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GREEN ARROW #11
"Ultimate Speedy"
Recommended (8/10)
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DC Comics
Writer: Kevin Smith
Pencils: Phil Hester
Inks: Ande Parks
Colors: James Sinclair
Letters: Sean Konot
Editor: Bob Schreck
Price: $2.50 US/$4.25 CAN |
After the strong performance on "Quiver," my expectations for the next issue of Green Arrow were pretty high, and I imagine I won't be the only one a little bit letdown by what is a solid but pretty quiet single issue story following up the first arc. However, while I wasn't as excited by this issue as I have been by most of Green Arrow,
this is still a very solid offering from a talented creative team. Smith takes
Mia, the kid "sidekick" of Ollie, in a direction that most saw coming, but in an
unexpected way and with unexpected results, at least as far as I was concerned.
And Hester and Parks continue to deliver terrific artwork, handling the urban
reality of Green Arrow with the spandex element that infuses his life and
balancing the two easily.
With Smith onboard, Green Arrow has been essentially an event book every issue that it came out, so I was a little surprised to see an issue that is really a quiet character study. Mia has been a strong supporting character from the first, and I expected that we'd see her slip into the role of Speedy in some way, but I thought Smith did a great job addressing the notion of kid sidekicks with the same eye towards skewed realism he has used for all of the Green Arrow books so far. Smith obviously has a great
deal of affection for the super-hero genre, but he's not afraid of poking a
little fun at the strange cliches that have defined the genre, such as kid
sidekicks.
While the series was about
Ollie returning to life and to duty as Green Arrow, seeing the personality of
Ollie the man has generally been a sidenote to the plot focus of the story. This
issue, there's a fairly slight plot, and so the weight of the story falls onto
how well Smith handles Ollie's characterization. Smith has put his stamp on the
character, but the dialogue still sometimes reads a little too much like the
funny riffing that Smith's Jersey Trilogy characters spout rather than like
Ollie's voice. However, the details of the character, with his burgeoning
relationship with his son and Mia and difficulty in dealing with Black Canary,
are spot on, and are the same great characterization I've come to expect from
Smith.
In addition to the good work
with Ollie, I enjoyed seeing a bit of examination of his children, blood-related
or otherwise, that came with the insights into Connor and Mia. Mia's crush, and
her desire to be a super-hero, have both been obvious from the outset, and I
like that she's so open about those feelings. She's one of the more believable
and enjoyable teenage characters I have seen in comics. On the other end of the
spectrum, Connor serves as a great support system for Ollie, taking the
weirdness of his life in stride and generally coming across as the mentally
balanced and adjusted character he has always been.
Hester and Parks have been
impressive on this book throughout, and this issue is no exception. There's some
great storytelling sequences, such as the panels shifting to indicate fading
from dreams to reality, as well as some simply incredible action sequences where
Connor and Ollie hit the streets of Star City.
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