Arrow: Season 2.5 #4 - A Review

Arrow: Season 2.5 #4 is primarily concerned with the back-story of the new Brother Blood and how one of Sebastian Blood's underlings came to acquire his boss' mask and formed a doomsday cult in Starling City. The writers do a good job of delivering this information without it seeming like an exposition dump.  Nevertheless, this issue does feel somewhat repetitive as much of it repeats scenes from the show verbatim before building on the established material.  Nice as it is to see the "Bitch With Wi-Fi" scene again, it would have been better to see more new material.


The artwork by Joe Bennett and Craig Yeung is largely excellent, save that it loses fine detail in the middle and far distances.  A larger problem is that Bennett draws nearly every page as if he were emulating a camera that was in the process of falling to one side when it took its shot. I can understand wanting to vary up perspective but there's a number of pages where one wonders if they need to tilt their head to view the artwork properly or if someone changed the alignment of their monitor.


Personally, I found the all-too-brief back-up story involving the Suicide Squad far more interesting, if only for the revelation that Barack Obama is the president in the DC Television universe.  That's not to say the plot - based on current events involving religious extremists in Africa - isn't gripping stuff.  It is and I wish this comic devoted more than a page every two weeks to it.  I'd also like to see more of the photo-realistic artwork of Szymon Kudranski, whose previous work on Green Lantern I enjoyed.

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