Green Arrow #35 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Ben Sokolowski, Andrew Kreisberg
Art By: Daniel Sampere
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: October 1, 2014

Trying To Hit The Mark

Alright boys and girls, the Outsider War is over and Green Arrow is back in Seattle with a new direction and creative team taking over the reigns of our Emerald Archer.  Another big change you might find here is that Jim isn't reviewing this book anymore and that means it falls to me and I'm going to SPOIL the shit out of it.  I apologize in advance if you don't want to know everything going on in Green Arrow, but that's what I do and that's what you'll get.  So let's dive into this issue and see what Ollie is up to and if this new direction can match the beloved run of Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino.  I'd like to say hopefully not because personally I wasn't a fan of that run, but that's neither here nor there.  Oh and also you should know that this new direction also includes turning our beloved Green Arrow into something that more resembles his television counterpart, so hopefully you're still on board.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our story begins with our hero re-acclimating himself as the scourge of the criminal scene in Seattle.  Right from the beginning he takes out some crooks that stole $30,000 from an orphanage in the Glades and after they're thoroughly dispatched we get some dialogue from Diggle that Emiko's off training, Naomi's in hiding and Fyff took another job.  So besides for good old Diggle, our hero is pretty much alone as he tries to continue his war against crime.

As of right now I'm digging the story because I like the idea of getting Green Arrow back to basics and saving the folks of his city and possibly getting his money back from Lemire's story line, but it seems like we might have to hold off on the actual having money thing, because it seems to be all tied into The Queen Foundation that simply runs as a charity.  If you've been reading Justice League you may remember that Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor have become partners in a joint venture to take each of their company's technologies and resources and actually try to make the world a better place and guess what?  They want Oliver Queen to add to their venture.  This is the part of the book where I begin really not liking this issue.  From the way the panels make it seem like Oliver knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman and I don't think that Bruce would ever let Ollie know that information and then later on it seems that Batman doesn't know that Ollie is Green Arrow and I know that Batman would know is identity as soon as he tried to join the Justice League from awhile back.  So I don't really know what they were going with here.......  Was it just to remind us; the readers of who these characters are?  Actually that might not have been a bad thing, which leads me to something else I don't like about this issue.  Anyone that I seem to love, who isn't wearing a mask, just looks awful.  I don't know if Bruce Wayne is having a stroke here or if Lex has suddenly become a mongoloid..........  Oh hell mongoloid isn't PC is it?  Oh well.  It just looks awful during this bit of the book.  Check it out.

So after we decipher who everyone is in this bit, we find out that Ollie isn't interested in saving the world with his money, he'd rather start by saving his city.  Man that was a lot to go through just to convey that.

Elsewhere we see that Arthur King (Merlyn) is torturing someone to get information and at first we're led to believe it's about Green Arrow, but Merlyn sets us straight in our beliefs when he says he's interested in finding Mia Dearden, who you might remember as Speedy from the 2000's after Kevin Smith's Green Arrow Quiver run.  So yeah, it looks like we might be getting Mia back and maybe she's not selling her body in this universe...........  You know how the New 52 doesn't like making things too dark.  Ha ha.  Oh and I want to know what the relationship is between Tommy Merlyn, who we saw in Green Arrow #0 and the non-television version of his father Arthur King.  Are we just going to overlook the Merlyn name?  Is that what we're going to do?  I guess that will have to be a discussion for another time.

In the end Oliver gets a message from Diggle about someone trying to hack into their servers and sends him to the location, but the fact that Diggle was able to trace the signal back is a dead give away that it's a trap and Green Arrow comes face to face with someone who was apparently hired to kill him.  You know that sweet Felicity Smoak of the Arrow universe?  Yeah well I don't think she's as sweet here.  So Felicity is brought into the Green Arrow universe, even though I would of preferred her in a un-cancelled Firestorm, it's still nice to see her.

So that's it for this issue of Green Arrow and I have to tell you, as far as first impressions go for creative teams, I'm not really sold here.  Some of the stuff here was half decent, but the middle section where everyone just looked awful, threw me off so much and I really hope that it doesn't continue to be like this.  See you next month as we continue this journey together and hopefully I can have the Green Arrow book I was so looking forward to reviewing.  See you then.

Bits and Pieces:

Yeah this isn't what I was really looking forward to in a Green Arrow book, but I do think that the new direction and characters this creative team are introducing have a lot of potential and I'll wait with bated breath as this hopefully becomes the book I want it to be.  So far with this introduction I'm not impressed.  The art went from really good to really awful all at once and it completely threw me out of the story as I wondered what the hell happened to my characters.  You should get this issue to keep up with the story, but it's not going to be an issue you'll be happy that you bought.

5.5/10