I haven’t been reading GREEN ARROW. I lacked sufficient interest in the character to get it immediately back at #1, and by the time I thought about it the quality of the book had gotten its share of bad press. But with the new creative team on board and a load of recent JLU episodes under my belt, I decided to pick up the new creative team’s first outing here.

I am not impressed.

Oliver Queen is frustratingly written. He’s very wisecracking man-child action hero. Maybe that’s by design, but if it is, it’s overdone. His newest opponents, the triplets called Skylark, are about as trite as can be. They finish each other’s sentences. There’s some implication that this is because of some kind of genetic tampering, but that’s not made explicit.

No reader will be surprised that Arrow and the beautiful Skylarks have a tryst before the end of the issue. I doubt any will be surprised, further, that their true intentions are not what they appear. This is the sort of plot that would be right at home in a lowest-common-denominator action flick.

The art leaves me a bit cold. It’s not bad, but it isn’t my cup of tea. Proportions strike me as a bit odd, but that can be said of lots of artists. The action scenes can be tricky to follow: I expect an Arrow action scene to be rendered with a sort of freeze-frame precision, tension and release. There was more fluidity to these scenes, the kind of thing that’d be more suited to a character who’s more of a brawler and less of a marksman.

All in all, I don’t think I’ll be picking up #8.