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Green Arrow #32
DC Comics, $2.99, 32 pages
Released: June 4, 2014
Story Grade: B+
Issue Score: 72.00
POINTEDLY RECOMMENDED
"Broken, Part One"
(20 pages / 87 panels / 1,366 words / 10:05 read time)
Writer: Jeff Lemire
Artist: Andrea Sorrentino
Colorist: Marcelo Maiolo
Letterers: Dezi Sienty
Editor: Brian Cunningham
The two-in-one image on this month's cover is a compelling one, effective in that it's almost certain to entice potential buyers to pick it up off the stands for a closer look. And that, of course, is 90 percent of making the sale.
The plot however, is not much to speak of. Green Arrow returns to Seattle — and it's a measure of how successful the CW Arrow series is that mention of Ollie protecting Seattle, instead of Starling City, or even old-school Star City, seems at first jarring — whereupon he promptly gets smacked around by admitted D-List villains. Meanwhile, Diggle gets slapped by Not-Richard Dragon. And that's about all that happens, really.
Among the D-Listers, The Red Dart seems an interesting new addition to Green Arrow's personal Rogues Gallery and I do like Killer Moth making the transfer from Gotham. Brick, however, is new to me, although it's clear from the dialogue that this is not his first appearance. Unfortunately, Sorrentino's art is terribly, and uncharacteristically, unclear on the page where he crashes in — he looks to be about twice Green Arrow's size — making it hard to tell exactly what his powers are. It seems that he has some kind of thunder-stomp, on maybe he wields a boom-stick, I'm really not sure. Meanwhile, I also had to search his scene extra hard because, while Red Dart mentions splitting the bounty on Green Arrow's head three ways, Killer Moth doesn't actually show up for another page. So, I was taken out of the story for an entire page, confused by Brick and also wondering where the heck D-Lister #3 was supposed to be.
Speaking of showing up, theres Emiko at the end in the prototypical last page, splash-panel surprise, claiming to be the New Green Arrow while wearing black and red. It seems she's destined to become the New Speedy, which I'm not at all looking forward to. For decades, writers have struggled to make Green Arrow more than Batman-with-a-bow and yet here's Lemire saddling him with a Damien-like adolescent asshat.
Of course, Green Arrow's thing, as made clear on his TV show, is that he's part of a team, as opposed to the Bat-family being, largely, a collection of individual operatives. I can't wait for Felicty to show up in Seattle, but I am glad we have Diggle at this point. Interestingly, and again proving how important the CW mythology has become, the revelation this issue that Diggle took down Not-Richard Dragon's father plays a lot more powerfully if you're familiar with similar scenes from the TV show.
The Not-Richard Dragon flashbacks are down well, stylistically, with archaic coloring rendered in a way that gives a sense of times past (even if you don't happen to have begin reading comics in the 1970s) while not being overly garish, as the technique can sometimes be. So, hats off to Sorrentino and Maiolo. My only complaint is that the flashback scenes take up entirely too much space. Not-Richard Dragon's origin, for example, could have been done just as well on one page as two. Trimming some of those sequences might have left room for a little more in the way of character bits. After all, with all the chatter about Billy Tockman this issue, it's sort of a shame he gets no actual panel time.
But the biggest benefit of cutting needlessly large flashback panels would have been to make room for more plot development. As noted, while there's a lot of neat character bits and some great dialogue this issue, not a ton actually happens. That's largely been true of Lemire's entire run on this title. While his work is vastly superior to what came before in the New 52 era (better, even, than most of the post-Grell comics, for that matter) each individual issue tends to cover precious little ground. The Outsiders epic, for example, ran about four months longer than it needed to, and this new storyline promises more of the same.
My only other critique this issue is that, for some reason, almost all of the sound-effects lettering looks too much like what it is — Photoshopped fonts layered on top of the art — instead of something that is organically part of the page itself.
[COVER: 8.00 — PLOT: 6.25 — SCRIPT: 8.75 — LAYOUT: 7.0 — ARTWORK: 8.50 — EDITING: 6.0 — COLORS/PRODUCTION: 7.50 — DOLLAR VALUE: 6.25 — COLLECTIBILITY: 7.0 —GOSH-WOW FACTOR: 6.75]
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