Green Arrow #40

Why is Felicity even in this scene? I'm already upset that Batman and Lex Luthor are here. At least replace Felicity with Emiko and this cover makes a little bit more sense.

Seattle! American setting!
But the city don't know what the city is getting.
The crème de la crème of the hero world
In a show with everything but Blue Beetle.

Arrows fly--doesn't seem a minute
Since the giant Space Needle had a bat guy in it.
Deranged. Don't you know that when you
Fight at this level there's no ordinary venue.

It's Gotham or Metropolis or Coast City.
Or...or this place!

One night in Seattle and you're soon on mushrooms,
Staring for hours at the EMP.
Lock the door on every public restroom
Unless you're not really there to pee.
I can feel a stranger sidling up to me.

One town's very like another
When you're kicking some thug in the testes, brother.

It's a drag, it's a bore, it's really such a pity
To have a guy with a bow keeping watch on your city.

Whattya mean?
You'd rather have some stinking, crazy man in a bat suit?

Batgirls, Supergirls
There's never been an Arrowgirl on any Seattle street.

That's right! You're talking to a hero
Who's a chauvinist pig. Let me be clear though:
I still let women work beneath me, sunshine.

One night in Seattle makes a bad guy wonder,
"Why did I stay in Gotham for so long?"
One night in Seattle and a bad guy blunders
Into an Arrow Net. It's all so wrong.
How could you be caught by such a fucking dong?

Goddamn. Attack from up above
Gonna knock a guy out with a flying Boxing Glove.
That's no worse than a fucking batarang or an emerald light ring.

Thank God Seattle's criminals don't have super powers or invulnerability.

I don't see you guys complaining
While I fight crime where it's constantly raining.
This time I need help so I had to invite you,
Are the Queen and his bow not enough to excite you.

Then go back to your LexCorps, your Arkhams, your Ann Nocenti titles.

One night in Seattle and your ratings are falling.
Nobody cares about a guy with a bow.
One night in Seattle and the death knell's calling.
Sales keep on hitting a new all time low.
Maybe you'd do better on a TV show.

"One Night in Bangkok" might be the best song ever. Unless the best song ever is actually "Jessie's Girl." Unless it's "Invincible." Yeah, you know what? I think it's "Invincible" by Benatar.

Well that one panel straightens out why Roy Harper would deign to help out Oliver. Now we just need one more panel to clear up why Batman and Lex Luthor give a shit. And I just mean one panel. I'm sure they're both helping out for the same reason and it probably involves stocks.

Felicity is on the front lines of the raid because she needs to hack into King's computer system. So instead of running around trying to hack in from a tablet, she's carrying a laptop open in front of her as she hacks away by pecking at it with one hand and dodging bullets. Shouldn't Batman have stopped this and mentioned that he knows somebody just as good with computers who can actually handle being in a battle like this without needing Diggle for protection? Batman's no help at all. I bet he already lectured everybody about no killing before they even began the mission. And then Katana was all, "Well then why the fuck am I here?!" And Batman was all, "I know, right? Hey! Remember when I ran a super hero team with you on it for some reason? Oh, I remember the reason! I needed a mother figure for Halo!"

Cupid. One dimensional and she uses a bow! I'm so far from interested I'm practically brain dead!

That was the panel that establishes that Cupid is obsessed with Oliver to the point that she sees children as a threat to her sexual relationships. Sorry, her "fantasy sexual relationships."

Naomi has also returned as the new Red Dart. I don't know where Henry Fyff is. I guess he didn't get the invite. Ollie probably thought he'd hamper the mission by stuffing pizza into his face willy nilly. That's what fat characters do in television, movie, and comic book scripts, right? You always have to show how they love to eat because that's totally accurate. Whenever some fat person helps me in the real world, it always takes longer than normal because they're busy shoving doughnut topped pizzas in their mouth and wiping grease on everything.

