Review: Green Arrow and Black Canary Wedding Special #1

Reviews

Green Arrow and Black Canary Wedding Special #1

Writer: Judd Winick

Art: Amanda Conner

Green Arrow, longtime playboy, is finally tying the knot with on again off again girlfriend the Black Canary. Naturally everyone gets involved, heroes and villains, so here we go.

We begin with a nice rundown of the two characters history, told well in art as well as words. We get that they began with pure desire, had much pass between them, and fight often. That’ll do for getting on with.

The first part of the issue is Arrow and Canary squabbling as they always do, then quick reaction shots of various heroes. They mostly work well, although Superman manages to sound like a blithering idiot. I’m not sure that wasn’t just the art though, but we’ll get to that. The villains also, naturally, find an invite and decide to crash the wedding.

The wedding hits and we’re off to the races. Nukes distract the big guns and the remaining heroes are attacked. The fight goes as you’d expect and the happy couple are married. A surprise ending later and we’re off to these two’s ongoing series.

The character work is this book’s strong point. These are characters that we are assumed to be familiar with, and this is a big moment for them. Everyone is given a line or two with a flash of clearly defined personality. The reactions to the event are perfect given previous characterizations and backstories, with Hal Jordan and Arsenal coming through particularly clearly in limited screen time.

There are pacing issues here as we go immediately from invitations straight through the wedding here. There is a lot of material that feels rushed. More time spent on the bachelor parties, the planning, and reactions would have given all of the characters more time and space to breathe, which is a shame, since the characterization was so strong within.

The art here is cartoony and terrible. There is no consistency to how people look and almost everyone comes off looking moronic, particularly Superman during his big speech and Arsenal who seems to be fat several times. It really drags the issue down when a big event in longtime characters lives that we should care about is given a cartoony style that detracts from the emotional gravity of the issue and makes everything seem signifigantly less serious.

As a whole, this was fun. Not great, but a good chunk of happenings for one issue that didn’t really go deep but allowed for some good character moments. I just wish they looked better and had more space to breathe. Decompression is overdone, but it was done because of how rushed events like this one often were before and are again here.

Glazer is a former senior editor at Pulse Wrestling and editor and reviewer at The Comics Nexus.