Absolute Green Arrow #1 Review

Bloody, angry, and beautiful. Absolute Green Arrow is an adrenaline soaked comic that speaks to the current moment.

I’ve written a few pieces about DC’s Absolute line at this point, but I think those reviews neglected a huge reason for this line’s success. That reason is this: the Absolute line of books is perfectly meeting the sociopolitical moment we collectively find ourselves in. We live in an era ruled by creepy, weird billionaires who get to make life or death decisions for thousands, if not millions, of people on a whim. Buy up this company, destroy that Company, use government connections to insider trade on war crimes, the list goes on. We can all feel it, the rot from on high that threatens to destroy us all. This is a moment where stories that walk the status quo don’t feel right. An era where we want to see our world reflected in the stories we read. Books not for pure escapism, but as a mirror that we can look into and feel a sense of recognition with. That’s what the Absolute line of books is doing, it’s providing an amplified mirror of the fucked up moment we find ourselves in. That’s the ambient background of these books, the moral arc of the universe tending towards evil. While here in reality that’s just a, quite understandable, feeling, here in the fictional universe of Absolute it’s the literal truth (because of some comicbook darkseid nonsense, don’t worry about it). The central conflicting force these iconic heroes, these bastions of truth and justice, must go up against is a moral entropy woven into the universe. No book has quite so directly held a mirror up to the fundamental rotting carcass of both our and Absolute’s worlds quite like Pornsak Pichetshote and Rafael Albuquerque’s Absolute Green Arrow.

So what shape does Green Arrow take in this universe? A character who takes his iconography from good ol’ Robinhood, who steals from the poor and gives to the needy. Well, the moral gravity of this universe can even bring our heroes down to depths we might never have considered. New depths to fight old injustices. Of course if you read last year’s Absolute Evil one-shot you’d know that Oliver Queen, the man behind the mask, had his brains smashed in at the direction of the ultra wealthy that govern this world. That’s where this book picks up, with the hero whom this mantle belongs to dead, the circumstances of his death unknown to the public. In his place we find a different kind of Green Arrow, a darker, more murderous type with a bow made of knives. This version of the hero, referred to as the “Green Arrow Killer”, is exacting revenge on those responsible for Queen’s death. The Green Arrow Killer’s identity is unknown, and it is bodyguard Dinah “Black Canary” Lance’s job to find out who’s behind the mask, and stop them.

Dinah is our POV character in this issue. She’s a reluctant bodyguard for the ultra wealthy. She doesn’t want to do this job, but it’s what pays for her dad’s medical bills. It’s a not uncommon story in our late stage capitalist society. Working for some truly evil corporation, or people, to make ends meet. She walks in a world of contradiction, one where her relative poverty is contrasted by those she’s hired to protect. She also is an ex-lover of Queen’s. She knew him from before he made his billions, back when he was a messy up-and-comer with daydreams of democratizing the distribution of wealth. While he may be dead, the ghost of Oliver Queen haunts the characters in this book and its characters. After losing her last bodyguard gig she’s coerced into unknowingly working for one of the people responsible for Queen’s death. Tasked with simultaneously protecting them from and looking into the Green Arrow Killer.

In terms of art, Albuquerque deftly weaves between moments of extreme, adrenaline filled, violence and more subdued moments of human emotion. One moment the Green Arrow Killer will be jumping through the air, cutting off heads as if it were a second thought, while the next is a tender moment of frustration or grief. No matter the scene, every beat elicits a fright train of emotion. This is all amplified by Marcelo Maiolo’s colors. Green is the ambient background color of this book. Almost as if the world is cast in the shadow of money, inescapable in the air. That makes it all the more stunning when that green is burned away by the red and orange flame tones that accompany the Green Arrow Killer when they violently burst onto the panel. Maiolo’s colors amplify the amazing pencils of Albuquerque to make sure that every moment is more than sufficiently felt.

Absolute Green Arrow is a beautifully adrenaline inducing book. Every page is just weighed with emotion and energy, so much so that it feels like it’s practically going to burst. As a book it feels angry but never in the way of a tantrum, more like a beautiful and earnest bleeding onto the page. In that way it’s not dissimilar to its peer titles in the Absolute line. All have such a vivid evocation of emotion, whether that be rage or love or empathy, or one of the other myriad of emotions they seek to bring to the page. It’s an exciting addition to the line, one that not only fleshes out this morally rotten world, but also gives us a bloody mirror for ours.

Pick up 'Absolute Green Arrow #1' here.