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Here it is, the companion piece to my Koma Designs Green Lantern, a dynamic and highly detailed 1/6 scale Green Arrow. I love this model; it be my favorite of all the kits I've built over the last five years. (But then again, my latest kit is always my favorite!) This kit has everything, including a lot of green!

This is a sculpt of the Neal Adams-redesigned GA, complete with domino mask and distinctive goatee. I've always liked Green Arrow, even in the early 1960s when he and Speedy were pretty much clones of Batman and Robin, complete with an Arrow Car and Arrow Cave. The character got really cool, however, with the award-winning Denny O'Neil-scripted and Neal Adams-drawn GA/GL team-ups in the late 1960s. I really like the costume, and it proved fun to paint -- I didn't know there were that many shades of green available! One green for his jerkin, another for his tights, another for his vest and boots, another for his bow, another for his arrow... you get the picture.

Sculpt-wise, there wasn't much to complain about here. Koma does a great job with their kits, and the sculpt was very detailed and the cast was very clean. This was an unusual kit in that I could paint all the parts before assembling them; the cut lines fell in natural dividing places, such as between GA's armbands and bare arms. Even the hat was separate, and was the last piece I glued on.

I already mentioned the "fun with green" aspect of painting this kit. In addition to all the various shades of green, I also added a little brown for the wooden grip on his bow, and bronze metallic for all the buckles on his outfit -- including the big "G" belt buckle. I know, most of the comics show this as a green "G," but I'd had my fill of green by this point -- and belt buckles are always metal, anyway. I like how it looks.

Fun was also to be had with Ollie's hair and beard. I didn't want to go with bright yellow, as it's typically colored in the comics, because real people don't have yellow hair. So I base coated all his hairy parts a very light brown (coffee, actually), and then drybrushed a dark yellow (straw) over that. The effect is a somewhat natural blonde color.

I also had a lot of fun with Ollie's mouth. I'm not used to painting mouths; gritting teeth is about all I've had to do to date. For this one, I painted his tongue, the inside of his mouth, and his gums pink, and then painted each tooth separately with misty white. Kind of cool looking.

The final piece of the figure was the string on GA's bow. This was much simpler than I anticipated. All I had to do was take a piece of green fishing line (yes, fishing line now comes in colors!) and tie it to either end of the bow, taking care to position it behind the feather on the arrow in Ollie's right hand. I thought I might have to use two pieces of line and blue them to the feather, but it turns out that it holds there naturally, no problems, no glue necessary. Sometimes things just work out!

I wanted to make GA a pair with the GL model, so I crafted a similar brick wall base out of StyroFoam. I won't go into all the details here; see my GL write-up for how I did it. In any case, it turned out quite well, and the two models fit together like two matching parts in a jigsaw puzzle.

The result is a big kit; Oliver Queen himself stands over 13" tall, and from the bottom of the base to the top of the bow measures over 18." I wish all superhero kits had this dynamic a pose!