Oliver blasts “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake as he travels the United States trying to stop the Ninth Circle. Maybe along the way he’ll learn to not try and be the drifter and walk alone the whole way.
Written by Benjamin PercyCover by Otto Schmidt
Illustrated and Colored by Stephen Byrne
Lettered by Nate Piekos“HARD TRAVELING HERO” part one! Unwilling to let another city suffer the same fate as Seattle, Green Arrow kicks off a new quest to hunt down the Ninth Circle across America! To stop disaster before it can happen, the (in)famously hot-headed Oliver Queen must mend fences with those he’s alienated in the past, starting with THE FLASH! The second epic year of GREEN ARROW REBIRTH begins here!
Over the last 26 issues writer Benjamin Percy has stitched together old and new concepts within the Green Arrow mythos. However, now that Seattle-Star City has turned against their Emerald Archer Percy begins to pay homage to one of the best-known team up stories in DC Comics with ‘Hard Traveling Hero,’ an homage title to the famous “Green Arrow/Green Lantern” ‘Hard-Traveling Heroes’ run by Dennis O’Neil. As Ollie goes on a road trip across America to bring down the Ninth Circle. That’s a big job for someone of “limited abilities” maybe it’s time for the famously lone archer (in his head) to get a little help.
If the next several issues bear out much like this one, Percy may have one of the most enjoyable single-issue hero books for a while. While everything about its production is modern, Percy writes it with Silver Age sensibility from its largely contained structure to the unnatural naturalism of this sort of team up. What could’ve been billed as Green Arrow x the DCU is instead treated like a crossover episode of Scooby Doo, it just kind of happens and then a Monster needs to get unmasked. Green Arrow rides along, not quite minding his own business, and runs into another major DC hero (The Flash) who is working a separate but connected case. The not quite meet cute lets Percy work the pun and insult game, though it never quite gelled for me. The use of happenstance to just throw these two characters together feels right. In a story world dominated by capes, books featuring guest spots by characters outside the series cast makes perfect (comic book) sense. Even the brief exposition dump by Barry that catches everyone up on what’s been going on in “The Flash” and reveals their individual enemies are one and the same works.
All of this coalesces around a nicely structured issue that makes it a fulfilling read. “Green Arrow” #26 is a piece of episodic content that serves a serialized story. I can’t tell you how many times I groaned at an individual issue of a comic that ends up structured like old film serial, that is to say episodes built around ever rising action. That structure clashes with our modern understanding and conditioning, via television, on how episodic content can serve a serialized structure. While comic book craftsmanship is often an exercise in working with physical constraints, Percy’s ability to fit in a nice two page ‘B’ plot featuring Emiko and Dinah gives this book a sprawling sort of appeal. It also lets him break up and not deal with the boring stuff found in the ‘A’ plot and ideally make a better story overall. Much like the series ‘Rebirth’ issue, ‘Hard Traveling Hero’ completed a nice simple emotional story between Arrow and Flash that also gestures toward continued adventures and team ups in issues to come.
Benjamin Percy may have overwritten a couple of pages with Oliver’s internal monologue. When that monologue is in the service of punnery, I’m all for it. However, a couple of pages just feel a little cluttered with words that don’t elevate the sequence. Instead they just reinforce already known information and block Stephen Byrne’s art. Take for example the page wherein Ollie begins to investigate the Cascade Range. This is a normal enough page, cut into thirds with the middle third further subdivided for a small sequence. Percy has already established that something is amiss in the woods. and while telling the reader the geologic makeup of the region is good juxtaposition, that’s one 24-word box. The pages other 6 boxes don’t serve this purpose and just get in the way of things.
Continued belowThe reason for this page is to raise tension and drive Ollie deeper into the woods for plot purposes. Byrne’s art dose all of this without the need for Percy scripted context. These woods are a paradox of deathly stillness and bursting with life. Byrne pictures the Green Arrow slowly making his way deeper into this lonely forest. And then, that paradox is springs forward in the mid page with a three-panel strip of a bird hatching. It’s like Jurassic Park, but smaller and cutter, until the bird BURSTS from its egg crackling with energy like a phoenix. These images efficiently tell the story of the page better than Percy’s words. It’s just a case of less being more.
That single page also encapsulates how Byrne approaches depictions of super speed in his art. While I am a bit of a mark for Otto Schmidt’s work his cover, and style, are nice immediate contrast when considering Byrne’s approach. Schmidt’s art often features highly expressive faces in dynamic positions with light line work. Byrne’s art also features expressive faces, the look of disdain on Ollie’s face as the Flash stops by after a page turn sells Nate Piekos embiggened lettering. The main point of difference lay in their approach to figures, Byrne’s aren’t all that dynamic in this issue. One side of a figure is often enveloped with a strong outside line which gives everything a statuesque quality. For the most part that strong perimeter is the majority of the line work on figures, with Byrne also on color duties he uses shading to give figures a three-dimensional feel.
So, then, how does he give the illusion of speed with statuesque figures? The answer is twofold: speed lines and page layouts. Speed lines are what they sound like, Byrne draws lines leading up to a figure in a panel to show motion. Except, here they aren’t so much lines as big blocks of a fundamental color (mostly green or red) with a dash of jagged lines to represent energy. On the page design front, Byrne uses long horizontal panels to create an appearance of space. With panels being wide and not all that tall gives him the ability to fit more of them in there then you’d expect. Which means more pieces of sequential art. His splash pages use that to cram as much action in to two pages as possible, with panels bleeding into one another. For all intents and purposes the big set piece of this issue is confined to a Marvel Ultimate Alliance team up maneuver by Green Arrow and The Flash. By laying out pages with lots of page spanning but not all that tall panels, Byrne is able to make easily read sequential action and create the illusion of speed even if his figures actually counter that assumption.
Final Verdict: 7.5 – ‘Hard Traveling Hero’ gets off to a strong start as the Emerald Archer begins to learn to make if not friends, partners, as he tries to take down his greatest foe.
