#kill machine

Vamos con la cuarta presentacion de la Mafia, Matt, maddox y Maximus nos traen el primer Kill Machine Outdoor. UN FIN DE SEMANA CON LA MAFIA DISFRUTAMOS DE DOS DIAS LLENOS DE MOTO ,BUENA COMIDA Y MUY BUENA GENTE Nuevos senderos ,caminos y terrenos es un poco de lo que estuvieron probando los chicos en esta edición de la clínica VOLVEMOS CON LA SEGUNDA EDICION EL 22,23 Y 24 DE AGOSTO QUERES SER…

So, just to get it out of the way, as someone who never read the mainstream story DC comics prior to the New 52 coming out(pretty sure Vertigo imprint/Dark Knight Returns don’t count), I’m aware of the New 52 hate but I’m actually the target audience, in that I’m a new reader who’d like something that cuts through the swaths of ragged and overlapping continuity.

The problem is I’ve found the New 52 kind of ...flavorless? I’ve read the first Flash trade, the first Nightwing trade, and this Green Arrow trade, and I just don’t have that same feeling that I have to read more. I read The Flash and Nightwing months ago and haven’t bothered to go back; it took me a week to get around to finishing this trade. Whereas with Young Avengers or The Wicked and the Divine or even Sandman back in my misspent youth (aka sophomore year of college, which in retrospect was pretty misspent) I couldn’t stop turning the pages or clicking or, in the case of Sandman, hunting down my friend’s copies that everyone was all kind of concurrently reading and finally resorting to a pirated PDF* because I HAD TO FINISH.

It’s just...everyone is kind of attractive, and they have powers or skills, and they sort of wander around fighting, but there’s not much of an inner life, or a sense of why they’re doing this. Maybe the problem is that I need to be reading more characters’ stories to get the full picture, but that’s the kind of continuity I thought the New 52 was supposed to wipe clean.

Bechdel test - maybe one or two of the issues pass? There are four named female characters. Two sets of them share scenes (Naomi and Emiko, Naomi and Shado). In both scenes they are kind of talking about Ollie but have some not-exactly about Ollie bits as well in which Emiko threatens Naomi and Shado and Naomi basically tell each other I told you so.

I wonder if it’s because I skipped ahead to this arc because people said the Lemire run was the strongest...I did miss three other trades, and yet it’s still not grabbing me. Part of it is the mystical cults and total lack of Black Canary. And the lack of facial hair. Don’t get me wrong, the classic Green Arrow beard is pretty silly, but some Arrow-like stubble could go a long way. Even more so, though, I just don’t have a sense of Oliver as a person from this, and unlike in the show, he’s not even coming off as a brutal, wounded, misguided vigilante on a crusade. He’s just some dude with arrows doing things. The action is good, but the inner monologue is primarily action. It’s not like Black Widow, where much of the story is inner monologue but it actually seems like her inner life, and not “arrows, shooting arrows.”

I’ve heard good things about this run of Batgirl and the new Black Canary series, and I liked Green Arrow Year 1, so maybe it’s just finding a better storyline. Or maybe Marvel just has my heart.

(Image also has my heart).