"The End" Week: Green Arrow #50!

This is a more recent last issue that I had wanted to check out, and...whoo. It's, um, a last issue, I guess. From 2019, Green Arrow #50, "zero." Written by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing, art by Javier Fernandez.

This series began in 2016 under the 'Rebirth' banner, and managed to get 50 issues out inside of three years? None of which I've read! Lanzing and Kelly had been writing since #39, although I'm not sure it had all been building up to this. In the No Justice event, the Justice League and other heroes had been, as Ollie testily puts it, "space kidnapped" leaving him earth's last line of defense. Pissed that it had come to that, he let the League have it, and J'onn J'onzz gave him a secret box, a weapon that could destroy the League. The government forces Dinah, Ollie's beloved Black Canary, to bring him in and get the box. Failing that, a ton of government special forces teams are ready to try to bring him down.

Ollie manages to get to his Arrowplane, and tries to bluff the pursuing fighters: maybe he does have a weapon the JL is afraid of, and maybe shooting him down wouldn't be good for it? He still gets his plane shot out from under him and has to bail out, but loses his chute (it may catch fire, but it's not clear there) and is only saved by Dinah's Canary Cry. She then takes down a squad for him, but won't run away with him: new vigilante Riot races through on her motorcycle to drag Ollie and his box away. She's going to be the new guardian of Seattle, Ollie is O-U-T. Ollie tries to give her some serious advice, and what I hope is a joke:

In the end, alone in the rain, his old life probably wrecked beyond repair (until the next reboot, anyway!) Ollie opens the box. And finds nothing. After going through most of the stages of grief--disbelief, fury, grief--Ollie calls out to J'onn, presuming the Martian could hear him. (Could he, though?) He knows, politeness aside, what J'onn thinks of him: "...a loose cannon...the loud rich brat who ruined every party by bringing up racial profiling statistics. The guy you invited out of obligation." Ollie may have even believed that, for a while, but he's something else. A survivor. And he promises J'onn, "when you do overstep your bounds--and you will--it won't be an empty box you're facing."

After Ollie walks away, the discarded box glows green.

Whoo. I know I'm coming in at the end, but I...did not care for that. I don't know how planned this was, or if I missed all the set-up previously, but if Ollie is going to spend the last four pages of his series yelling at someone, maybe they should've appeared in the issue? Even in flashback? And I grew up on Oreo-eating JLI J'onn; it is virtually impossible for me to believe he would be this kind of dick. Unless Ollie was somehow more annoying than Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, and Guy Gardner at their worst. ("This is an ancient Martian artifact. It is imperative you keep it out of enemy hands. Now go! Run!" "...this looks like your coffee cup, J'onn." "I could make you believe it, or you could get out of my office.") Either J'onn thinks Ollie is less than useless and gave him a busy-box; or he gave him an invisible super-weapon that Ollie then threw away...

I think at some point since the TV show, DC tried to bring Felicity Smoak into the comics series, but comic fans refuse to have him with anybody except Black Canary. And I think Canary has a lot of fans that prefer her with the Birds of Prey or solo or the JSA or the JLA; just without Ollie. Probably some subset of both want Ollie to have a sidekick or partner like Roy or Emiko, while another insist he be a solo act...somewhere in that Venn diagram is a smaller group of "people paying money for Green Arrow comics," which probably explains this last issue as well as anything.