A Very Fine Read Indeed

Several weeks ago I wrote about the bizarre events leading up to and culminating in Green Arrow and Black Canary's wedding night. The... climax of that event came in the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special, where bride Dinah was inexplicably attacked by groom Oliver, resulting in her stabbing him in the neck, apparently killing him. And this was all a lead-in to a brand new Green Arrow / Black Canary ongoing title, which launched this past week.

I'm in a minority within the comic book community, because I neither love nor hate the writing of Judd Winnick. Sometimes his style works for me and sometimes it leaves me cold, so I haven't really formed any definitive opinion about the man. Here, I'm happy to say, he hits exactly the right notes for this DC fan. To begin with, the story picks up a month after the events of the GA/BC Wedding Special, so we're quickly informed that the neck wound at the end of the previous tale was, indeed, fatal. So much so, in fact, that Dinah (Mrs Queen?) has the dead body to prove it, preserved in a glass coffin, down in her basement!

Where Winnick wins me over, though, is with his inclusion of other key DCU characters. Pretty much everyone who's closely associated with either Oliver "Green Arrow" Queen or Dinah "Black Canary" Lance shows up, either to offer condolences to the widow or to help her deal with her apparent boatload of denial. She's utterly convinced, it turns out, that the man who tried to kill her, and ended up dying at her hands, was not Oliver Queen! She knows this by his eyes, and she's unflagging in her belief. But of course no one else believes her, until she finds the most unlikely of allies: Batman himself! He's done his usual detective work, as a counterpoint to Dinah's more emotional bias, and has come to the same conclusion as his Justice League teammate. Suddenly the rest of the friends, family and heroes take the Canary's denial a lot more seriously! (Hopefully no one reading the comic will interpret this as a slap at women, as it's clearly not a "male/female" thing but rather a "Batman/everyone else" thing!)

There's lots more on display in this impressive premiere, including a whole lot of very clean, very attractive artwork by Cliff Chiang. He has a deceptively simple style that may not sit well with some, especially on characters like Green Lantern and Batman, but I found that it worked perfectly for me here. He also has the likenesses of the main characters down pat, right from the start, which should help anyone trying out this book who isn't a longtime fan. Consistency is all too rare in comics these days, it seems.

I came into this series lukewarm, especially given the way it was lead into. But after reading this first issue, I'm planning to stick around for awhile, both to see where it's going, and because it's off to a great start! I'll also say, without giving anything away, that I guessed the minor twist that shows up toward the end of the comic, although I saw it just before the big reveal. The clue was subtle, but it was there. And I like when writers play fair like that!