Sunday, March 28, 2010

One Good Thing And TECHINCALLY One Bad Thing (With Some Ranting) AboutThe Fall of Aresnal #1



GOOD THING: This issue did give us a lot of scenes that SHOULD have been in JUSTICE LEAGUE: CRY FOR JUSTICE. Chief among them are scenes where Roy Harper finds out about Lian's death and our FINALLY seeing the fight scene where Prometheus cuts off Roy Harper's arm.







BAD THING: J.T. Krul's grasp of the characters and continuity is still very uneven. Most of the characters - Roy in particular - are written true to form, but the scenario just doesn't work. And it all falls apart when Krul has to deal with a character he (or his editor) clearly didn't research that well.

Case in point. The scene in which Dinah confronts hospital-escapee Roy, as he has just finished fighting off a band of looters who had broken into the home he had just got for himself and Lian in Star City.





There's a lot of things wrong here, even if you ignore the asinine idea that an adoptive parent cannot possibly love their child as much as a biological parent.

1. Dinah's Fertility Or Lack Thereof: Dinah's infertility - which was a big issue back in the Mike Grell Green Arrow run - doesn't logically apply anymore. It was said outright that Dinah's inability to have children was due to injuries she suffered during Longbow Hunters - the same incident that took away her Canary Cry for a time.

Those injuries were healed near the end of Chuck Dixon's run on Birds of Prey when a near-death Dinah was dunked in a Lazarus Pit, which returned her superpowers. Admittedly, nobody has said outright that Dinah still can't have babies since then but there's no logical reason why The Lazarus Pit shouldn't have healed her baby-making parts along with her vocal cords.

2. Dinah's Adopted Daughter: Given that Dinah spent a few days thinking her adopted daughter Sin had been killed (see Tony Bedard's four-issue Black Canary mini-series), I rather think that Dinah DOES know how it feels to lose a daughter, Flesh-And-Blood or no.

3. Dinah The Foster Mother: Granting that Roy is hurting and lashing out at the world, it still seems a little unbelievable that he would be poking at Dinah with this talk about not knowing what it's like to be a flesh-and-blood parent... considering that Dinah was the one who stayed with him and got him through rehab. Indeed, in most ways Dinah is the closet thing Roy ever had to a maternal figure in his life - particularly in his darkest hour when he most desperately needed someone to care for him.

I think - with Dinah's silence here - they were TRYING to go for a feeling similar to the classic Batman: The Animated Series episode Robin's Reckoning, where Dick Grayson finally confronts the man who is responsible for killing his parents, nearly goes over the edge in fighting him and curses out Batman, who has been trying to keep him out of the fight the whole episode...

"Stuff your advice, Batman! You and your stone-cold heart! You don't know how I feel! How could you?!"

To his credit, Dick quickly realizes just how STUPID it is to tell Batman that he has no idea what it is like to lose your parents and want revenge on the man responsible and apologizes.

The problem with this scene relative to that scene is that Roy does not have that moment of realization and that Dinah - to her credit - does not call him on the stupidity of his statement, recognizing that it has come out of pain and that he doesn't really mean it.

There's also the fact that Roy is - at the moment - on enough Vicodin to make Dr. House say "Dude, that's too much!" so it's likely he's not thinking all that clearly to begin with. So Dinah probably knows that Roy won't remember any of this and that arguing with him about that point won't do anyone any good.

And all of this is ignoring the fact that this is Roy Harper talking about the importance of Flesh and Blood family.

Roy Harper, whose mom died in childbirth.

Roy Harper, whose dad died in a forest fire when Roy was young, leaving him in the care of Brave Bow, a Navajo shaman who adopted Roy as his son.

Roy Harper, who was orphaned AGAIN and cast out by the tribe he had lived among his entire life only to be adopted - a second time - by Oliver Queen.

Roy Harper, who was cast out of his home by an angry Oliver Queen once his drug habit came to light, and set about building his own life on his own?

Roy Harper, the twice orphaned, twice adopted and twice abandoned self-made superhero/master marksman... THIS man is going to put a lot of store on the idea that Family is a matter of blood?

Bollocks, I say. And the history backs me up on that.



From Superboy #82, in which Roy Harper meets with the clone of his great Uncle and tries to establish a relationship.




The Final Verdict: It's like watching John Wayne in The Conqueror - he plays his usual tough guy character well and the dialogue is well-written... but that doesn't change the fact that the scenario just doesn't work relative to the actors and the script. Everyone sounds like themselves, for the most part, but the parts which are wrong just drag you out of the story and break the fourth wall.

6 comments:

  1. The lazurus pit was even brought up by the characters as something to cure Dinah's baby-making. Though the restoration of her cry was obviously the meta-purpose to the entire plot, the only reason she was in the vicinity of a Lazurus Pit to start with was because Ra's Al Ghul wanted her to have his babies.
    So yeah, I'd say it's pretty obvious (even Word of God, if the person writing the between-story blurbs in For Better Or Worse can count as that)
    However, the more I read those panels I haven't read the comic, the more I think that it is just Roy lashing out in pain, and when you're in pain you want to make it clear that no one understands your pain. An adopted son lashing out at his adopted mother who has lost another adopted child, is pretty much the only person I from whom will forgive such a crappy phrase as "own flesh-and-blood". Because you take the cheap shots when you're in that much pain.

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  2. The lazurus pit was even brought up by the characters as something to cure Dinah's baby-making. Though the restoration of her cry was obviously the meta-purpose to the entire plot, the only reason she was in the vicinity of a Lazurus Pit to start with was because Ra's Al Ghul wanted her to have his babies.
    It's been a while since I read that issue but I THOUGHT that was the case.
    However, the more I read those panels I haven't read the comic, the more I think that it is just Roy lashing out in pain, and when you're in pain you want to make it clear that no one understands your pain. An adopted son lashing out at his adopted mother who has lost another adopted child, is pretty much the only person I from whom will forgive such a crappy phrase as "own flesh-and-blood". Because you take the cheap shots when you're in that much pain.
    And yet... somehow, the way this is written and illustrated... Roy seems more like a whiny kid than a man in mourning, if that makes sense?

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  3. Actually, yeah it does. i feel like I'm willing to give Roy a free pass for stupidity, but not the writer.

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  4. YEah that's right because I'm pretty sure she did tell Ra's that she couldn't have babies... and he was all 'teehee' about it.

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  5. ... you're right! As was said above, that was the whole reason he took Di to the pits in the first place!

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  6. Yeah. Roy can afford to be irrational but the whole situation the writer (or, as I increasingly suspect, DC Editorial) has created is irrational.

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