Green Arrow #1

More from DC's "New 52".

Title: Green Arrow
Issue: 1
Date: November 2011
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: J. T. Krul
Penciler: Dan Jurgens
Inker: George Perez
Colorist: David Baron
Letterer: Rob Leigh
Editor: Sean Mackiewicz, Pat McCallum
Cover: Dave Wilkins

Oliver Queen gets one of the biggest makeovers in the "New 52". He's the owner of a tech corporation now, a fairly blatant ripoff of Apple (there's even a Q-Pad *sigh*). So I guess they're not so much making Ollie into Steve Jobs. They're making him into Tony Stark.

Ollie skips board meetings to travel the world hunting down (third-rate, so far) super-villains. In this case he takes on Dynamix, Doppelganger, and Supercharge in what is essentially an extended jobber squash. Ollie barely breaks a sweat as he dismantles this crew of idiots with an array of trick arrows, plus a few of the old-fashioned pointy kind. Sadly, no boxing-glove arrow, though. No Phantom Zone arrow either. That was a classic one they need to bring back sometime. But really, just one use of the boxing-glove arrow for old-times sake is all I ask!

Ollie has a support team that consist of a woman named Naomi, who is basically a poor imitation of Oracle just by the fact that she is not Barbara Gordon. She seems to wish she was on the support team of someone with fewer scruples about just blowing the bad guys up. Maybe Frank Castle is hiring?

There is also a guy named Jax who reluctantly designs weapons, and he's the best character in the book so far. Which means he'll probably get killed off around issue 3.

Ollie gets in some good lines as he lectures the villains while administering a beatdown. The experienced team of Jurgens and Perez does a great job with the art, and the action is fast-paced without losing attention to detail.

This is one of the more radical departures for a classic character that we've seen in the "New 52", and I had a bit of a hard time reconciling this corporate version of Ollie with the fight-the-power aging hippie version from earlier series. I did think this version was a huge improvement over the (awful) "corporate" version of Ollie presented in one of the Flashpoint crossovers. This character is at least competent and heroic.

Dinah is also conspicuous in her absence, and I'm hoping they have plans to get her involved somehow.

But this is an enjoyable, entertaining superhero book, and the series definitely hit the ground running.

Rating: 6.5/10

Green Arrow Industries #1

Title: Green Arrow Industries
Issue: 1
Date: August 2011
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Pornsak Pichetshote
Penciler: Marco Castiello, Ig Guara
Inker: Vincenzo Acunzo, Ruy Jose
Colorist: Stefani Renee
Letterer: Carlos M. Mangual
Editor: Kate Stewart, Joey Cavalieri

This is a Flashpoint crossover, so cue Donkey saying "This must be one of those alternate universes!"

In this particular piece of the Flashpoint universe, Oliver Queen is, well, actually he's Tony Stark. But a lot less competent. His company, Green Arrow Industries, manufactures weapons for the US Government. Except instead of doing their own research and development, they've hit upon the perfect source of new technology: Super-villains. After all, what is some random super-powered criminal going to do when Green Arrow Industries steals their gadget? Take them to court?

Of course there is the little problem that this practice tends to make Oliver a lot of enemies.

This is not an absolutely horrible setup. Which is a good thing, because the rest of the comic is, indeed, absolutely horrible.

After introducing the aforementioned scenario, we get a brief scene where security chief Roy Harper urges Oliver to use his corporate assets for good. One panel later Roy is dead (Now that death is one I would consider speedy! *ducks* Sorry, couldn't resist.).

Anyway, there are assassins loose on the premises. Actually just one assassin. The security teams and the rest of the assassins have all killed each other in a bloody battle that took place entirely off-screen. The one remaining assassin is escaping, and instead of just sitting tight and waiting for his backup to arrive, Oliver decides to go after her. He briefly considers bringing a bow that he just happened to be carrying around for no real reason, and then decides that he'd be better off arming himself with an entire rogues' gallery worth of supervillain gear. For some reason, the writer decided to make the fact that Oliver is incompetent with a bow in this universe into a running joke.

Turns out, he's actually just incompetent in general.

So he fights it out with this assassin-girl (who's armed with a bow, of course), and in between fighting they argue over various misdeeds done by Oliver's corporation, until the whole thing finally comes to a rather nasty conclusion that pretty much renders the whole story meaningless.

So, to recap, Oliver is incompetent and a jerk. Assassin-girl is a generic anti-corporate crusader whose surprising connection to Oliver is about as obvious as could be, and Roy Harper actually seems like he's got an interesting personality but is killed off on page five. Also, Harper was in charge of security when all of this went down, so he's not exactly scoring high on the competency scale either.

And the "intriguing" question posed here is the question of whether a corporation can function as a superhero, which buys a bit too into the whole corporate personhood concept for my tastes.

As I mentioned in my previous review, the basic problem with an alternate universe story like Flashpoint is that there is no real reason for the reader to care about the characters. The reader has no emotional investment in this version of Oliver Queen and Roy Harper because we all know that this is a temporary version and that the whole DC Universe is about to get reset.

The only way to win the reader over is with compelling stories and characters that are interesting and appealing enough to make the reader care.

This comic had neither.

Rating: 2.5/10