Jeff Lemire's Green Arrow: Promising, But Uninspired

Jeff Lemire has brought the Arrow to Green Arrow in his first issue of the New 52 series, [...]

Jeff Lemire has brought the Arrow to Green Arrow in his first issue of the New 52 series, stripping Oliver of the support network he had built up over the last 17 issues and giving him a new mission: one related to his late father's mysterious legacy and to the island on which he was stranded. The issue is essentially is a "soft reboot" of the first year and a half of the series in the same way that Dan Jurgens was brought in to salvage The Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Man by eschewing everything that wasn't working and sticking with the core concept of the character: two opposing forces, sharing a body. In the case of Green Arrow, Lemire is being asked to come in and try to make the audience forget a year and a half of consistent disappointment by bringing in so many of the elements that work well on TV's Arrow. It's the approach that probably should have been tried the first time around; this series may have made a much bigger splash if it were published exactly like this...only back when the New 52 launched.

Instead, we've got a book that spends a good chunk of the page count tying up threads crafted during the previous year and a half of unmemorable issues and then another bit of page count giving us a version of Oliver who, despite having been at this game for a while now, is suddenly starting over from zero. That's a theme that Lemire pushes in the issue--the idea that Ollie has been stripped of everything. He abandoned the identity of Oliver Queen to be Green Arrow, and because of that, he's lost control of his company and the resources that made Green Arrow much easier to be. Shortly thereafter, he finds another archer, challenging him to be the alpha male and laying waste to his base, effectively trying to take the one identity Ollie has left to himself--Green Arrow. That would be clever if it weren't overtly narrated for you by Oliver the whole time. It all feels a bit clumsy, and isn't nearly as endearing as when Lemire used a similar device to roll out Animal Man in 2011. After all, most people don't need a primer on Oliver Queen--and even if they did back when The New 52 launched, they don't now, as Arrow is a bona fide hit. Now, don't get me wrong--this book has changed hands so many times since the launch that it's a bit like the popular girl in a high school dramedy. Up until now, it just kept getting worse and worse. Lemire's first issue is certainly a promise of something better--if a promise only partway fulfilled. Let's digress a bit to check the trajectory of Green Arrow since the relaunch: When J.T. Krul, Dan Jurgens and George Perez did the first issue together, we thought the villains felt generic, but were generally optimistic, giving the book three stars. "[It's] a more interesting take than I've seen from the character in years and Krul has done well in making the title a little 'younger,' eschewing Ollie's old CIA buddy Eddie Fyers (who would have been a natural source for intel) for a couple of twenty-something hackers on the Q-Core payroll," I wrote. "The real question is whether these characters break out on their own rite or stay "young hackers" and devolve into a stereotype." Unfortunately, not only did they never really break out of the stereotype before they were apparently written out this month, but once Krul left after only three issues, no subsequent writer seemed to have much interest in doing anything with them. Meanwhile, Eddie Fyers appeared in Arrow and now seems like he would have been an interesting choice to involve in the story. The book went through a series of writers--artist Dan Jurgens took it over along with Keith Giffen, a creator with whom he's been doing some work of late; when they left to take over Superman, the book went to Ann Nocenti, but there were issues by Judd Winick as well--or at least an issue, and that one was a huge missed opportunity. Green Arrow#0 set a new low for a series that was already floundering; the chance the issue gave Winick and artist Freddie Williams II to explore the same time period as Arrow--which by then everyone had seen and enjoyed--was wasted on an issue of which we said, "This may be the most unfathomably hideous comic book that was ever published by a major publisher. Each page of Green Arrow assaulted and insulted my senses more than the one before....This book is the low point of the last few years for a character who headlined a story that involved his sidekick talking to a dead cat for several pages."

Okay, back to Lemire. His first issue is neither as unambitious as Krul's nor as unreadable as Winick's. It's a solid story, and Andrea Sorrentino's art (which we'll get to momentarily) generally looks good. The problem is everything BUT the story:

