Sunday, November 28, 2010

One Good Thing And One Bad Thing About Green Arrow #6



GOOD THING: There's relatively little Brightest Day nonsense in this issue. After a brief page of Galahad musing upon duty and public service, we are treated to a picture-perfect fight scene with Ollie storming the Queen Enterprises building and fighting an army of mooks in close quarters.





BAD THING: Storywise, everything falls apart once Ollie confronts The Queen and we finally get her backstory. While it's not hard to believe that a naive, attractive young woman from a backwater berg might be easily wooed by some sweet nothings from a millionaire playboy out for a quick fling and come to believe he was the handsome prince come to save her from a life of toil and misery, it is rather hard to believe that Ollie would take her at her word about his father's apparent plans to abandon his family to bring home a Russian trophy bride, before his untimely death.





What is worse is that Ollie's justification for believing the story in the first place is that he knows what lying about an affair sounds like. "So does Dinah." There are two problems with this...

1. Lying about having slept with someone is quite different than denying having slept with them. Granted that lying is lying, The Queen wouldn't be "lying about an affair" in the same sense that Ollie means in this sentence.

2. As I've pointed out numerous times in the past, the rumors of Oliver Queen's cheating on Dinah have been greatly exaggerated to put it mildly, briefly and politely.

(On a side note, It's surreal going back and rereading an article I wrote about how Oliver Queen didn't ever cheat on Dinah Lance mere months before Judd Winick wrote the infamous story where Green Arrow slept with Black Lightning's niece.)

And this is ignoring the fact that the dialogue used (and the artwork with Ollie and Dinah in their modern costumes) seems to suggest that Ollie lied about an affair to Dinah recently, when - as we all know if you've been reading my rants - that Ollie has only ever cheated on Dinah once. And the way the lines are written suggest that it was an affair that drove Oliver and Dinah apart recently- not Ollie's attempts to conceal his killing of Prometheus and getting caught before he could tell Dinah everything.

Lying did end the relationship, yes. But not lying about an affair.



The Final Verdict: Good action sequences and artwork are betrayed by a massive plot hole that serves to make the title character look bad over a subject that is already a sore point with most devout Arrowheads. Sadly, I suspect only I and a few others will care at this point given that this is the best treatment Oliver Queen has had in years. Which is really sad, the more I think about it.

2 comments:

  1. I stopped reading this book when I realised Krul really was trying to shoe-horn a romance in before Dinah's wedding ring is even cold. (Marion? Really?)
    But that's not Dinah's modern costume. That's her pre-BoP costume that she was wearing when she dumped Ollie over Marianne (sigh). That's still not cheating, but still.

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  2. Actually, she's barely been in the book and there's been no hint of romance since the first issue. I'm not saying it's not coming but still...
    And that's not Ollie's outfit from the Grell days. And the artists are so inconsistent on drawing Dinah wearing her mother's outfit with the cleavage lately I don't eve notice any more unless it's particularly gratuitous like when Cliff Chiang or whoever the artist during the last few issues of Green Arrow/Black Canary drew her.
    But yeah... what happened with Marianne and Ollie? Not cheating. One kiss. And the set-up was that she kissed him JUST as Dinah walked in. And the break-up was more about Dinah not thinking she could trust Ollie than it was about "cheating".

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