It's actually not that bad anymore. But I guarantee if you watch a movie or a television show from the eighties and one of the characters is overweight, there will be jokes made about their eating and they will almost always have some kind of food in their hands or all over their shirts or coming out of their face-holes.

Meanwhile Batman is threatening a cop or a lawyer or somebody. He informs the guy that his friends will be sending some evidence indicating John King's guilt in some nefarious activities and when it arrives, this guy needs to press charges. And if he doesn't, Batman will break something. And the room doesn't contain anything breakable! The most unbelievable part of this scene is that Batman calls Green Arrow and Lex Luthor his "friends."

Oh look! She took my advice and ditched the laptop for a tablet! Screw continuity because this makes more sense.

According to the above scan, Felicity must be dead now. Green Arrow can probably survive the blast because he's a super hero and even without invulnerability, they seem to weather explosions fairly well.

Being that I'm reading a comic book and not a biography of Oliver Queen, Green Arrow and Felicity survive being at the center of an explosion. They wind up, through grappling arrow technology, safe and sound on the floor beneath the explosion. Luckily Felicity still has her iPad which she must have shoved down her pants as she was flying through the air. Or maybe this is just her backup pad that she keeps tucked into her bra. Time to put the King in checkmate! Do you think Oliver will use that line when they finally bring him down?

Oliver's ex-girlfriend arrives with King on speaker phone. He tells them they have twenty minutes to bring Felicity's hard drive to him or Mia will die. Does he not know how technology works? First off, her iPad doesn't have a "hard drive." It just kind of is a hard drive with a screen! And twenty minutes? His life is going to be ruined in thirty seconds thanks to email! He's just giving them nineteen and a half extra minutes to kick his ass and save Mia while still ruining his life. Also, Oliver should be saying "Checkmate" in about nineteen and a half minutes!

Oliver battles King and has the upper hand. King is all but defeated when Mia decides to shoot him in the back. She doesn't shoot her father King which is what you'd have expected if you already knew that she just wanted the gun so that she could kill her father. No, she shoots Oliver first which only makes sense if she knows she's in a comic book and she's trying to string the readers along or shock them with Oliver's death. When the gun doesn't have a second bullet in it because King knew better than to completely trust his daughter, she reveals that she knew Oliver wears Kevlar and then Ollie rolls over and shoots King. It all makes perfect sense if you don't actually give a shit about what you're writing, Kreisberg and Sokolowski! Queen had defeated King so why did Mia shoot Oliver if she just wanted her father caught? If she wanted her father dead, why not just shoot him instead of shooting Queen? If King thought his daughter might still betray him, why give her a gun with even one bullet in it? What kind of evil genius is he to assume she's going to betray him but not after she kills Oliver Queen?

Nobody ever says checkmate. How do you write such a shitty story and not tag it with the "Checkmate!" line?! I'm so disappointed in these guys.

Green Arrow #40 Rating: -2 Ranking. Green Arrow's army was a bullshit wasted gimmick and I'm pissed off that they even bothered with it. Arsenal appeared in two panels. He shouldn't have been there in the first place and then he wasn't even utilized. Why the fuck even bring him in? Lex Luthor does nothing but shoot a bolt or two out of his super suit. Batman simply threatens a guy. Katana does nothing. Emiko appears simply to make Cupid jealous so that she can say her one line. This entire finale could have been pulled off with just the usual characters. Diggle could have threatened the district attorney while Felicity and Oliver break into King's offices. Nobody else was needed. It was all fucking bullshit! Who let Kreisberg and Sokolowski near this comic book?! It had a vibe going that was kind of working and now it's CW's Arrow-lite! I'm not surprised though. This is the sixth(?) iteration of Oliver Queen since the Reboot. All of them have been vastly different characters, so why not keep trying new versions of Oliver Queen? What's really stupid about his oscillating personality is that he had a perfectly good one that everybody already identified with him! You know, the chauvinist liberal who was always pissing off Black Canary and Hawkman?! Can we just have that Oliver Queen back in June? Give that one a try! He seemed to work for years!