Flashpoint: Green Arrow Industries – Review

By: Pornsak Pichetshote (writer), Marco Castiello & Ig Guara (pencillers), Vincenzo Acunzo & Ruy José (inkers), Stefani Rennee (colorist)

The Story: A corporation for the people?  Isn’t that like saying bacon for the vegans?

The Review: In my imagination, I like to see Batman hanging with the guys at a barbeque on Superman’s farm, munching on burgers made with 100 percent ground chuck from Smallville’s organic cattle ranch, and telling everyone (except the Flash—he’s run off to buy a refill for the keg, and taking his sweet time about it, too) how he’s going to use his civilian identity to really promote his agenda now.  Then Green Arrow says, quite roguishly, “Welcome to the club.”

Really, when you think about it, Oliver Queen has never hesitated to further his crime-fighting goals with his corporate and political resources.  So it makes a lot of sense that in the Flashpoint world, where Green Arrow merely refers to the super-powered missiles his company sells, Ollie ponders the idea of a corporation as superhero, though in such ethereally vague terms that you can’t tell how such a thing would ever work.

The idea actually originates with Ollie’s head of security, Roy Harper, who insists Green Arrow Industries can do more than simply reappropriate super-villain weapons for conventional military applications, some of which are rather ingenious: Trickster’s antigravity boots for flight, Folded Man’s suit to make the largest weapons portable.  And then you have the Top’s atomic grenade tops “with the power of five nukes”, which just seems like overkill.

There are a few overkill moments in this issue, where Ollie’s cocky dialogue just gets a touch out of hand.  Sometimes they come in eye-rolling jokes (“Gentlemen, and…uh, more gentlemen…”), but they really grate on your nerves when he gets into one of his self-righteous speeches that unfailingly reach gibberish proportions: “Because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and in the right hands, money is a green arrow to the future.”  Yeahbutwhu–?

Flashpoint: Grodd of War – Review

By: Sean Ryan (writer), Ig Guara (penciller), Ruy José (inker), Stefani Rennee (colorist)

The Story: When it comes to conquest, these gorillas don’t monkey around.

The Review: Violence, of course, has its place in fiction.  It’s an undeniable part of reality, and stories have to reflect that in some way.  But just like with anything else you write in fiction, it has to be put to some purpose, though when excessive it quickly loses its shock factor and gets simply nauseating.  This is especially the case in comics, where too often writers use violence to inject the energy or drama their stories lack.

This seems the case here, as Ryan keeps Grodd’s purposes hopelessly simplistic.  You can sort of appreciate Aquaman sinking half of Europe as a (presumably) unexpected casualty of a volatile weapon of war.  Grodd slaughters half of Africa for apparently no reason other than for attention.  He seems his most melancholy in the first page, when he laments no one knows his name despite his feats of massacre, and he later emphasizes his sole desire: “I want violence.”
Consequently Grodd comes off rather one-note throughout the whole issue, a wasted opportunity on Ryan’s part to develop the gorilla’s character.  Despite Grodd’s fame as one of the DCU’s most notorious (and weirdest) villains, you still have no idea what makes him tick.  His conquest for power and his hatred of humans are constants, but the former quality is one shared by almost every comic-book mastermind and the latter is too superficial to set him apart from the pack.