GREEN ARROW #44

By: Tony Whitt
Review Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Recently, a reader wrote in to (quite erroneously) take Judd Winick to task for making HIV "a career obsession" and being "dictatorial" about forcing us to read about a comics character who has it. For one thing, Winick's hardly obsessed with the concept of HIV as another reader quickly wrote in to point out, the only other book Winick's ever done that treated with the subject this directly was his rightfully critically-acclaimed PEDRO AND ME way back when he began his career. And for another, if any writer can handle the subject with as much care and tastefulness as Winick does and wants to read about it, I'd say more power to him.

In fact, the only real flaw that I can find in this issue of GREEN ARROW is that it's almost too informative, too focused on the topic at hand, so much so that the scene in which Mia's doctor corrects Ollie when he asks if she's going on the drug cocktail (it's now called HAART, she tells him) feels almost didactic in tone. Thing is, it's also exactly the sort of conversation that one would have with one's doctor about the virus and its treatment, and that's exactly the sort of information that would come up at such a moment. The only thing that makes it sound so odd and "After-School Special"-ish is that we haven't seen this stuff all that often in mainstream comics and to quote that jailbird Martha Stewart, that's a good thing. That we're finally seeing it, I mean.

I also find that, even more than Kevin Smith's interpretation of the character, I like Winick's take on Ollie more than anyone else's. Ollie reacts the way we'd expect him to react: he retreats into gruff denial, in much the same way that Mia herself has. Additionally, Winick's handling of Mia is nothing short of amazing, and dead on true to life as someone who has had many friends who were HIV-positive or who feared they were, I can attest to the veracity of the whole "Who will love me now?" conversation that Mia has with Connor at the end of the issue. This is the way real people act when they're diagnosed, and if it takes a "career obsession" for someone like Winick to get these scenes so absolutely right, I'll clamor for more "obsessed" writers any day.

And there's something about Phil Hester and Ande Parks' artwork I had never, ever noticed before this issue: it reminds me of the best work one sees in indie comics. Even the cover looks more like something one would see from Oni Press or Slave Labor Graphics I had to do a literal double-take in the comics shop before I realized it was the latest issue of GREEN ARROW. I suspect that same cover will cause some casual readers to immediately avoid it a white cover with "h.i.v. positive" in red lowercase letters is likely to do that sort of thing but those same people will be doing themselves a disservice by not reading this issue...or, indeed, the series itself.

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