Broken Frontier

It’s One Year Later and Oliver Queen is the new mayor of Star City. What does a once-vigilante, elected figurehead do during his first days in office?

Apparently, he antagonizes the national media; disowns the capitalist tycoons invested in controlling the city; and makes enemies of the police department devoted to maintaining order without accruing one spot or blemish upon the public perception of his political character. The first issue of Winick’s appealing concept on yesterday’s liberal becoming today’s conservative (a modern day Robin Hood becoming the new Sheriff) was a purely eventless, throwaway chapter. The state of Star City in the wake of the Society’s ardently destructive assault from one year earlier was made evident, and the idea that Oliver Queen is, in fact, the mayor of this broken down metropolis was also made clear; all information that was easily gleaned from that issue’s cover and advance solicitation synopsis. Was an entire issue needed just to set up an already understood premise?

The good news: after the inanity of merely patrolling the city streets in the previous issue, it was a pleasant surprise to actually see our protagonist act the mayor in this otherwise ridiculous second chapter. The bad news: what a ridiculous second chapter! A superhero as a politician (even if just a local one) – is a fantastically fun idea to pursue, but unfortunately, and especially after the more well considered comic-book politicking of Rucka’s Wonder Woman run and the dangerously parallel yet elevated concept of Vaughan’s Ex Machina, the mesh of real-world considerations and super-heroic ideals gels in writer Judd Winick’s script like cookie batter without eggs; not at all.

Winick is an outstanding comedian (when he’s allowed to do it "raw," as they say), and he can equally spin slice of life poignancy with an earnest gravitas. His love for the superhero and the fantastical worlds they inhabit is equally as blatant in his near reminiscent handling of the characters and their histories. That said, his plotting and dialogue for these speculative genres is woefully out of step with the style of suppressed histrionics necessary for such overblown concepts to succeed dramatically. Superheroes are naturally unreal, archetypical in scope, and the true modern-day fascination with them is seeing them interact with a world that we know. Each grandiose concept needs some sort of grounding within the familiar in order to establish an empathetic reader connection. If the story is centered in another galaxy with fifteen alien races obliterating each other with pseudo-science technology, little can or should be conceded as there is no recognizable foundation within the framework (save for maybe the human recognition of the horror inherent within any war). But a superhero as mayor is a concept that requires such aforementioned delicacy. A comic book can and by all means should, if the story calls for it, be more fun and frolic than grim and ideological gore, but a character such as Oliver Queen taking a political office is much more a tale for the latter than the former.

Regrettably, however, Winick writes an overly belligerent, bellicose Queen which, while not necessarily out of character for the womanizing leftist, is a direct contradiction to the older, wiser, more introspective protagonist that’s been presented to readers over the past few years (many of these character evolutions a product of earlier issues written by Winick himself!). Rather than the honest moral equivocations as dealt with in that other comic about an ex-superhero as mayor (Ex Machina), Green Arrow #61 gives little more than an issue-long sermon for Winick’s own political views; Ollie’s speeches sound like Winick, not Ollie. They sound like a hip, young writer who hadn’t just spent an entire year petitioning for a public office. Basically, while the content of his words are kinder, the phraseology Winick chooses to give Ollie as a political speaker is as ill-conceived as anything uttered by George W. Bush, yet still the writer imagines that this type of straight low-brow talk is fresh and effective. Ollie’s effortless cowing of the national media (the most uncowable group of narcissist individuals imaginable) with a quite frankly puerile, tantrum-esque address is beyond unbelievable. The idea that a mayor standing alone can reject a vast multi-billion dollar conglomerate from managing a foothold within a city infrastructure, and that the police of the city are ineffective as compared to one solo, non-powered archer in green tights – it’s all pure pipe-dream implausibility. That suits the superhero side of the equation, but not the political one, and I for one was very disappointed that the concept wasn’t treated with more sincerity.

There is one slice of goodness to look forward to, though: Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens are naturals here at Arrow central; much more fitting replacements for the dark kinesthesia of Phil Hester and Ande Parks. I thoroughly enjoyed Tom Fowler’s work, but his Queen (with a freakishly long, pointed goatee and disconcertingly vicious smile) was redolent of some sort of Joker-Ollie hybrid that I was never able to adapt to.

DC’s grand One Year Later event, spinning directly from the departure of Infinite Crisis, has so far been a tepid affair, with stories that, for all their honest, enticing charm on the conceptual level, have been sadly far from gripping in execution. The befuddling aspect of this is that most books, like Green Arrow, have retained the original writers and editors that were in place before the continuity leap. Still, character gaffes, story inconsistencies, and an all around lack of honest dramatic effectiveness within the stories – as readers have been perhaps jaded by with Infinite Crisis’ epic noteworthiness – is stifling the excitement before the precedent crossover is even complete. There is a truly exciting cliffhanger at the end of this latest GA issue that’ll be sure to bring readers back for more, but even this plot twist seems horribly out of place and forced into the supposedly primary focus of the arc (Ollie as mayor).

I’ll hope for more, but honestly, I won’t be hanging around much longer if the quality doesn’t improve to something far greater than what was given in Green Arrow #61.