Arrow Season 2.5 #4 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Marc Guggenheim, Keto Shimizu
Art By: Joe Bennett, Craig Yeung
Digital Price: $0.99
Release Date: October 13, 2014

Rerun

So far in the Arrow Season 2.5 series we've seen a lot of cool stuff leading up to the Arrow Season 3 premiere and as most of you know that premiere was last week.  I don't know if this comic should of come out a lot earlier as to get most of what it wanted to say out there before the show started up again but at this point it seems like it's a kind of a waste.  Yeah I'm sure we'll see some set up or more accurately I hope we see some more setup that we won't be seeing in the show for some time.  Anyway we learned last issue that the new Brother Blood is actually Sebastian Blood's old bodyguard Clinton Houge.  I was really expecting something a bit more dramatic than just some bodyguard taking over the mantle, but it is what it is and we'll continue that story here...... Kind of.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our story begins with Brother Blood having an artist working on something that the creators want to keep secret until the end of the issue and now we dive right into an entire issue that's a rerun of an episode at the end of Arrow Season 2.  I'm not kidding we actually go back and see where Diggle beat the hell out of Clinton and brought him back to Felicity so the two could interrogate him about Brother Blood.  It's word for word and I don't know why I would read this when I could just watch it........ again.  Felicity and Diggle sound a lot cooler on the television than they do when I read this issue out loud.  

The only real new thing we have during this whole section of the book is that when Clinton Hogue goes back to Sebastian Blood to tell him what happened, we see that Blood's pissed and that Clinton goes and prays to an inverted cross about what he should do, then goes immediately back to Blood and tells him he prayed on what to do and we find out that Blood gave Arrow the Mirakuru cure because Slade betrayed him.  This is the point of the episode where Ravager meets up with Blood after they realize that Arrow has the cure and when she murder's Sebastian we see that Clinton Hogue was in the closet watching and instead of shooting Ravager in the head like he was supposed to, he simply watches and waits.  After she leaves Hogue comes out and claims the Brother Blood mask for his own.  It's not really a big revelation, Clinton was a nobody and I figured, yeah he obviously just took the mask and went his own way with the persona.  

In the end after we read a rerun of an issue we find out that the artist Brother Blood got was making a sketch of what he remembered Diggle and Felicity looking like.  Yeah they're pretty accurate sketches, so I guess Brother Blood's next move is finding this pair and getting some revenge.

Bits and Pieces:

While the art to this book is consistently great and really captures the look of the actors of the show, I really can't recommend this issue because it's a complete backtrack to show us the supposed origin of the new Brother Blood, but does it by just showing us what happened in an episode last season of the show.  I know these are short issues and there's a lot to convey in a small amount of space, but this origin seems like something that could of been said in a brief conversation, because really it's not all that exciting and definitely not the stunning origin that the description promised.  Hopefully now that this story is out of the way we can get back to telling actual stories that happened in between Season 2 and 3.

5.3/10