About the time graphic novels and collected trade paperbacks began to dominate comic publishers' bottom lines, the industry witnessed the rise of what has been termed "decompressed storytelling." What that means is that stories that could be adequately told in one issue are stretched and padded to fill two or three issues. Or, more likely, a two-issue story now drags out to six issues in order to fill out a trade edition. At the same time on television, the X-Files was making a killing doing essentially the same thing — spinning out a conspiracy mystery each week, with agents Mulder and Scully coming tantalizingly close to the answers but never quite learning anything.
Believe it or not, I actually turned in these reviews within a week of the comics hitting the streets. Real Life intervened, however, keeping them from being published until now. Such is life. If you're interested in charting my reaction to the series from the start, you can go back to my Identity Crisis no. 1 and start from there. Chronological order counts for something, you know.
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OK, for whatever reason, this is the first comic (or graphic novel) that I've read in about a half century. No kidding. I mean, I used to read about Green Arrow that long ago, and longer. So naturally I don't have much of a clue about all the backstory that's involved here. Even at that, though, I've enjoyed what I've seen so far, and I'm looking forward to finding out the answer. It had better be a good one.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping it's good, too. I was somewhat let down by his Green Arrow arc, because after great build up fantastic characterization, the solution to the "mystery" turned out to be something Meltzer invented from out of left field. Since he made up the motivation out of whole cloth, there was no way readers could "solve" the mystery. The storyline was entertaining, but ultimately unsatisfying.
ReplyDeleteI busted his chops about that pretty hard.
I'm hoping he plays fair with the readers this time, and doesn't cop out with "WifeKillerz" a heretofore-unknown master criminal with a long, drawn-out retroactive history with the Justice League.