Arrow Season 5: Who Is Wild Dog?

Tonight on Arrow, the first new member ofTeam Arrow version 2.0 was introduced to the audience, in the form of Wild Dog, a hockey mask-wearing, gun-toting vigilante who was inspired by — and then shot in the kneecap by — Green Arrow.

The character first appeared in Wild Dog #1 in 1987, making him one of the first new superheroes created following Crisis on Infinite Earths. Created by Road to Perdition writer Max Allan Collins and artist Terry Beatty, “his super power is guns.”

Star athlete Jack Wheeler went to college on a football scholarship, but had to drop out and become a mechanic after an injury forced him off the team and he couldn’t afford tuition. Before working as a mechanic, though, he enlisted for a tour of duty with the U.S. Marines, only to see most of his friends killed by a terrorist bomb. After returning home, he fell in love…but the woman he was in love with was gunned down in a seemingly-random shooting, later revealed to be a hit because her father was a reputed mobster. Wheeler snapped and became Wild Dog — a vigilante beloved by the public for “cleaning up the streets” but wanted by the police for his brutality.

After his own series failed to make him a star, the character would appear in Action Comics Weekly before fading mostly into obscurity. His most recent appearances on the printed page were in an alternate-reality story in Booster Gold, in which Wild Dog was part of a team of revolutionaries led by Green Arrow and working against Maxwell Lord and his army of OMACs.

“You gotta go to [writers] Geoff [Johns] and Jeff [Katz] for that one,” artist Dan Jurgens said when ComicBook.com’s Russ Burlingame asked him why Wild Dog had been chosen to team with a group of DC A-listers in Booster Gold #8. “I kind of enjoyed it. Took me back to those Action Weekly days!”

During his Booster Gold run, Wild Dog was depicted as being very conservative, something that seems likely to play a role on Arrow since Oliver Queen is now the liberal mayor of Star City.

A group of men dressed in Wild Dog costumes appear on the cover of Green Arrow #1, out today, although the character does not actually appear in the issue.

“That’s not coming right away but it’s coming down the pipeline,” Green Arrow writer Ben Percy said of Wild Dog. “That first cover is sort of previewing some of the obstacles that lay ahead in the first few Rebirth arcs. I won’t say too much except that there was a lot of discussion at the DC offices about how we could channel some of what was going on in the news, particularly what was going on in Oregon at the Malheur Nature Reserve which was taken over by that militia.”

Arrow airs on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.