The cover shown (and advertised) in not the real cover.  Although both are great.  The new Green Arrow is much younger than before. He now looks like a young internet billionaire, and not the veteran hero he was before.  I don’t know how they are going to explain Speedy or his son?  Are they erased? Did have kids when he was a teen?  I guess these will answered over the next few years.

The script was serviceable.  It introduced the hero and his abilities, the people in his life and his situation, and that is what was important for new readers not to feel they have missed 50 years of story.

I don’t know if the whole industrialist/capitalist story about Q-core and its CEO will work in a super-hero book.  But I appreciate that the situation is different than standard.  Also, I think some of the dialogue was bit ham-handed.  Most of the time it was okay, but there were some combat scenes where the dialogue was dense and long.  How long does it take to shoot an arrow? Long enough to have a soliloquy.

I don’t like the green box text.  It is hard to read, but it guess it adds some flavor, so I can deal with it.  And why set it in Seattle?  He had  a distinct city in Star City that I hope is not lost.

I hope more story comes soon.  I’m not drawn into Jax and Namoi, but I am intrigued by the ‘loss’ he is driven by.

C+   —-  Don

The very first thing that struck me about this issue was how strongly the “new” Green Arrow look resembles Marvel’s Ultimate Hawkeye. If you take the cover of Ultimate Hawkeye #1 and recolor the costume in green, I’d be surprised if people didn’t readily accept it as a Green Arrow cover. It’s not a bad look, but the new 52 Green Arrow doesn’t stand out nearly as much as he has in the past, and the same can be said about this issue.

It’s by no means a bad book – Dan Jurgens tells a decent story, the art is good, and the inks by George Perez give the book an ideal blend of both artists’ work. The new status quo of Ollie Queen being an active (if oft-absent) part of his Wayne Enterprises-sized company could be interesting, but we are not exactly tantalized by all the fruit that such a setting could bear with the first issue.

The first issue isn’t bad at all, but it is easily lost for me amidst the excitement of the other books, both potential and realized, of the new 52 launch. There is little here that could not have easily been put into place in any Green Arrow issue from the last few years. It’s still a good book, but it has already been overshadowed by the other books I’ve read so far, so it gets a C+ with a lot of room for improvement (and with the creative team involved, I see no reason why it can’t grow far beyond its forgettable beginnings).

- Ed

I agree with my fellow bloggers above. While I don’t think Green Arrow is as young as Don stated, the story does seem to happen during his younger years. Book has a good creative team, but I thought it was just “okay”. Not terrible and not great. Just okay.  Dialogue mundane at times. I think if you were a fan of Green Arrow, you’d probably be intrigued by this. But I hadn’t read Green Arrow in the past, and the book didn’t really do anything to interest me in reading more. However, for the sake of this blog,  I will read issue #2 and see if the plot/story improves. It’s got all the ingredients to make it happen. Just needs a bit more time in the oven. I give it C.

–Kelly