Green Arrow #21, by Marc Alan Fishman – Snarky Synopsis | @MDWorld

June 16, 2013 Marc Fishman 2 Comments

Written by Jeff Lemire, Art by Andrea Sorrentino

Erik Larsen said something profound the other day on Facebook: “Every issue of every comic book series is a good jumping on point. Yes, there’ll be a few unanswered questions. Man the fuck up. What relationship have you ever had where you knew everything about a person immediately? You still don’t know about shit your parents did and you lived with them for years.” With that mentality in mind, I snagged Green Arrow #21; a book I’ve not touched in years, but had a love of the character (as I once knew him). Issue #21 ends one arc to begin another. With no backstory under my belt, and only the basic knowledge that Oliver Queen was once stranded on an island, became fancy with a bow, and returned home to become a vigilante… I manned up. Well Erik, I don’t know all the shit my parents have done. If it’s as good as Green Arrow #21? Then I’ve never been more relieved.

The plot in a (coco)nutshell: Green Arrow, aka Oliver Queen heads off into the desert to have a pow-wow with his spirit guide, Magus. Cue the drug-sequence! Cue the revelations about Oliver’s dad! Cue the trippy visuals and overly dramatic dialogue! Jeff Lemire generally has been a solid writer in my ever-diminishing DC subscription pile. If I were to give anyone in the New 52 a free shot with which to draw me into a book I’d not read? Lemire is second only to Scott Snyder. Well, perhaps I’ve been a bit too nice. Green Arrow #21 is monumentally frustrating—because parts of it are oddly compelling, and everything else winds up thrown away to the ‘trope-o-tron’ I’m continuously fighting in current comics.

Look, can we have a meeting? I’m waving the white flag. There’s simply no need to run ram-shot over well-established origins. It was cute when Geoff Johns did it every now and then. But with the New 52, it seems like everyone wants a crack at modernizing, or mucking up just about every origin in an attempt to do what, I’ll never know. GA #21 contends that Oliver Queen’s father (who admittedly in canon was even less an actual character than Thomas Wayne) was searching the globe for ‘The Arrow’, a mystical weapon that would grant enlightenment. It would seem that when Ollie was left for dead on the island that would shape his emerald path… things were not so much left to random happenstance. Nah. Lemire wants us to get excited about weapon-driven cults, and an macabre-revamp of ‘The Outsiders’. I can’t wait for Metamorpho to get a Nehru collar.

My basic issue here is that what we’re left with in GA #21 is a mish-mash of everything I’m seeing being done elsewhere. Clandestine groups of weapon-centrics? Five Weapons. A new secret origin wherein our titular hero is meant to believe he was destined to be who he is instead of through hard work? Iron Man (and the ‘Secret Origin arc going on…). A sage who helps unlock mental blocks and drive us to the next big story arc? Hell, look at my review a few weeks back on Red Hood and the Outlaws! While I’m sure Jeff Lemire isn’t aping the plot and direction of those aforementioned titles knowingly, he is showing that too many books by the big two are leaning on broken crutches to be ‘modern’. And for a character as charming as Ollie Queen? It’s mind-numbingly dumb to do so.

The core of Queen is his ambiguous moral compass, his street-level-small-picture attitude, and most importantly… his so-left-communists-balk heart. GA #21 shows none of these attributes. Instead, Oliver is an angsty, whiny, driven hero like so many other New 52 brethren. It’s beleaguering after a while. Can’t anyone be more than a quip or an emo-scream?! But I digress.

Art is handled by Andrea Sorrentino with an amazing color-assist from Marcelo Maiolo. In spite of all the hokey story beats, the book is a beauty to behold. Warm tones bath Sorrentino’s choppy figures. Detail is poured across a few splashy pages, and reserved for trading dialogue heads where need be. While some faces tend to lose so much detail they become amorphous blobs on a few occasions… the good outweighs the bad quite a bit as the story progresses. Take the nightmarish visage of Oliver’s ‘super-villains’ or the appearance of a three-headed dragon… and you will see an artist begging to hope to Justice League Dark, Animal Man, or even Swamp Thing. Instead, Andrea is left to render minimalist scene after minimalist scene. Suffice to say: the book looks far better than it reads.

At the end of day, Green Arrow is off to find the remaining two ‘dragons’. What that means, I’ve no clue. But he’s packed up his small band of side-characters, maintained his ‘Brad Pitt meet whoever is playing Ollie on the CW’ look, and is ready to take on Shado in the next arc. There was a time when I flipped open a GA book to see a hero whose worst enemy was always himself. A man who was driven by his love of his fellow man. A hero who had a clear agenda. A pro-active hero, instead of a reactive one. Jeff Lemire buries any of these tenants in lieu of Kung-Fu warrior clans, drug-induced walkabouts, and a few family secrets peppered in. Erik Larson dared to tell us to dive headfirst into a comic because the thrill of the unknown could be the kick in our pants to find something amazing.

Sadly, I’m left with no questions for Ollie Queen. I think I’ll go find Clint Barton instead.