Green Arrow #20 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Andrea Sorrentino (art), Marcelo Maiolo (colors)

The Story: It’s hard to hold your breath in a graveyard when you have to fend off an assassin.

The Review: I love seeing gradual improvement in a comic book—heck, in anything.  In a world where good things tend to get worse as time goes on (How I Met Your Mother springs quickly to mind),* anytime anything actually gets better, no matter how minimally, is worth some kind of praise.  Lemire’s Green Arrow definitely had a rocky start, but in the last couple issues, his story has slowly taken shape and gotten more confident.

The one thing Lemire really has to get rid of are these morose monologues of Ollie’s: “I could just let myself become that shallow, pampered, rich kid I always pretended to be.  Just give up.  But I don’t.  I keep walking.  Because I know now I’m not that man.  I’m meant to be something more.”  Even if they make sense in context of Ollie’s story of personal growth, they just feel self-serving, almost like a backdoor brag.  If he’s really someone worth investing in, then we should see it in his actions; we don’t need him to reassure us about it.