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To QUOTE Jeremy
Clarkson: “What could possibly go wrong?”
THE REVIEW:
Green Arrow
has had a rough life. I'm not just
talking about Oliver Queen's current continuity. The guy gets turned down by the Justice
League, loses his company, lives on the paychecks from the short lived and
ill-conceived Justice League of America built to bring the Justice League down,
then gets roped into the self-proclaimed Justice League United, only to get
whisked off to outer space and picked on for having no powers. I'm also talking about the concept of Green Arrow. Despite being just over a year away from his
75th anniversary, the character spent his first
quarter century as a back-up story unable to escape his origins as a green
imitation of Batman. It wasn't until
fifteen years after Neal Adams and
Denny O'Neil's 1969 character-distinguishing makeover that Oliver finally got his own solo series.
The most
recent indignity, though, is that in our post-Flashpoint continuity, poor Oliver
was just handed off to his ninth
creative team (for last month's issue 41) in less than four years. It's been a roller coaster of tone, style,
and, frankly, quality. Our most recent
team's run was short-lived by some standards, but the second longest for this
title. “The Kingdom” story arc, from the
Arrow TV series Executive Producer
Andrew Kreisberg and writer room token Canadian Ben Sokolowski (with artist
Daniel Sampere), has come to a close.
The reins of
our Emerald Archer have been handed to novelist and short story writer, Benjamin
Percy, in what I believe is his first comic tale. Handing a 75 year old comic book character
who lives in a major metropolitan city to a guy who's best known for writing
action and horror thrillers set in rural Oregon
Let's see how
he does.
With all the
different creative teams on this title, one of the nice things is that they
have all, for the most part, respected the continuity set by their
predecessors. So we've got one long arc
of Oliver's growth, the destruction of his company, his interactions with other
heroes, and the building of his support team.
There are some conflicts, like the backstory with Roy Harper that Jeff
Lemire built which didn't quite match Judd Winnick's issue 0 origins and was
later contradicted over in Red Hood and
the Outlaws. Kreisberg and
Sokolowski couldn't keep track of where they sent Naomi and Fyff off to from
issue to issue (let alone the fact that Oliver had broken up with Zehra). And there's that whole Jin Fang / Jin Fung
thing. But aside from the disappearance
of prior creators' set-ups that didn't really need to continue, we've been
rolling pretty smoothly.
Until
now. When Kreisberg and Sokolowski came
in, they made some changes to suit the story they wanted, but they did so
in-story. Emiko was sent off “to train”
while Naomi and Henry had varying explanations as to why they weren't around
based on which issue / character explanation you prefer. The Clock King had changed races, grown hair,
and dropped at least a hundred pounds.
The charity Oliver built with the Queen Industries insurance money was
not just a single homeless youth shelter, but the Queen Foundation. And despite its destruction thanks to
Lacroix's takeover and manipulation, apparently there are still "billions
of dollars tucked away in Queen Industries that are collecting more dustballs
than interest."
But Kreisberg
and Sokolowski also left us with a setup that had Mia Deardon moving in with
Oliver, and both John Diggle and the hacker-for-hire second-hand adaptation
version of Felicity Smoak on to stay (despite Naomi's return as Red Dart) as
the new Team Arrow. With Percy's start,
however, all of that is gone. The Queen
Foundation is unseen and Queen Industries is back in full swing, with a man named
Broderick as apparent COO. Diggle,
Felicity, and Mia are all gone and unaccounted for. Fyff looks to be back to delivering Chinese
food (or at least working above a Chinese restaurant) but instead of the New
Dragon, it's the Dragon Palace Seattle Pacific Northwest ” feel to it than any prior lodgings
we've seen.
Despite all
these continuity headaches, though, I'm not minding it at all. Percy and Zircher have restored the best parts of this series, even if they haven't
explained it story-wise. As with many of
the series that survived the “New 52” to “DC You” transition, there's been a
multiple month gap in the story. (In
fact, one might interpret the restoration of Queen Industries and Emiko
apparently aging beyond her established backstory lifespan, as possible years passing in continuity.) So the fact that we've got these characters
back is, to me, a great thing. The
changes are easily accepted as having happened in the interim, and if Percy or
later writers want to make reference to exactly what happened, it's a
blank slate.
Plus, there's that key social conscience of Green
Arrow that looks to be getting restored.
Ann Nocenti started to introduce it during her run way back in issue 11,
but then completely dropped it with Jin Fang's takeover and the ridiculous
ancient Chinese zombie stuff. Jeff
Lemire set some of the foundations by shifting the Jin Fang takeover into the
Komodo / Outsiders takeover and destroying the company, leaving Oliver bankrupt
and relying on his A.R.G.U.S. paycheck to operate. However, when we came out the other side of The Outsiders War and Broken, the lessons were all about
Oliver learning more about who he is and that he doesn't need to go it
alone. It looks like Oliver has left the
JLU due to his frustrations with dealing with intergalactic threats in order to
focus on change on a scale he is more comfortable with. Percy gives him a great inner monologue as he
heads out to Tacoma
The only
problems I had with this issue were pretty minor. There's the whole believability thing about
the Seattle Gotham 's consideration of the plan in Batman 41, but Scott Snyder included no
such mention. And there's the fact that
they were stealing people off the streets in the prior issue before getting the Queen Industries
funding and Zimm giving the albino creep a thumbs up for production, but that
is likely part of the mystery of their full operation to be revealed next
issue.
