Review: Green Arrow #27

SPOILER WARNING: This review contains spoilers for Green Arrow #27, and other issues of Green Arrow.

Positives:

When you’re trying to rebuild a character from the ground up, as Jeff Lemire is trying to do with Green Arrow (lord knows he needs it after the first sixteen issues of just awful comics), you really should go all out. You need to either completely revamp the origin, or add a new twist to the original story. Lemire seems to be doing a fairly good job, so far, of setting up a major twist with the original “Island Story”. The implications that Ollie being stranded on the island was no accident is definitely an interesting addition to the mythos.

The Andrea Sorrentino splash page has become something of a monthly expectancy for Green Arrow readers, every month Sorrentino creates a fantastic splash page and we all go crazy for it. He delivers again this week with two beautifully detailed splash pages that continue to build on the amazing amount of artwork he has done for Green Arrow.

Negatives:

While the current change to Ollie’s backstory might be “interesting” it can’t necessarily be called good. Ollie has fallen victim to a plague that’s affected a number of DC heroes since the reboot. It happened to The Question and now it’s happening to Green Arrow. It seems as though DC is trying to get rid of backstories where the character chooses to become their alter ego in favor of a story where it’s either preordained or some mysterious force made it happen. While this isn’t always bad, it kind of takes some wind out of the sails when it comes to Ollie. One of the things that made him great was that he chose his own path; he chose to be out on the rooftops every night. Not because his parents were killed in front of him, not because he was given near god-like power and had to do what’s right, but because he wanted to do what was right. What Lemire is doing could end up working in the end because having faith in him has usually worked out in the past, but as it is right now, it’s just another story lost to the New 52.

Verdict: 

The dialogue is fine, the art is great, but the overall story is going in a worrisome direction.

Any Lemire story has the potential to be great, but this single issue will likely be remembered as one of the hiccups in his larger Green Arrow story.