I mean there's snow. A guy has a beard. And, uh...
Okay, look, I looked back and saw that pretty much every month I've reviewed at least one Green Arrow comic and I decided that since this one was the most "winter-y," I would review it. Sadly, though, it isn't one of the good Green Arrow books.
I've already expressed how I feel about the New 52 Green Arrow line and how the creative team of Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino saved the book from possible destruction. The problem with the book wasn't that it was bad, it was just, to be blunt, pretty boring.
Nothing really had any weight to it. I hardly ever felt as emotionally invested as I would be when the book became more character-based and less event-based. I started reading Green Arrow from the trades, then the monthly comics, so the trades should have been a good way for me to get interested in the goings-on of Oliver, and I hardly ever was. The end of Issue 13 piqued my issue because Hawkman was fighting a war over Seattle.
Another issues the books had is the fact that nothing had any consequences. Things just sort of happened and that was it. The issue I'm examining today is the end of the three part "Triple Threat" storyline. At the end, Oliver realizes his blood has been taken, and if memory serves correctly, that plot point has yet to be seen again. And we just got issue 37 a week ago. Not to mention that Oliver forms an emotional bond over one of the triplets yet that too is never brought up again.
Heck, in the following issue, there's a woman that looks exactly like her (no not one of the other two, obviously) and Oliver doesn't even bat an eye at the resemblance, whereas I had to go back and check to make sure that they weren't the same person. I wished they were, though, as that would have made things way more interesting than not having her around.
I just found it difficult to take the stories here seriously when they bounced around so much and were only decent at best. The strange part is, the Green Arrow run was piloted by some established writers. Dan Jurgens, the writer of the first six issues, wrote "The Death of Superman" and Ann Nocenti has written several titles since the 80s. The art was never amazing, sadly, and at times difficult to follow.
Okay, so, I'm being a bit of a bad person by reading the third part of a three-part story, but it's thankfully the best of the three parts. The other two parts weren't particularly good and after reading over them again I found them to be nothing but two issues of sex jokes and a stupid Oliver Queen. Seriously. A triplet of blondes attack Green Arrow pretending to be fans. He sleeps with one of them. He shows little caring about his company despite the fact that he has done absolutely nothing for it and could easily lose his job. When he realizes he's been kidnapped, one of the Skylarks (we shall call her The Skylark because she was never given a name due to their father not liking individuality), lets him go. So he gets captured again but King Leer praises him for showing fighting prowess against rabid wolves, so he sleeps with The Skylark again. Then he escapes again with The Skylark. all the while they make stupid sex jokes and Naomi and Jax (part of the old Team Arrow) are trying to figure out if he is dead or alive, a subplot that pretty much goes nowhere.
The cover for the issue is okay, I guess. Having Oliver in a frozen western-setting is interesting but the fact that he is using arrow-guns is a little strange. Sure, it goes along with the western vibe, but it's Green Arrow. He's not one for guns. He even says in the previous issue that anyone can pull a trigger. And the fact that they're hiding who he is firing at--and clearly missing most of his shots--is silly, since we know in all probability it's King Leer.
The issue begins with Oliver being attacked by Eskimo-looking folk. In a western town. In the snow...
What?
Oliver is even speaking like a southern person, using the word "ain't" in most of his speech bubbles. Also, the reason they attacked him is very poor. They thought he was King Leer while he slept peacefully inside a room with his lover. What? Couldn't they have just peeped inside and been like "huh, he's wearing green and not the white we're used to seeing, it's not him!"
We find out through the Eskimo-ish people that King Leer has been laying waste to the surrounding areas, and that he has taken down tons of people in his wake. King Leer initiates his plan of swapping one of the Skylark triplets with our The Skylark to emotionally ruing Green Arrow. Why? He's a protective father, I think. His motivations behind gold-mining are extremely cloudy.
They arrive at yet another western-looking town but this one at least has western-looking people in it. And despite the immense cold outside, these people are dressed very warmly. So unless there is heating--which I highly doubt given how the buildings are structured--those people are freezing their butts off just to look cool. Also, more sex jokes. Yay...
Oliver spits in the tavern without realizing it's a hanging offense.
...
What? Spitting is a hanging offense? How stupid is that? This really a five-star place, it's a freaking run-down, poor replica of the cowboy life. These people make anything out of muskrat! I'm not even kidding, everything on their menu was prefaced with "muskrat." And they go after Oliver because he spat?
Oliver beats the snot out of them and then asks, in exchange for gold, the bear that he and The Skylark caught. When he goes back to get a drink from the bar, one of Leer's Skylark paralyzes and mutes The Skylark, swapping places with her before she and Oliver get it on. However, the paralysis allows her to hear everything, yet then it's also going to wipe her memory of it. So, why put her through the torture of having to hear it if she's not going to remember it anyway?
Naomi finally tracks Oliver down to the Crow town he's staying in while he and The Skylark--unable to remember the previous night--head off to one of the secret tunnels (which also goes up the mountain) to find Leer. However, the map that Oliver was given was made by one of Leer's Skylarks, but since Oliver doesn't know about the body-swap, he thinks The Skylark betrayed him. And since the Skylark can't remember a thing, she has little proof for her besides Oliver trusting her.
Oliver engages Leer in battle and proceeds to get his butt-whooped. Oh yeah, that's another thing about these early Green Arrow books. Oliver tends to get beaten up a lot by extremely low-level fighters, when he is definitely one of the greatest martial artists in the entire world. Sure, Leer's strong and got two women to help him, but Oliver's got a batch of trick arrows and two freaking guns at his disposal. He easily handled the three Skylarks, and since Leer isn't too quick, Oliver should easily have handled Leer instead of getting tossed around the place.
Naomi shows up and Oliver hops onto the ladder dropped by Naomi while the mountainside crumbles. The Skylark chooses to fall to her death because, uh, Green Arrow broke up with her. Yup, that's pretty much the only reason I can get out of it.
He laments that he lost his company and that his decision of leaving will haunt him for a long time. So basically, that little subplot about what was going on in Seattle actually turned out to be far more important than the events we were following. That's kinda lame.
So yeah, this issue is pretty much sub-par, as per the course of the early-Green Arrow-goings. Nothing led to anything and all that really happened was that he slowly lost control of his company and no events flowed into each other. The events themselves weren't very impactful. This one is probably one of the more memorable simply because it's a new landscape compared to the city-scapes we'd seen before.
Still, this issue was hardly anything more than sex-jokes, a poor running gag of Oliver trying to find his bear, and then a sudden reminder that, oh yeah, Oliver runs (and has now lost) a company.
Next week, we'll close off 2014 by taking a look at "Captain Marvel Vol. 1: Higher, Further, Faster" one of the best new comics to come out of the year.
I would look at Moon Knight, but, I already did. So sass in space it is!
If you want to stay up to date on when I post, be sure to follow me on Twitter @seanovan13 and on Instagram @seanovan10. Thanks for reading!
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