It ' s a wellthoughtout argument , but I ' m not convinced by the They ' ve never called Malcolm the Dark Archer line of reasoning . Tommy Merlyn aka Dark Archer was a creation of The New 52 , which started around the same time as Arrow , and in fact the big storyline with Tommy as Ollie ' s enemy was in 2014 . Then you have Arthur King aka Merlyn the Magician , the L eagueofAssasinsaffiliated evil archer and nemesis of the Green Arrow . While he is occasionally referred to as the Dark Archer in much the same way as Sara being called The Woman In Black by the media in Arrow , he is mostly just called Merlyn or The Magician . While a lot of Malcolm ' s character is very far away from Merlyn , they kept the name the comics reveal that Malcolm was born Arthur King and the codename Al SaHerThe Magician . So I dunno if we can really say that Malcolm isn ' t explicitly identified with the comicbook Merlyn