Green Arrow had an outstanding first year as part of Rebirth, putting out 24 consistently excellent issues with sharp, complex scripts and dynamic, imaginative visuals by a rotating art team in total sync with each other and with writer Benjamin Percy. The past year has given Oliver Queen a strong sense of direction and a compelling supporting cast, with each new story upping the stakes and forcing him to think even bigger if he’s going to stop his ever-growing nemesis: The Ninth Circle. Green Arrow’s hitting the road in this latest arc, and the hero is teaming up with the biggest names in the DC Universe to stop a villainous plot that has national ramifications.
Oliver worked with The Flash to investigate speedster animals, faced domestic terrorism in Washington, D.C., with Wonder Woman, and in this week’s issue, he heads to Metropolis to confront Lex Luthor about his relationship with The Ninth Circle. This exclusive preview of Green Arrow #28 spotlights Lex Luthor’s powers of deduction, and he’s immediately able to piece together the hero’s recent changes by analyzing his appearance and weaponry. While Lex reads Oliver, Clark Kent is on the streets of Metropolis, inconspicuously stopping crime before grabbing a croissant. The pages are split between these two tracks, which is something Percy has done a few times in the past to play around with pacing.
Percy typically does this when working with artist Juan Ferreyra, whose evocatively painted, cleverly designed artwork has made Green Arrow one of the most visually inventive superhero books on the market. Ferreyra is being just as playful with his layouts, like the five-panel sequence of Clark stopping a robber that unfolds like a self-contained comic strip. (Let’s just ignore that a full paintcan smashing into the back of someone’s head could paralyze or kill them in real life.) He makes bold coloring choices to distinguish between separate tracks, and the combination of those different colors in the final page of this preview indicates that they are about to intersect. As great as this book is, it’s at its best when Percy and Ferreyra are working together, and this super team is back together just in time for Superman to appear.