In Green Arrow Annual 1, out this month, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen is infected with a virus that turns him into a werewolf.

That's not exactly unusual in a medium where characters fly, shoot lasers from their eyes and run faster than the speed of sound.

But the issue, created by writer Bejamin Percy and artist Szymon Kudranski, uses the Lukos virus as a metaphor for HIV in a way that's both clumsy and unsettling.

In the comic, Arrow has a one-night stand with a woman named Melanie, who keeps him at arm's length to him because he’s rich, hot and white. (Percy's attempt at educating readers about privilege, presumably.)

In another scene, a mob hunts down a man infected with Lukos. The victim, Johnny Evision, is rescued by the cops, who ask how he contracted the disease.

“I slept with the wrong... person,” he explains—the pause suggesting he was going to say "man" but thought better of it.

The police tell Johnny he had it coming and remind him to keep taking his meds.

We learn that people afflicted with Lukos are quarantined from the general public, in part to avoid infection, but also because they turn into "wargs," which are like werewolves on steroids.

We told you—it's clunky.

During the Dark Ages, Norse fighters who ate the brain and heart of an infected wolf became animal-like berserkers.

Over the centuries, they were hunted to near-extinction by Crusaders, Puritans and the Nazis.

But now the wargs are back—in Green Arrow's stomping grounds of Seattle. A violent warg biker gang, led by Dolph Marrock a.k.a. Big Bad Wolf, decides to get revenge for being oppressed by infecting everyone at a Halloween parade.

They're like ACT UP for werewolves.

Green Arrow arrives in time to (mostly) stop the attack, but the issue ends with the revelation that he has been infected by a bite from one of the wargs.

In the final panel, we're told the story will continue in an upcoming issue.

Percy is clearly trying to craft a metaphor about vilifying people infected with a blood-born disease, but while he illustrates the heartless bigotry the wargs face, he makes them terrorists who selfishly want to spread their disease.

Exactly the kind of rhetoric used by anti-gay forces in the 1980s.

What makes things odder is that, back, in 2004, Green Arrow addressed HIV head-on in the character of Mia Dearden, a former teen runaway Oliver Queen takes under his wing.

Mia sold her body to survive and, once off the streets, learns she contracted HIV. She's devastated, and lashes out at those closest to her—but in one of the most beautiful stories told in a mainstream comic book, she eventually finds her inner strength and becomes a superhero, despite her positive status.

So why tiptoe around the issue a decade later, with a bizarre story about werewolves and biker gangs?

DC rebooted its entire line in 2011 with an all-new continuity, one that erased Mia and her saga completely.

Maybe they should have just left well enough alone?

h/t: 17world