On Arrow‘s sixth season premiere last week Team Arrow was picking up the pieces and moving on after the events on Lian Yu and part of that moving on meant a new costume for Wild Dog. However, not everyone is happy about Wild Dog’s new look and that includes the character’s co-creator Terry Beatty.
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Beatty, who created Wild Dog along with Max Allan Collins in 1987 took to Facebook this past weekend to express his displeasure with the updated look the character debuted on Arrow. You can read Beatty’s full comments below.
However, it’s not just the costume that seems to bother Beatty. The changes between his comic creation and its small screen interpretation seems to be a slight sticking point for the creator as he specifically points out that the Arrow character “is now literally Wild Dog in name only.”
The comic book version of Wild Dog first appeared in his own comic series in September of 1987 as Jack Wheeler, an ex-Marine discharged after losing almost his whole team to a terrorist bomb. Wheeler goes home, enrolls in night school and meets a woman named Claire. They start dating, but it turns out that Claire was a mobster’s daughter who left the family and she ended up murdered in front of Wheeler. Wealthy after Claire left him her money, he couldn’t stop his anger over her death and ended up literally fighting the mob — donning a pair of camo pants, a hockey jersey over his body armor and a goalie mask as his disguise.
On Arrow, Rene Ramirez (Rick Gonzales) was also a discharged Marine, but instead of a girlfriend being murdered by the mob, Ramirez’s wife is killed in their apartment by her drug dealer and his resulting anger over the death causes him to lose his daughter, Zoe. Stripped of everything he loves, Ramirez puts on the costume and hits the street as a vigilante. He eventually ends up as part of Team Arrow and, over the course of last season, establishes a connection with Quentin Lance and starts to take back his life.
After surviving Lian Yu, Wild Dog’s new costume is more in line with the suits of the rest of Team Arrow and will likely serve the character well as they deal with new threats this season. And even though Beatty is displeased about the changes to his creation, he acknowledges that Gonzalez has done a good job with the television version of the character
“I will tip my hat to Rick Gonzalez, who I feel has done a fine job in the role and has a strong screen presence,” Beatty wrote. “I wish him luck in going forward with this and whatever else he does down the line.”
Arrow airs Thursdays at 9/8c on The CW.
