Oliver Queen and Roy Harper were half-brothers, Oliver five years older than Roy, sons of the same wealthy man, but sons of different mothers.  Oliver was the son of his father’s wife, while Roy was the child of an affair, the older one born to wealth and privilege, the younger born to hardship and poverty.

After their father’s death, they were traveling by plane to pick up his body in India, when the plane went down and they were stranded on a mysterious tropical island.  In order to stay alive from strange creatures and a group of killers using the island as a base, Oliver taught Roy the use of bow and arrow.  By the time they were rescued, in the time they spent fighting for their daily survival, the two half-brothers became a team—not one that always got along, but one that fought together with one mind.

When they got back to Star City and the United States, they discovered one of their father’s associates, Count Werner Vertigo, had tried to have them declared dead in order have the brothers removed from control of Queen Financial, which was left to them in their father’s will.

Then they learned their father had not died of natural causes, as they’d been told, but that he was murdered.

As they probed deeper into the matter—Oliver Queen had a quick and educated mind and an aptitude for his father’s business—they learned their plane had been brought down intentionally—and by the same men who killed the elder Queen.

By this time, they realized they themselves were being hunted—by men employed by their father’s business associate, Count Werner Vertigo, killers who resembled the men they met on the mysterious island—and once again took up the bows and arrows that kept them alive on the island.

They took up the secret identities of the Green Arrow and Speedy, and conducted an undercover vigilante war against the covert group of villains trying to seize control of the Queen fortune and the company the man had built.  As Oliver found allies of his own against his enemies in Queen Financial, he began to acquire new tools for the secret job he had taken on—trick arrows, explosive arrows, and arrows with tech-surveillance capabilities; a sleek Arrow-Car, with its own cache of gadgets and weapons; and a secret control-center hidden in a cave under the hills outside the old part of the city.

As the conflict escalated, and the Green Arrow and Speedy made a name for themselves as heroes, they discovered that the man behind it all, Count Werner Vertigo, was a villain with a strange supernatural power over men’s minds, very befitting of his name.

As Green Arrow and Speedy fought against the criminal organization, they crossed paths with a motorcycle-riding super-hero, the Black Canary.  She had a sonic power over her voice that enabled her to scream in ways that could not be heard, or only be detected by animals and special equipment, shatter solid objects, such as stone, and knock men unconscious, stopping them in their tracks.

Under the mask, the Black Canary was a private detective named Dinah Lance, and she had taken on the secret identity in order to avenge her own mother’s death.

Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance fell into a passionate relationship that spilled over into their private lives.  Eventually, the Black Canary joined the Green Arrow and Speedy in their never-ending battle against the super-villains, crime, and corruption of Star City.