Green Arrow #48 Review and *SPOILERS*

An American Werewolf In ........America

Written By: Ben Percy
Art By: Patrick Zircher, Gabe Eltaeb, Rob Leigh
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: January 6, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

October is a time when you break out the horror flicks and have yourself a scare or it's a time for ghosts and ghouls to come out of the shadows and terrorize young children or if your cousin Ricky is spending the night, for you to pretend to be said ghost or ghoul and crawl underneath the bed like a goddamn alligator and start pulling his sheets down slowly.......... ah, good times.  Anyway, as we saw last October it was time for Green Arrow to take on a bunch of infected people who had become werewolves and even though it wasn't that great of a story....... fuck it, it was October and it was an Annual so let the monsters play........ Well, like any classic monster, it looks like it's returned from the grave and Oliver Queen has to continue his transformation from that story where we saw the leader of a werewolf biker gang bite him.  This isn't a story that I'm looking forward to, but I'll try to keep an open mind while I wait for Green Arrow to........ well, be a little more Green Arrow again and quit hanging out in the horror section of the comic shop.  Let's jump into this issue and check out werewolf Ollie.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Ollie apparently getting away from it all in the Rainier wilderness, where I guess he's really just keeping himself away from people while he explores his transformation with the Lukos Virus.  While I'm usually really hard on this book, I have to say that I really dug the beginning, where it's all told to us through Oliver's inner monologue as the character runs throughout the woods hunting, mountain climbing and at times, trying to shake the bad dreams of Marrock, the Berserker who bit him.  The reason this is actually pretty fun is because of how similar it is to Superman lately, only reversed.  You see, Green Arrow has always had to be the best he could be in order to only stand slightly next to the rest of the heroes in the DC Universe, but with this new power he feels coursing through his veins, he's now stronger, faster and his senses are beyond anything that he's ever known........ Plus, unlike Superman, Oliver isn't a jerk out of nowhere so he's instantly better than our Man of Steel........ Maybe we gotta get Clark some of this Lukos and see what he does with some werewolf power.

Anyway, throughout Oliver's hunting, he keeps seeing human foot tracks in the snow and if that wasn't enough, he keeps hearing howling at night........which he weirdly thinks is his own screams from a bad dream reverberating throughout the mountains..........maybe that happens, maybe it doesn't, it just comes off as a strange thing to think to yourself about.  Too add to this mystery, we meet the caretaker that the Queen family hired to watch over their land and we find out that this man's son died........ but since we don't know this guy and nothing else is really said about it, it comes off really strange when we later see that this man's son is actually a werewolf he kept tied up, but who has recently broken free of his confinements.  It's really odd, we started this issue out really strong, but forcing the horror element into it just doesn't work that well because out of nowhere since Oliver's becoming a werewolf, we just have another werewolf in the Rainier wilderness, but there's no shock value to it because we've never met this caretaker before and the only reason we even know that he has a son is because Oliver in passing says that he's sorry to hear about it son.  Just thrown at you like it's supposed to mean something that was set up, but no, it's just there for a couple of pages down the line and does nothing for the story except make you think how convenient everything is.  

In the end, Oliver meets some lost hikers and points them in the right direction, but the direction they go in spells doom for them because they come across a werewolf and Oliver has to quick get into his Green Arrow costume and hope down the line that these two hikers don't put two and two together about where this superhero, who looks incredible like the guy they just talked to, who also said that this was his land and has the exact same wolf with him is.  Oliver and the werewolf go fang to fang as our hero begins sporting some wolf like qualities of his own, but in the end the hero of this story is the caretaker who shoots his own son because as we all learned from Fred Gwynne in Pet Semetary, "Sometimes, dead is better".  As our issue closes, Oliver begins wolfing the hell out and even looses his ability to speak, but somehow the big dope believes that this is the best thing that's ever happened to him and has no intentions of finding a cure for the Lukos Virus. 

That's it for this issue of Green Arrow and while I went into this issue not expecting much, I have to say that the beginning of this book actually got my attention and made me think that this might be an interesting story after all............ Then I continued reading and it became the normal nonsense, where everything is way too convenient to ever really grab you.  On top of a character who's just mentioned out of nowhere, who ends up being a werewolf just because our title character is becoming a werewolf himself, we also have that very annoying quality that Ollie's been displaying lately about not giving a shit about his secret identity.  You're a goddamn superhero Oliver, that's like shit you learn on the first day of superhero school.  I did really enjoy the inner turmoil that Ollie was going through in this issue in dealing with the fact that he actually has something "super" about him, but by the end when he monster-ed the hell out, I was kind of disappointed that he'd rather go out into the woods to be a wild man instead of being someone I thought of as smart and doing something about his condition.  Another thing that I really enjoyed was Patrick Zircher's art on this book and I'm happy as hell I can say that because I wasn't really digging his stuff when he first started working on this book and that's terrible to me because I love Patty Z's work normally.  Here, it not only looks great, but we also see Oliver growing out his beard a bit, making him look closer to the character we grew up loving.

Bits and Pieces:

While I have to eat my words in saying before it came out that this issue would be complete nonsense, it only mildly gets out of that category in my mind because while the issue started out strong with some really interesting inner turmoil about what Oliver's dealing with, the story then became really convenient in what took place and left me questioning our hero's motives by the end.  The art in this issue was fantastic though and since I haven't been enjoying this run of Green Arrow, I'll take whatever win I can get from it because I hate not liking this hero.  

6/10