Green Arrow #23 – Review

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

The Story: Count Vertigo will be thinking of Evander Holyfield a lot tonight.

The Review: Some years ago, I had aspirations to get into the acting biz.  Of course, this was before I realized my face wasn’t suitable for popular entertainment, but I digress.  During that blithely optimistic period, I realized all the classes and workshops were real big on the concept of “motivation.”  They were always asking what motivated such and such character to do this or that, often repeatedly, with increasing insistence, until you felt motivated to just leave the room.

Obviously, I now realize the question of motivation is not only essential for the art of acting, but for fiction—and real life—as well.  The question reminds you that it’s easy enough to see when someone wants something, but it’s much harder to dissect what makes them want it, and it’s this latter point which makes a character (or person) interesting and unique.  The more a writer leaves the motivation question to generalities, the less dimensional a story becomes.  If you want a textbook example of that problem, look no further than this issue.