Written by JT Krul
Illustrated by Dan Jurgens (with George Perez!)Green Arrow is on the hunt. Driven by inner demons, Ollie Queen travels the world and brings outlaws to justice…by breaking every law.
Now, armed with cutting-edge weaponry and illegally gained intel (courtesy of his team at QCore), Green Arrow is shooting first and asking questions later.
Green Arrow (or rather Ollie Queen) is a long-time favorite of mine. He’s a pretty rocking character, and there is something about a normal guy with a bow and arrow amidst near gods that I find endearing (see: Hawkeye). I have to say, I’ve read very little by JT Krul (just his solid run at the end of Teen Titans), so I was curious as to what he would do with this new version of the character.
Find out my thoughts after the jump.
Holy 90’s, Batman! Or rather, Green Arrow.
Do you remember the 90’s? That rough and tumble era of comics, in which good comics were replaced with their evil twins that focused on action sequences and generic characterization? I do too.
This comic feels like it has been resurrected, much to my chagrin.
Ollie Queen is back in a far younger form, and he’s running his Queen Industries at the same level as LexCorp and WayneTech by day while protecting the common man as Green Arrow at night. Your average man would be satisfied by the billions he’s earned from inventions like the Q-Pad (ugh!), but Queen isn’t. He’s driven to Paris to take down bad guys like Supercharge (ugh!!) and Dynamix (ugh!!!) whilst saying lines like “You’re right. I have a lot of toys…but I don’t play games.” (UGH!!!!)
This book is painful from a written standpoint. I like the idea of Ollie getting back to his man of the people background, but why the hell is he in Paris doing it? That aspect feels very forced amidst setting up the whole story. Everything on the written side of things (including, and perhaps especially, the solicit) is a hard pill to swallow.
Which is a shame, because Dan Jurgens (with George Perez inking!) is actually pretty on point throughout. While it also has a distinct 80’s/90’s feel to it as well, there are some really nice scenes rendered by the team along with some clever layouts. The thing about this book is it very easily could have been better if it was just art. I’m not sure if it is the fact that Jurgens is a writer too, but this is a guy who gets how to tell a story visually. I could have taken away just as much – if not more – from this book with no words at all.
This is a short review, and it’s a tough one for me to write. I was hoping for more, and what I got was a book that was a bomb from the written standpoint. It definitely gets some points for art, but if the DCnU was supposed to be an effort to start fresh and attract new readers to the medium, then why does this feel like a nostalgic blast to the most creatively bankrupt period in comics history?
Final Verdict: 3.5 – Pass
