Green Arrow #35

Writer: Benjamin Percy

Artist: Juan Ferreyra

Letterer: Deon Bennett

This title has officially gone monthly, and whether or not this will help the book will be determined soon. However, it bodes well for the art, because Juan Ferreyra is the best artist this title has right now and the possibility of seeing his artwork month in and month out is a pleasure both as a fan of his work and as a critic.

Something that irked me about this issue by the end of it was that this still felt like a biweekly title. Comics are written so far in advance that Benjamin Percy could have thought his book would still be biweekly by the time this issue came out, so he writes two issues' worth of story in one month rather than writing one issue for one month, which will lead to some slow plotting for the new couple of issues. This was the case for AQUAMAN, which went monthly this summer and it felt like reading a biweekly book.

As for the issue and story itself, it isn't very compelling. I've made it clear time and time again that this Ninth Circle story is incredibly boring and simply unengaging on any basic level for me. Percy is simply trying to drag out this story as much as he can, which deeply bothers me. I love long-form storytelling when a writer has a solid, dynamic, and interesting story to tell but it's very contrived when it should be more natural, much like Scott Snyder's work on METAL. He's tying things back to his BATMAN run that he didn't even initially plan, so it feels more narratively smooth.

Nothing's wrong with the art here. Ferreyra is, again, one of the best artists working in the industry. The amount of attention he brings to a page is stunning, and his double-page spreads are excellent progressors of time.

In yet another slog of an issue, the first monthly issue of GREEN ARROW does little but show you that Percy still gave in a script for a biweekly story. Nothing really happens save for the final few pages, and even they don't do much to peak my interest.