Found this on Tumblr, had to share. Whatever Happened to the Emerald Archer? First off, I’d like to disclaim that so far, the Jeff Lemire/Andrea Sorrentino Green Arrow has been quite good and I’m really enjoying it. I’ll get into that more later. For now… A couple years ago, DC launched their “New 52” line, completely rebooting their entire universe (except Batman and Green Lantern). Superman got an attitude, Batman got a completely messed up timeline, and everybody got swanky (read: awful) new costumes. Meanwhile, in amongst all the hullabaloo, Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, turned into a completely different guy and no one seemed to notice. Well, I sure noticed. Ollie is one of my favorite characters in comics, and has been ever since I was a kid watching Justice League Unlimited. He was passionate, charismatic, had an awesome beard, had clear, material political beliefs (an unusual trait in cape comics, where heroes tend to be drawn to more universal ideals, so as to have the broadest possible appeal) and, as I learned when I started devouring his comics, was deeply, humanly flawed. His whole urban Robin Hood schtick is the perfect halfway point between the dirty street-crime scene of Batman and the flamboyant fantasy that I love in comics. He was the Batman who smiled. My favorite Green Arrow comics ever are the Mike Grell run of the late 80s and early 90s. It seemed, after over a decade of flailing around not knowing quite what to do with Denny O’Neil’s revamped, socially conscious version of the character, Grell finally found a place for him, a specific story to be told with him that you could only do with that character. There was, admittedly, a dearth of smiling, but in place we got one of the most thorough, internal explorations of a super-hero character there’s ever been, one that I would gladly hold up against anything of Marvel’s for all that they claim to have the monopoly on flawed heroes. Most Green Arrow since Grell has been more or less riding that wave. The foundation was good enough to survive even Judd Winick. (Actually, I’ve got a soft spot for the Winick run, but I’m not going to even try to justify it.) Unfortunately, it’s now been long enough since Grell that those books, I admit, aren’t immediately relevant anymore. And the fact that nothing even close to as good has been done with the character since, means that, to an executive, it looks like the character has grown stale. By September of 2011, there wasn’t much vocal interest in Green Arrow. I’d argue that DC’s execs didn’t realize how good a character they had there, and I may be entirely correct, but I still sound like a sad old fanboy. Johns, Lee, and DiDio had to justify their Great Big Shakeup™ somehow, and since the headlining Justice Leaguers hadn’t received any significant changes whatsoever beyond the cosmetic, it was the “less popular” characters who were due to be forcibly metamorphosed into…*gulp*…younger and hipper versions. Which is how this guy… image …became this guy. image I have no doubt this was done with the best of intentions. You can see the inspirations they drew from for NuOllie. Justin Hartley’s Oliver Queen from Smallville certainly struck a chord with people, so you can understand the desire to draw elements from that take into the comics (of course, it seems now that they jumped the gun pretty badly, as Stephen Amell’s Oliver Queen in Arrow has struck an even bigger chord, rendering a Hartley-ized version rather quaint and passé. Ouch). Similar things have worked before. But you hear a lot, in discussions of the New 52 about “change for change’s sake” and this is one of the best (worst?) examples of that. In trying to pare the character down to a few core elements and then “update” him for a new audience, they accidentally removed everything that made the character unique or interesting. Look back up a few paragraphs at my description of the Ollie I love: “passionate, charismatic, had an awesome beard, had clear, material political beliefs, and…was deeply, humanly flawed.” Pretty much none of that statement applies to NuOllie, right down to the beard. For the life of me, I can’t actually describe what NuOllie is like as a character without dwelling on superficial details or comparisons to OldOllie, or the fact that the title sucked. Yeah, that. That didn’t help matters either. Green Arrow had one of, if not the rockiest start of any title in the New 52 stable. Actually, rocky start doesn’t begin to describe it. They juggled the book between three or four non-committal writing and art teams who clearly didn’t want the thing for the first few weeks, then finally settled on an extended run under an actually terrible creative team. We all know that Lemire and Sorrentino saved the book on issue 17. What I don’t understand is how the hell it made it to issue 17 in the state it was in. So, having dropped the title in disgust after three issues of Nocenti, I eagerly took it back up again with Lemire, who is, in fact, one of my favorite writers currently in the biz. It’s good. It’s excellent stuff. They knocked out some of the more obvious mistakes of the reboot (like Oliver being a one-dimensional male fantasy one-percenter) right away, and brought in some of the long overdue Arrow influences. I like Arrow. The story finally has its own unique identity like some of the other headline solo books, such as Snyder and Capullo’s Batman or Azzarello and Chiang’s Wonder Woman. You can now say “Lemire and Sorrentino’s Green Arrow” in the same breath as those others and have it mean something. “Psychedelic pulp-adventure noir with accompanying deeply personal mystery” is a great style for Green Arrow, the book as it exists now is finally something to enjoy and be proud of enjoying. But… The thing this doesn’t change is I still feel kind of a sense of loss. Lemire salvaged the character of NuOllie quite a bit from what he was, but it’s still unmistakably NuOllie. The real Ollie, the classic Ollie, my Ollie is still gone. I can read Batman and tell that this is the same guy Morrison was writing three years ago. I can read Green Lantern and tell that it’s the same guy who sat at the center of Geoff Johns’ decade-long space epic. Superman, for all his new youthful sass, is still recognizably Superman. Wonder Woman is probably closer to my ideal vision of Wonder Woman than she’s ever been within my lifetime. But when I’m reading Green Arrow now, I don’t feel that sense of continuity. The connection is lost. This young blond rastabout searching for the secrets of the Arrow Clan is called Oliver Queen, but, for now, I see nothing in him of the Oliver Queen I remember. He’s a different character with the same name, who I guess I’m just going to have to learn to appreciate in different ways. And that may happen, but I’ll never shake the feeling of how much was lost. Batman was rejuvenated by the reboot, Green Lantern was reinforced, Wonder Woman was invigorated, but Oliver Queen, Green Arrow, alone, was replaced. And I’m going to miss him, because he was awesome.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 07:09:47 +0000
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