Green Arrow #2 - A Review

Oliver Queen is missing and presumed dead. His boat was found abandoned off the Washington state coast, filled to the brim with booze and illegal drugs. His secretary's corpse was found washed ashore close-by. And then the allegations of bullying his employees and misappropriating company funds came out...

But Oliver Queen is innocent and, more importantly, not dead! And while he may feel all alone in the world, he still has some friends left. One of them is a certain fishnet-clad singer who is ready to do what she does best to avenge his memory. And what Black Canary does best is hurt bad people.


At this point I am ready to write off most of the fears I had regarding this series when I came into it. Benjamin Percy has proven a firm grasp on the characters of Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance. Black Canary is portrayed in all her complexity as both a broken-bird and as a Fury in fishnets - a competent warrior who is in no danger of being portrayed as a damsel in distress or a manic pixie. Green Arrow, in turn, is shown as to be a man with a cynic's mind and a romantic's heart.



This is expressed eloquently in one page by Otto Schmidt's artwork. If pressed for a single image to express how Oliver Queen looks at Dinah Lance, you couldn't ask for a better one than Ollie's dream vision of an golden-winged angel lifting him up and out of the pitfall of his own making. The damnable thing is Schmidt proves just as skilled at depicting straight-forward action as he does this metaphorical imagery. Green Arrow has not looked this good in quite some time.


I am hooked through the end of this story arc, at least.  My hope and trust is not easily won in regarding these characters. Yet I am prepared to hope, if not quite believe, that Green Arrow and Black Canary may finally have a worthy creative team for the first time in two decades.