The now ongoing Green Arrow series was never intended to go beyond six issues, and whilst writer Joshua Williamson certainly hoped that it would it was never a guarantee, and with the now two extensions that it's had (to a 12 issue series and then an ongoing) this issue feels something like a bridging issue, and one that's partially designed to give Williamson a bit of breathing room.
After returning from being lost across space and time, Oliver Queen has returned to his world, and is excited to get back to being the Green Arrow. With that in mind he hops in his new arrow car and drives over to the Hall of Justice to reunite with his teammates. But he finds an empty building, no sign of his friends. Thus begins an issue where Oliver visits some of the key members of the League in order to find out what's changed since he's been gone.
This is a good issue if you've not been keeping up on everything, and shows some of the wider state of the DC universe. He learns that Batman is being even more Batman than usual and his now also hated by his family, Superman is running Lexcorp as Supercorp, Wonder Woman is a wanted fugitive who's at war with the US government, and Hal Jordan is a loser at love living in a shitty trailer. It gives Ollie enough of a rundown of everything without having to go into huge detail, but as someone who's aware of everything that he learns here there's pretty much nothing new in this book, and I'm not left with a huge amount to actually entertain me.
I can't even really say that there's much there in regards to the character interactions either, as the talks with the trinity are more about what's going on with their status quos than them as characters, and the only person Ollie interacts with who actually seems to be a person is Hal. Even then, there's not enough with the two of them to fill the book, though at least it does feel like the tow of them are friends with a history during this scene.
The most interesting part of the issue is learning that Ollie isn't just catching up with his friends for the sake of it, but is also trying to find out if this is indeed his reality. With things being so different from when he left it makes absolute sense that he'd be wondering if he's slipped onto another Earth, and he and Conner running tests and spy on people to make sure they got it right is sneaky sure, but it's also very smart.
The art on this issue is done by Carmine Di Giandomenico and Trevor Hairsine, with Romulo Fajardo Jr. on colours. The art duties are split in this issue with the two of them doing around half of the book each, but with no thematic reason for the split. Some recent DC books have been using different artists on things such as flashbacks to show the difference clearly; but this issue it seems that perhaps the split was simply due to the sudden extension of the series and the need to produce a seventh issue on a shorter timeframe. The down side is that whilst neither artist is bad in any way, and are both producing really nice looking work their styles just don't really seem to mesh well, and you notice the change when it happens.
I can't help but feel that a lot the issues that I found with this issue are down to behind the scenes issues and the change in plans for the series, rather than being about the quality of the team involved. That being said, this was the least entertaining entry in the series so far for me, and I'm really hoping that the next issue will return to the quality that we've been experiencing so far that made Green Arrow one of my favourite books of last year.
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