Green Arrow and Black Canary #19

Well, if memory serves me right, I really enjoyed the last issue of this series, so hopefully Andrew Kreisberg can make it two good issues in a row.

-We begin with Ollie freeing Merlyn from the trap his crazy stalker, Cupid had placed Merlyn in. Cupid then proceeds to blow up a portion of the museum Ollie and Merlyn were having their showdown in, which knocks Ollie out.

-Ollie wakes up handcuffed to some train tracks with Cupid telling him that she intends on letting the train come by and kill them both so they can be together forever. When Ollie demands the key to the cuffs, Cupid explains that she swallowed it. Well, that's a problem!

-Black Canary arrives on the scene and fights Cupid to a stalemate. Canary realizes that the train will be there soon, so she rushes over to Ollie and tells Cupid that she is going to die with Ollie as a big romantic statement, the same way Cupid wanted to. Oh, she's using reverse psychology!

-Cupid regurgitates the key to Ollie's handcuffs, since she doesn't want Canary there to ruin her romantic death scene with Ollie. Cupid frees Ollie before the train comes and rushes back into the museum.

-Ollie and Canary follow Cupid and find her holding an arrow to Merlyn's neck. Cupid whines a bit about her "romantic" evening being ruined before she slashes Merlyn's throat and makes her getaway while Ollie and Canary work to save Merlyn.

-As the issue ends we find out that Ollie managed to save Merlyn's life although the doctor's are unsure of just how bad the damage to Merlyn is. Dinah bitches to Ollie about Cupid lusting after him and we see the guy who suffered hearing damage thanks to Dinah irresponsibly using her Canary Cry a few issues back watching a television in a store window... OK then...

Well, I'll say right off the bat I wasn't very fond of this issue. Why oh why does Andrew write Dinah as such a loser??? That drives me absolutely frigging crazy! Whatever happened to the Dinah who was able to stand toe to toe with Deathstroke the Terminator from the Birds of Prey comics? I was always under the impression that Dinah was one of the better hand to hand fighters in the DCU... I guess I was WAY off. In this issue Dinah can't even defeat Cupid in hand to hand combat. Cupid, who to my knowledge has no real fighting expertise! WTF?!? Dinah should have beat Cupid with one hand tied behind her back without even breaking a sweat!

Besides that there is also the issue of Ollie repeatedly stating that he isn't a murderer... Now, my sister is a HUGE Green Arrow fan, and she has many of the Green Arrow comics from the late 1980's to the early 1990's. I even picked up a bunch of those comics for her last Christmas. Anyway, those GA comics carried the mature audience banner and had Ollie basically killing whoever the hell pissed him off that day. I haven't read those issues yet(I have flipped through a few of them), but my sister has told me that Ollie would kill criminals with arrows, automatic weapons, basically anything he could use as a weapon. So yes, Ollie IS a murderer. Not that I have a major problem with that(he was killing rapists and various other scumbags), it's just annoying that Ollie and Dinah were acting like those past events never occured.

Finally, why the hell is Dinah pissed at Ollie about Cupid hitting on him? It's not like Ollie asked for Cupid's attention or was leading her on or anything like that, I mean Cupid was going to kill Ollie with a train! That doesn't exactly sound like a sane woman! Dinah blaming Ollie for Cupid's bad behavior was just another aspect of this comic I really didn't like. For a score I'll give this issue a 6 out of 10. Honestly, with the exception of the characters acting in ways they shouldn't, this wasn't a terrible comic book. Personally though, I can't ignore the weak way Dinah is being written... That really annoys me.