1306 ( )

I was looking forward to the replacement of Judd Winick on Green Arrow and Black Canary. Unfortunately, this is like the switch between Bill Mantlo and James Hudnall on Alpha Flight: it's still bad, it's just bad differently. There's a few big problems with the book. The first is Green Arrow's absolute obsession with bringing in Merlyn in this issue: why now? Why does this crime cause him to cross "the line"? He wasn't tempted to with Connor in the last storyline, he wasn't even tempted to when Merlyn blew up half of Star City. Merlyn taking out three technogeeks is what it takes to get him riled up? Really? The other, and much bigger, is Cupid: a woman with no training who is suddenly capable of taking out big-name villains with ease. Now, I think Merlyn and Brick are both completely lame villains... but I also know that this lone woman could not just waltz in and take them out when Green Arrow has spent years trying without success. This could be forgiven if Cupid was at all a good villain, but Kreisberg has just replaced Winick's lame antagonists with his own. Finally, there's Black Canary, who continues to be sidelined in (supposedly) her own title, needing Ollie to rescue her from a stupid thug in the very first issue here, and then accidentally deafening a man in contrived circumstances.

Add to this a perfunctory write-out of Connor and Mia (Winick was always good for giving Mia things to do) and Mike Norton's art embracing a "grittier" style that is more his own (apparently) but also more generic, and you have the third disappointing volume of this series in a row.

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