back to, and I have not seen much discussion of it.
If Miraclo can raise the dead, then the central premise of this series is now in question. Oliver Queen washed up on a shore with his head caved in. That has been the fixed point the whole mystery is built on. Everything Dinah does, she does because Oliver is dead.
Issue three introduces an unnamed body double, and has Roy openly casting doubt on whether Oliver died at all. Put those two things beside a drug that reverses death and the question stops being who killed Oliver Queen.
It becomes which body was that, and where is the man it was standing in for.
I am not calling it a resurrection yet. There is a version of this where the double is the corpse and Oliver simply walked away, which is grubbier and more in keeping with what we have learned about him. The flashbacks in this issue show a man who was lonely, sad and involved in a great deal he should not have been.
Where my theory stands
I said after issue one that Tom Hallaway is the Longbow Killer, and I am not moving off it.
Hallaway is a real DC deep cut, a 1940s vigilante called The Spider who murdered criminals with a bow and arrow and let another archer take the blame. If you were building a modern serial killer story around archery and framing, he is the single most useful name in DC's back catalogue. His name appeared on a list in issue one. Three issues in, he still has not been mentioned again, and he still has not been ruled out.
That silence is the argument. Nobody plants a name like that as set dressing.
I also still do not believe the dream sequence in issue two was a reveal. Seeing Oliver's face under the mask told us about Dinah's state of mind, not the killer's identity. The series has since been extended from six issues to twelve, which tells you plainly that the real answer is nowhere near.
The chain I think we are being shown, as of this issue: Roy Harper gave up information, Hammond gave the order, and the execution went through Carter Hall. That is a conspiracy with a corporate motive at the top and a very old grudge somewhere near the bottom.
Is it any good?
Mostly, yes, and it is worth being honest about where it is divisive.
Reviews have been strong. It is sitting at 4.2 out of 5 on League of Comic Geeks with a Very Positive rating, and the general critical read is that Pichetshote layers mystery, character and social commentary without losing pace, while Albuquerque's art carries an intensity that most books in this line cannot match.
The criticism is not unreasonable either. This is a Green Arrow comic in which Green Arrow barely features. Three issues in, the title character is an absence rather than a presence, and at least one reviewer has argued the political content is laid on with a trowel. If you came for a Green Arrow book you may be reading the wrong series, because the protagonist is Black Canary and the title character is the mystery.
My view is that the absence is the point, and that a book willing to make its lead a rumour for twelve issues is doing something more interesting than most. But if that irritates you by issue three, it is not going to stop irritating you.
Worth picking up?
For collectors specifically, this issue has a genuine hook: the first appearance of Absolute Solomon Grundy. Absolute first appearances have moved well since the line began, and a debut in a book already extended to twelve issues on the back of strong sales is not nothing.
Check you have a first printing before paying over cover. This line reprints quickly, and later printings trade at a fraction.
Issue four lands 19 August 2026.