People were talking about this one at work, for some reason. Since someone had the issue with them, I gave it a look.
Good lord...
For those curious, this is THE wedding issue...sort of. There's more buildup. More stuff involving peoples' reactions to the upcoming wedding. Some good humor throughout. And Deathstroke continues his plan to disrupt the wedding, along with some of the other DC villains. His plan is stopped by the Suicide Squad, of all people. Still, I don't see what the fuss is about.
Then we come to the end.
First thing that should be noted is that the actual wedding itself is a total afterthought. But we do get to the wedding night...
Where out of nowhere, Black Canary and Green Arrow start fighting. Not arguing, fighting. As in, physical fighting. The issue ends with Black Canary taking one of Ollie's arrows and stabbing him in the neck for the big death blow.
Yeah, months of hype for the big wedding...and it all ends with Black Canary killing off Green Arrow.
I won't even start with how little sense this makes. Even if it doesn't really turn out to be the real Ollie, because NO ONE at DC should be stupid enough to kill him off twice in the same decade, how the hell can anyone explain this? I'm willing to suspend my disbelief as much as the next guy (because this IS, after all, a comic book), but I feel like my intelligence has been insulted. More importantly, I feel bad for people who have followed Green Arrow and Black Canary for years and were finally excited to see them tie the knot after all this time. I feel that these fans were cheated for what was, essentially, a moment derived for pure shock value.
Hands down, the Worst Comic Moment of 2007. At least the ending to Civil War led to some solid stories. Amazons Attack was tripe, but it was harmless in the long run. The Death of Captain America can be considered sad, but it's led to some of the best stuff out there right now, so it can't be considered bad. But this cheap publicity stunt has no redeeming value whatsoever. Thumbs way down.
Originally posted by It's FalseI won't even start with how little sense this makes. Even if it doesn't really turn out to be the real Ollie, because NO ONE at DC should be stupid enough to kill him off twice in the same decade, how the hell can anyone explain this?
I bet he was a SKRULL!!!
Yeah, very cheap. DC did such a fantastic job in the lead-up and build to Identity Crisis that it single-handedly brought me back into comics. With that mini they were able to do a great cross-over while still devoting time to telling an actual story, humanizing characters, and having effective character development (and I mean character development - not "this guy's dead and there's a new guy in his suit now").
Then Infinite Crisis started up. For what it was, I enjoyed it. Since then, everything's one big rush job that reads as if they get ten months into a year-long project and realize they've only covered half of what they intended or need to. As a result, we got shit happening for the sake of happening and/or making people go "OH MY GOD!" And now it's to the point where they've done it so many times that when something potentially major like this DOES happen, it doesn't illicit anything but a groan from the readers. Needless to say, they lost me again.
It's a shame, because I think DC has some fantastic writers, but the overall direction of the company's books handcuffs them to all this nonsense.
In fairness, I haven't read much in the past year. But the reaction of yourself (It's False) and others hasn't exactly soothed my apprehensions about getting back into it.
My guess was that it isn't Ollie. During the rather entertaining fight at the wedding, someone switched places with Ollie using the teleporting guy. That's gotta be the reason they made a big deal outta him.
The build up was really good though, I really liked the page where Dinah is telling Ollie she wants to wait to have sex (again) until after the wedding was pretty funny, and the bachelor party was interesting. Over in Countdown, we saw that there were some male strippers at Dinah's bachelorette party all dressed up as different superheroes, both male and female, that was kinda scary as well.
But the ending here was kinda outta left field and I really want to know where it's leading to.
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Not to hijack the thread, but also this week, we got the long awaited JLA/HITMAN book that was crazy and over in JSA, the Superman from KINGDOM COME pops up in the end, so it wasn't all just the wedding craziness.
I only flipped through it in the store today (my copy will come in the mail shortly), but given the weird look on Ollie's face, I assumed it was either a fake or he had been hypnotized/brainwashed/etc.
I know it leads into the GA/BC on-going, but it would have been nice for this kind of book to be a stand-alone one-shot.
Originally posted by El NastioThey key thing to remember; this is not the end of an arc but the beginning. I am reserving judgement until I see the end results.
On a related note, MAN does Green Arrow have a lot of upset fans on the Official DC Comics boards!
(edited by El Nastio on 20.9.07 1958)
I wouldn't go to the DC (or Marvel) message boards for a big pile of cash.
Forrest Gump ran across America to escape because Jenny broke his heart. Superman is walking across America to reconnect with the people he was sworn to protect.