Small week for comics this week, being the end of the month. It’s also been just one heck of a week for me. Ugh. I do not need to be paying this much to fix my car every couple of months…Anyway, we’ve got Green Arrow, for one thing.

Comic Book of the Week goes to She-Hulk #14 because this series has finally hit a groove I enjoy, after the first storyline left me in the dust.

Meanwhile, everything else continues to shamble along. Still immersed in both Tears of the Kingdom and Diablo 4. Enjoying Secret Invasion. Didn’t care for the new Indiana Jones. Just kind of chugging along and trying not to go broke.

Comic Reviews: Green Arrow #3 and She-Hulk #14.

Green Arrow #3
Writer: Joshua Williamson
Artist: Sean Izaakse
Colorist: Romulo Fajardo Jr.
Letterer: Troy Peteri

Green Arrow is balancing one of the weirdest plots in superhero comics with some otherwise really strong comic making.

Ollie and Lian are teleported to a new time and space, where they encounter Hawke and the Legion of Super-Heroes. Ollie and his son have a nice reunion and then they get down to business to figure out what’s going on. Turns out, Oliver in the future will work with Amanda Waller in the past to insert displacement devices in each of the Arrow Family that teleports them away from each other when they get close. He’s working on a tip from a Super Old Oliver who says that the Arrow Family is responsible for the Great Disaster. But Lian convinces Ollie to ignore Super Old Oliver’s warning and just get the family back together to beat this. They are all then attacked by by classic Hal Jordan version of Parallax.

Meanwhile, Roy wins a shooting contest against Peacemaker and earns the right to interrogate Count Vertigo for information on Amanda Waller.

Comic Rating: 7/10 – Good.

Even though the plot is really, really wild, this remains a well-written and excellently drawn series that makes great use of the characters involved. I can forgive transforming the comic book Peacemaker into just his James Gunn version, because Williamson nails the tone and the scene where he and Roy have a shooting contest is just dumb enough to be fun. It works for both characters, especially with Black Canary and Peacewrecker rolling their eyes at the whole thing. It’s just a fun, silly scene that totally worked for me.

The Green Arrow scenes also worked. I don’t have any connection to Connor Hawke, so his reunion with his father means little to me on a personal level. But I can what’s happening, and the fact that the Legion of Super-Heroes are just standing around for it all is kinda funny. But we’ve got a better understanding of what’s happening, and it totally works to propel the movie forward. It’s just really, really weird. So Amanda Waller has the technology to create little baubles that can be inserted into a person that causes them to be launched through time and space anytime they get close to another bauble? That’s insane. And it’s insane that this was the answer to keeping the family apart to prevent the Great Disaster. And it’s insane that this is only the third issue. This storyline is wild.

But the character writing is strong enough, and the artwork is excellent enough, to make this a very readable comic.

TL;DR: The character work is nigh second-to-none in this relatively fun, if insanely plotted, story.

She-Hulk #14
Writer: Rainbow Rowell
Artist: Andres Genolet
Colorist: Dee Cunniffe
Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramagna

Man, with every new issue of She-Hulk I read, I wonder what all those early issues were about. I hope Rainbow Rowell was setting up an incredible long game.

Jennifer meets with the Fantastic Four about Scoundrel and how he was stealing bomb parts, but nobody has any answers about the guy. Jen heads to court, then to the office then back home, where she fields a phone call from her depressed boyfriend, Jack of Hearts, who is elsewhere in the world doing some project. Then she immediately gets a call from Scoundrel, who shows up outside her apartment in his spaceship and invites her aboard. They get to chatting, dancing and chatting some more as she poses questions and he answers and flirts. He’s a thief who doesn’t like complications, but he really likes her.

Jen eventually gets him to reveal that he was stealing bomb parts for an alien named Drapurg so that he could blow up Manhattan that very night. That’s why he got She-Hulk out of there. She’s so mad she throws him through a wall.

Comic Rating: 8/10 – Very Good.

Part of me feels a little hypocritical for enjoying this issue so much. I complained all the time how the first couple of issues were just Jen sitting around with Jack having a conversation. And this issue is just Jen hanging around with Scoundrel having a conversation. But it’s all about the tenor of the conversation, the conflict it sets up, and the chemistry between the characters. I don’t feel like Jen and Jack have any chemistry at all. Whereas Jen and Scoundrel are fun together, and their flirtation creates layers of conflict and concern. He’s also just more personable and charming than Jack of Hearts, and that totally works for me. (Though my guess is that Jack of Hearts’s project in the world is a grand romantic gesture to Jen…). Anyway, I just really enjoy this thing Rowell has built between Jennifer and Scoundrel.

He’s a bad guy, and that’s half the fun. I love his aloofness. He’s not hiding anything about his life as a thief or his opinions on Manhattan. He likes a girl, and this is how he woos that girl. It’s charmingly straight forward. And I love Jen’s hesitancy to give him anything. It’s a very fun back and forth, and it all builds to the reveal of what he was up to, and how it’s going to cause further conflict between them. I dig it. I dig it all. Coupled with some check-ins with the F4 and Mallory Book, this is a nice, all-around issue that finally builds to a head on this storyline.

TL;DR: Genuinely fun and charming writing easily bolsters this character-focused issue, with the story finally coming to a potentially explosive head.

The comics I review in my Hench-Sized reviews are just the usual comics I grab from Comixology any given week, along with a few impulse buys I might try on a whim. So if there are any comics or series you’d like me to review each week, let me know in the comments.

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