[Editor’s note: This review may contain spoilers]
Writer: Mairghread Scott
Artists: Matthew Clark, Sean Parsons & Jason Wright
Summary
“LESS THAN” part one! At Superman’s request, Green Arrow escorts Parasite back to Stryker’s Island Prison, but Parasite feeds off the super-powers of the other inmates, breaks away from Arrow and causes a prison riot. On his own, with only the arrows in his quiver, Green Arrow will have to keep all the villains at bay and take out an overpowered Parasite!
Positives
I like the cover by Tyler Kirkham and Arif Prianto. My absolute favorite thing is that Parasite, a giant blob, has abs. It’s a full on six pack. That is delightfully absurd.
The interior art features pencils by Matthew Clark, inks by Sean Parsons and colors by Jason Wright. It’s solid art. The character models look good; Oliver is very expressive. There are some cool panel layouts using a target symbol; I loved that. And Wright provides a lot of nice colors. It’s a good looking issue.
I like that Ollie is a little sympathetic towards the prisoners including Parasite. He tries to talk to him and connect a little. It doesn’t work but I like that attempt.
Ollie has to fight King Shark and that’s just hilarious. There is an absurdity to this issue that I like a lot. The best part of that is if it wasn’t for the prison security system, Ollie just would have died. This is why you always carry the shark repellent bat-spray. It seems stupid until King Shark tries to eat you.
Negatives
The premise of the issue is that Ollie has to deal with Parasite because it’s too dangerous for a powered hero to be around him just in case. Which is fine except it doesn’t explain why Batman can’t help. There is so much talk about Ollie not being an actual superhero but no one talks about the fact that Batman doesn’t have powers either and yet is ranked alongside Superman and Wonder Woman. Maybe they’re all really at Bruce and Selina’s wedding and they didn’t want to tell Ollie he wasn’t invited so they gave him a dumb mission.
Verdict
This is a fun issue. It’s fairly over the top which works in its favor. Ollie is so outmatched that it’s actually fairly comedic when he succeeds. I think Scott is aware of this and the intention was to create a fairly outlandish story. It absolutely works; I had a good time with this. The art’s great too so definitely check this one out.
