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

Flashpoint #5

Title: Flashpoint
Issue: 5
Date: October 2011
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Geoff Johns
Penciler: Andy Kubert
Inker: Sandra Hope, Jesse Delperdang
Colorist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Nick J. Napolitano
Editor: Eddie Berganza, Rex Ogle
Cover: Andy Kubert, Sandra Hope, Alex Sinclair

Disclaimer: I didn't read any other issues of this series. But, having read this one and skimmed the Wikipedia Page, I don't really feel like I needed to.

In the midst of a whole bunch of mayhem, Zoom confronts Flash and restores Barry's lost memories by "resetting your internal vibrations". Apparently this is extremely painful. Probably because the human brain has a limited tolerance for horribly contrived pseudoscientific nonsense.

It is then revealed that...

SPOILER WARNING

The entire Flashpoint miniseries is nothing more than a good old fashioned time travel story about how you can't just go an change the past because all kinds of unforeseen stuff will happen. That's all there is to it.

Five issues. Sixteen different miniseries. A whole bunch of one-shots. And a map of Africa featuring the words "Ape Controlled" (Really, DC? Really?).

And the whole point was to tell the same story about what happens if you go back in time and step on a butterfly kill Hitler save your mom from a supervillain that every SF author since HG Wells has been telling.

So, in terms of the actual explanation it was a bit underwhelming.

The big climactic battle suffered from the same problem that the big climactic battles in these crossover series always suffer from: Too many characters need to get their big final resolution scenes. The result is a series of quick deaths with no emotional impact (and even less in this series because of the "Elseworlds" nature of the whole thing and the looming DC Universe reboot that will restore most of these characters).

That being said, Zoom gets a pretty good comeuppance that works well in the context of the story and delivers some satisfying impact. And the story does get quite a bit better once we enter epilogue mode and have dispensed with the mass battle stuff. The resolution of affairs between Barry and his mom is a nice touch and the fact that she goes knowingly to her fate is an interesting choice of plot direction. Likewise the final scene with Barry and Bruce Wayne is excellent and it gets a full seven pages.

The actual "reset the timeline" bit was a full two-page spread featuring some hooded woman who I probably should recognize but don't explaining (non-explaining, really) that there were three timelines because the "history of heroes" was shattered, and that they will now merge into one. Okay. This will probably make sense to some of the serious DC fanboys. For people like me, they kept it short and provided lots of random pictures of different version of DC superheroes in the background.

The problem I had with this series in general is that nothing in it really matters. Everyone knew going in that the reset button was going to get hit. Like most time travel stories, the final goal is simply to put the universe back to what it was before (or in this case a very slightly altered version to coincide with the relaunch). So there's no real emotional investment in the end result, nor are there any real stakes being decided while we're in Elseworlds mode. Or, to use Marvel's terminology, this entire series was a huge "What If?" story. And the appeal of "What If?" is to give us a glimpse of an altered version of the world. The altered version presented in this series was nasty, brutish, and ultimately uninteresting.

Given the limitations of what DC set out to do, I'm actually surprised that this final issue had anything worth reading in it at all. It did, and that's something at least. But I'm not exactly regretting not reading the rest of this mess.

Rating: 5.5/10