  • It's the narration, as mentioned above.
  • It's the dialogue, which often feels stiff and awkward, with a villain who talks like something straight out of a B movie. If he didn't call Ollie a "whelp" during the course of their confrontation, that didn't stop my brain from reading it.
  • It's the fact that Lemire's "brave new direction" for Oliver falls back on the same old tropes. Oliver losing his money and/or losing control of Queen Industries happens so often that it's no longer an effective plot device--and even though it's no longer canon, Ollie spent so much time with a publicly-known secret identity that it's difficult to get a real sense of dread from a villain whose big claim to fame is that he figured out who Green Arrow is in his downtime. It's not like that took the same level of supervillain aptitude as it took Bane to figure out who Bruce Wayne was. Also, why another archer? You've got plenty of those floating around.
  • It's the weird cult vibe that's being thrown off not only by Komodo, but by Magus as well. Don't we have enough of that going around DC right now? Batman's first arc was all about a deep mythology Bruce didn't understand. Animal Man and Swamp Thing have been dominated by the idea of the Red, the Green and the Rot being set up as some kind of deep mythology that Animal Man and Swamp Thing didn't understand. Right now the Superman books are being taken over by this H'El on Earth crossover, in which Superman is faced with visions of a Krypton shrouded in a deep mythology that he doesn't understand. Now, Green Arrow gets...basically the same thing, or at least seems to.

The pacing of the issue is off, as well. DC might have done well, given the focus they're putting on this and the other Justice League of America tie-in books in February, to have bitten the bullet and given Lemire a few extra pages to work with. The whole first act--in which Oliver deals with the repercussions of his company being acquired and confronts the CEO, who then attempts to feed Oliver key information about his father and a conspiracy that threatens to consume both of his identities--is full of pages like the one you see at left, where the art has no room to breathe because there are ten panels on the page and each one has a cluttered word balloon or three. There is also a question of timing; while it seems ideal to launch a Green Arrow comic around the same time they were planning the Arrow pilot, and it seems unwise that when they were planning those two disparate events they did little or nothing to sync up the tone, look or content of the comics to have made transitioning between the two easier, that's not what we're talking about. No, we're talking about Hawkeye, the "poor man's Green Arrow," who also happens to be starring in one of the best superhero comics on the stands. Frankly, for the first time in his long history, Green Arrow ought to be trembling in his boots at the prospect of a comparison to a Hawkeye ongoing title. And unfortunately, mainstream superhero fans will likely compare the two even more once they see the cool, creative things that Sorrentino is trying to do with his page layouts.

The pages are full to bursting, with a lot of tiny panels and even some inset panels that basically use a single image to tell the story of two or more panels. This isn't decompressed storytelling, an accusation that's been leveled at so many of the New 52 titles; this storytelling is hypercompressed. The problem is, that's just what they do with Hawkeye. So are the staggered panels. In fact, if you ignore the fact that Sorrentino's work looks nothing like Aja's and focus solely on the panel layout, the two books are pretty similar. Did Sorrentino "steal" the look of his archer book from Aja? God, no. Both of them have been doing this for a while, and are among some of the more innovative visual storytellers you'll find working in mainstream superhero books. To most of the audience, though, that'll be something they notice. Don't be surprised if someone finds a couple of particularly similar pages and throws them up online at some point to prove the premise. And, while Sorrentino's use of negative space is wonderful and his cinematic approach to composition makes for a really kinetic, dynamic comic, the art will suffer from those comparisons. Sorrentino and Lemire haven't found a groove yet; they still might, but at present it doesn't seem as though Sorrentino's Vertigo-flavored look of Green Arrow serves Lemire's take on the character particularly. Is it a little more gritty and crime/espionage comic-y than it was before? Sure.

But there are still plenty of superhero trappings, as the painfully awkward way Ollie's domino mask looks in the fight scene will remind you. The appearance of Magus at the end of the issue particularly sets all of this off. Sorrentino's version of the character would have been at home in I, Vampire or Animal Man, but in Green Arrow, it would take a major tonal shift to justify the way that character looks on the page. That shift hasn't happened, or at least hasn't happened yet, leaving the big "surprise" moment at the end of the issue to feel more like a "what in the world is going on?". It all feels a bit like when Grant Morrison gets a touch more eccentric than usual and forgets to take the Invisibles influences out of his Batman books. At the end of the day, Green Arrow #17 is one of the best issues, if not the best issue, of the series to date. That is, of course, somewhat faint praise, since it's widely accepted that Green Arrow has been one of the biggest disappointments of the New 52. As with Firestorm, though, DC have decided that they have faith in the book and/or a desire to move the property forward, so the comic remains, and is in better hands. There's certainly room for an excellent comic to grow from the seeds of this issue, but it isn't there yet--and we were already burned the last time we said something like that about this book.

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