Green Arrow 1: Reunion TPB
by Joshua Williamson (Author), Sean Izaakse (Illustrator), Phil Hester (Illustrator), Ande Parks (Illustrator),
I think I might have become somewhat jaded.
Green Arrow: Reunion by Joshua Williamson and Sean Ikaaze, while dynamically illustrated, somewhat suffers in the writing department. It seeks to be a time-travelling rescue mission within a rescue mission, but ends up being all over the place. Hot on the ending of Williamson’s own Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths (which I have yet to read), it shows the Arrow family seeking out their patriarch Oliver Queen who is lost in time and is being being kept away from them by a (predictable) shadowy figure.
I think I already gave away what I think of this comic; because yes, it is very predictable, and yet all over the place.
While Williamson has shown a lot of talent in the past – I am particularly fond of his run on The Flash – it seems to me that he unfortunately tries to do what other writers have done with “epic return” story lines, returning the titular hero and setting up future storylines with them, but fails to do so effectively by trying to throw too much at the reader into a convoluted knot that does not understand who the character is. While it is understandable to try and explore new scenarios with a character, transplanting them into a completely foreign storyline when the objective is drawing them back into the fold while giving readers enough familiarity with the character is not the way to do it.
You see, Oliver Queen, while he has been involved with sci-fi adventures before, does not work best within them.
It is therefore a befuddling decision to place the entire Arrow family within a predicament of high stakes sci-fi, trying to tie different narratives while trying to be true to who the character is and introduce that idea to new audiences. In a way, I find that Williamson has closed himself into a corner placing Queen in that position to begin with, as I am very hard pressed with imagining any other way it might have gone, to be fair. Which in my opinion is exactly what makes this comic suffer; it made itself hard to follow in spots, and yet completely predictable.
I am hoping that Williamson proceeds to redeem the shoddy start on his run on the character. It is gorgeous to be sure, with references to Jack Kirby, Mike Grell, Denny O’Neill and Phil Hester’s run on the character galore, but a weak start nonetheless.
