Going Out With a Surprising Bang
Bill Sienkiewicz delivers a weird, but kind of cool cover. The design's not exactly that clever, but the tone is much more akin to the show Arrow or what it appears Lemire is going for. I like it quite a bit for some reason.
Nocenti manages to wrap up her Green Arrow tenure with one of her stronger issues. Last issue was one of her biggest train wrecks, but this one pulled a lot of the most salvageable pieces out of her entire run. I think the thing I liked most about this issue was the way it set up Lemire's run. It's a little weird that Ollie seems to have lost everything offscreen at some point, he references it but I don't recall ever seeing the big moment across the past few issues. Regardless, this fall from power, loss of friends, and place on the street sound exactly like the starting point Lemire has described, and Nocenti does a fine job this issue really setting that stage. Ollie isn't exactly devastated, but he's a bit shaken up, and beginning to realize both mow much harder his life has really become, and how inspiring he still is.
The beginning of the issue was incredibly unnerving. There's a farce of an arrest, followed by what appears to be a very obvious trap. There's so much awkward tension between Green Arrow and Gloria that I felt certain she was leading him into a trap….. and then it turned out she wasn't. It made all that awkwardness multiply in magnitude. But once that melts away, the remainder of this issue is surprisingly well paced, considering Nocenti's penchant for terrible frantic pacing, and the sense that this arc had to be rushed a bit to let Lemire take over. Harrow's story is resolved in a fairly satisfying manner, and the heartwarming moments between Green Arrow and the suicidal Pike are actually quite touching. The weird part is the apparent lack of danger in the actual explosives. It was built up as this huge stockpile that could take out a city block; but then in the end it was only a threat to anyone actually IN the building, because Pike let them go off as he was carried away and they were…. fireworks?
Nocenti also uses this opportunity to tie up a few plot points of her run, most notably calling back to the best issue in her entire run; #10. #10 was a touching one-shot story about the blurring line between man and machine, free will and slavery. Ollie left that tale a bit shaken up, but he gets some closure in this issue that also ties in heavily to the wrap-up of the lesson's he learned this arc in his fall from grace.
In Conclusion: 4/5
MAYBE this isn't QUITE so deserving. There was still quite a bit of awkwardness in the beginning that was actually multiplied instead of explained; and the bombs turning out to be so harmless was even stranger. But this issue was just SO much better than 90% of Nocenti's others that I just found myself looking upon this one that much more favorably. That said, BRING ON LEMIRE/SORRENTINO!
