Green Arrow #33 – Review

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

The Story: Ollie gets to experience the joy of having an annoying little sister.

The Review: When the DCU relaunched, the idea was supposedly that we were in a sparkling new world, with the characters living out their early superheroic histories before our very eyes. Going by that theory, you assumed that in the first few issues of Green Arrow, Ollie had only recently started going about town in his emerald hoodie. The introduction of Diggle thus creates a slightly awkward pre-history to this early period, one even odder since Ollie never gave a hint of its existence before now.

Lemire tries his best to reconcile these two eras in Ollie’s vigilante life, using the death of his mom as a sensible dividing line. But from a character development standpoint, there are redundancies. Lemire goes through a great deal of trouble playing out Diggle’s disgust with Ollie’s indolence after his mother’s death, accusing him of being a “self-absorbed, spoiled little rich kid with a lot of fancy toys.” Given that Ollie resumed the Green Arrow identity by the first issue of this series, Ollie must have taken those words to heart. But then what should we make of his self-loathing remarks about being a spoiled kid in practically every issue of Lemire’s first arc on this series?