The timeline
of the issue draws in to question some of Oliver's time management skills, or
lack thereof. Everything appears to be
happening in sequential order without significant time passing in between. Yet we open with Emiko's clock reading 7:16,
presumably AM, meaning Oliver was either out really late busting up that dogfight or he carried George around
for quite a while before heading home to stitch him up. We then see a series of daylight activities,
such as the homeless kid stealing a hamburger, Oliver's call to Broderick, and
the dusk arrival of the panopticons at the Pennytown protest. It is then dark by the time Oliver heads out
to Tacoma, meaning he and Emiko spent all day watching the news and patching up
George.
But all these minor problems are dwarfed by the great story
we're getting. It's been a while since a
“superhero” (yes, I know, Green Arrow has no super powers) took on such a
serious type of story, and it's great to bring that gravitas to a character
like Green Arrow.
This is a very
promising start for this new team, giving us a story that feels like it
matters, a villain that is terrifyingly creepy in an all too realistic way, and
a hero that is realizing his faults and working to correct them. We don't have any obvious headquarters for
“Team Arrow”, but we've got his old costume visible hanging in his condo base,
and Fyff back in his little geek den (complete with Superman bobblehead). These were a great first two issues and a
very promising direction.
THE MUSIC:
I love the
little background details that artists (sometimes as per the writer's script)
work in to comics. There's the
references to in-universe details from other comics, such as Black Alice's
Draculords shirt in Secret Six, Henry
Fyff's Animal Man t-shirt from his early days on Team Arrow, Onyx loading up
the Fist Clan's devastation on a ship named Mary Stewart, or the Black Canary
posters and fliers popping up in the streets of Gotham City, John Constantine's
(abandoned) New York apartment, and, yes, even Emiko Queen's bedroom. Then there's the real world references, like
Harper Row's “No, it's Becky” t-shirt from the end of Batman Eternal, Joey's Punk
Rock Jesus t-shirt and poster in Nightwing,
or the recent Justice League of America
indication that the Marvel cinematic universe exists as films within the DC
Universe.
But Zircher
got a little meta on us recently. Since
I can't get you a Black Canary song onYouTube for this issue, I'm going to have
to hop back to a great detail he added in the prior issue. In Green
Arrow 41 we see Henry Fyff hanging out in his WarRock t-shirt. Which means that your favorite comic book
character is a fan of Adam WarRock,
a nerdcore rapper who's very heavy handed with the comic book references. (Which I'm pretty sure requires Adam to
record a Henry Fyff song).
We'll go with
Adam's relatively recent Purple Yellow,
his tribute to Batgirl. Since it's
Batgirl's fault that Black Canary had to join a band and thus is really the
reason that Oliver Queen's half sister has a poster on her wall of Oliver's one
true love from a prior reality. So it
all comes full circle and is totally relevant, see?
This issue's
comparison is more a comparison of the methods of the villain than a comparison
to the issue itself. There have been
many ominous floating robots of tyrannical justice throughout history, but the
one I'm going to compare to the panopticons in this story is the Micro Managers from The LEGO
Movie. Only, where Lord Business used
his justice robots to prepare the citizenry for the Kragle, Zimm uses his
justice robots to allow an insane albino to douse them in bleach and drop them
out of the sky. They should make an
official LEGO set for this story arc.
The kids'll love it.
THE CONCLUSION:
Morton
Weisinger and George Papp gave Oliver Queen life. Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil gave him a Van
Dyke beard, a social conscience, a superhero girlfriend, and a junkie
sidekick. Mike Grell isolated him from
the superhero community and gave him a murderous side, a child by rape, and
took away his girlfriend. J.T. Krul and
his successors gave the post-Flashpoint Oliver Queen a new, younger start. Ann Nocenti had him start to realize it's not
all fun and games before Jeff Lemire truly gave Oliver Queen some unique
gravitas of his own. Percy appears to be
giving Oliver something he hasn't had in a while, though; some borderline
real-life challenges of the big city.
Police profiling, socioeconomic preferences, and apparent racially
motivated criminals. We've got an Oliver
motivated to help the little guy again.
Man, I
haven't made enough jokes in this review, have I? Stupid serious topics and awesome creative teams. What big reveal should we be looking forward
to next?
- The albino is, in fact, G.I. Zombie on a super-secret-undercover mission.
- Mia Deardon is actually living with Ollie and Emi, but she stays in the cabinets so as not to anger Emiko.
- Emiko tricks Fyff and Naomi in to going on a blind date with one another.
- Oliver contemplates why he hasn't been to Star City since he got back from the island.
- George starts talking to Emiko, introducing himself as J'onn.
GREEN ARROW #42
Reviewed by David Andrews
on
August 12, 2015
Rating:
Reviewed by David Andrews
on
August 12, 2015
Rating:
