Green Arrow #41

This should be a poster for a Green Arrow movie where he needs to take a second job as a stripper. It can be called Quiver.

According to the Sneak Peek, we're going to be getting yet another take on Green Arrow. But how different can it actually be? Issue #40 saddled him with Felicity and Diggle and Emiko and Mia. My hope is that he becomes an urban ghost hunter and his new sidekick is a teenaged girl named Ouija who rolls her eyes a lot and blames being possessed by ghosts to excuse her constant backtalk. She'll have to deal with people constantly making fun of her for being named after a Parker Brothers game. Then she'll have to tell them in a serious voice, "It's not a game; it's a tool."

Or we'll probably just get another version of Oliver Queen trying to keep the streets of Seattle safe from thugs and no-goodniks!

The issue begins with Oliver Queen telling the reader how every morning his mother would ask him what he dreamed about and every morning Ollie would reply, "The moon!" You know what that story tells me? Oliver Queen is an unimaginative bastard with an obsessive compulsive mother. Oliver seems to think he dreamt about the moon because he was already done with all the trouble here on Earth. But I've heard that earth is the right place for love and that it's not likely to go better anywhere else! Although love generally sucks ass so fuck you, Robert Frost!

Really, Oliver? Those are the thoughts you were having as a child? No wonder you're fucked up.

Why is Green Arrow telling the reader this story? Is he going to be battling Eclipso soon?! I bet he turns around and comes up with that whole thing about Earth being the right place for shooting assholes in the face with boxing glove arrows. There's probably nowhere that that's likely to go better!

Instead, Oliver ends his little moon fantasy by saying that he's given up on the moon. Also, the sun. Also, light. Also, days that aren't overcast and full of rain. Dude, I get that. Fucking Pacific Northwest. Eat a dick already and give me some Vitamin D!

The actual station in Seattle is KOMO. I like KOMA better. So apt! Side note: who names their fucking high school "Dark Water High"?! Is this a pilot for a teen drama? Is this the setting for a Goosebumps story?

Emiko isn't like any of the people in her high school. Who is?! We're all better than those other sheep, amirite?! Give me a high five! I mean, that's not cool so just look at me with a knowing look and maybe a slight nod and an eye roll and is it okay to do hand jerk-off motions? Yeah? Okay! We'll do those whenever anybody else in high school says anything! I bet Emiko is such a unique snowflake that it's hard to feel comfortable around all of the sheep-shaped snowflakes! It's really hard when she Snapchats people intensely profound and interesting things like, I don't know, stupid plastic bags floating in the breeze but then they just send her back dick and clit shots. It's like, grow up already, you adolescents full of hormones with incomplete brains! Get a clue!

I don't know what it is about Percy's writing on Green Arrow, but I get it. He keeps bringing up moments that I don't just understand because he's competent at his job; they're moments I've lived. So in the Sneak Peek, we have Ollie's need to abandon his old life and become nobody for awhile. I did that at about the same age Oliver is here. And now he encounters a woman the locals call The Wart Lady. And he tells a little story in the Narration Boxes that is as close to an experience I had in China as it could possibly be.

I'll just be discussing the Narration Boxes in the next paragraph. I haven't even yet read what the Wart Lady is saying here.

I took a picture of a man without a lower torso who got around on a platform balanced in the middle of an axle between two wheels which he manipulated with his hands. I didn't feel embarrassed about taking the photo even though he waved the camera away when he saw me getting it out. Although he did wind up posing for the picture and I paid him for it, I didn't take the picture to exploit him and so I won't be scanning it for the internet to see. I also didn't take the picture because he was a monster, or a victim, or an amusement. I took the picture because I was awed by him. Yes, ultimately, one can argue it was objectifying and technically no different than a tourist's picture of a Golden Pagoda or the Great Wall. You could say it was dehumanizing and paying him was just a way to assuage any guilt that I might have felt for invading this man's privacy. I can't say those are not aspects of the experience. But those are aspects of the situation that dehumanize the man whose picture I took. He was begging outside of a well-known tourist attraction which tour guides brought foreigners through on a constant daily basis. He probably manipulated me. I'm free to take whatever pictures I want in a slightly-Communist public space! I didn't have to give him any money at all! And he probably knew fucking Americans suck at figuring out the conversion rate between dollars and yuan! I probably slipped him one hundred dollars American! Fuck that guy!

I just finished reading that page. How dare you, Oliver! If Wart Lady doesn't want her picture taken, maybe she should wear Picture Resistant Clothing!

The night after the couple were killed on the Great Wheel, a Seahawks linebacker is killed by the Nightbird guy as well. Oliver needs to do some detective work to figure out what's going on! That can only mean going to see one person: Henry Fyff!

Well I'm glad Henry is back after Kreisberg made a point of bringing back everybody in Ollie's life except Henry last issue. I thought maybe Naomi murdered him! I wonder if this means Felicity is out on her ass? Or maybe she and Henry will get together?! I ship Smyff! Or Fyoaks! Or Felicenry? Henricity? How about just Nerdz²?

KOMA reports that six victims have been found and all but one were African-American males. That means Nightbird must be hunting them for their melanin. Wasn't this an episode of The X-files? Where some albino black guy was going around sticking straws in the pituitary glands of other black guys?

Meanwhile on the Queen Industries side of the storytelling which has mostly been ignored, Oliver falls asleep during a meeting with some guy from Panopticon. There's a note about seeing Batman #41 because they're probably working with Wayne Industries or Power Whatever Inc (or both of them if they merged. I don't remember details very well!). Who is stupid and doesn't think Panopticon is going to be some kind of super villain shell corporation?

Oh no! Panopticon is working with The Nightbird! They must be developing camera technology that sucks blood!

Later Oliver finally puts on the hoodie so Green Arrow fans don't feel like they've wasted their money. Although if they've been wasting their money on the last forty issues of this comic book, I can't see how they'd have any problem throwing away another $2.99!

As Green Arrow, Ollie gets to do ridiculous things that prove his real super power is negating the laws of physics within a forty yard sphere around his body.

Oh comic books! Fuck you!

Green Arrow saves a woman from some muggers and then lectures her for being out at night trying to make a living. She tells him all the black men are disappearing and nobody seems to care. Oliver is all, "Yeah, yeah. But have you heard about this Nightbird guy?" And she's all, "Go talk to Big Dog about Nightbird!" So he does!

Green Arrow gets to the dog fight (of course Big Dog runs dog fights!) a few seconds after Big Dog is kidnapped by Nightbird. Big Dog's half-wolf ringer in the dog fight gets his neck ripped open from the distraction but Ollie is there to save him. Because what Green Arrow needs is his own Ace the Bathound or Krypto the Superdog or Aquadog the Abandoned Dog! I bet he names him Streaky!

Nightbird takes Big Dog to a warehouse in the woods where he ties him up and douses him with bleach. Um. Because...um...well...he's crazy?

Green Arrow #41 Rating: +1 Ranking. I appreciate the way this super hero story happens organically. A villain is doing something villainous that has nothing to do with Green Arrow. The villain seems to have both large plans that involve a group and smaller, more personal plans that the group would probably frown upon if they knew about them. Green Arrow takes it upon himself to search out trouble in Seattle once he gets wind of something odd happening. One thing that remains true though is how Ollie takes his lead from the ever present news reports on the televisions around him. Between KOMA and the Wart Lady (mostly KOMA!), he figures out something odd is going on, straps on the quiver, and heads into the night to do unspeakable things to evil!