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, 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.

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Animal Man Arrow Green Arrow 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.”

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.