So if you are at all interested in comic books then you know the praise "Quiver" got because it had great sales and well because of the well written story too right? Right. It did in fact have a lot of aspects of a well written story, for instance the interweaving of DC continuity was interesting and i think did the story good. The dialogue i just loved, the characters weren't flat, but i thought Batman's character was maybe slightly over-done, too meticulous, too know-it-all, but that’s just an opinion. There was just one thing that bothered me after I had read the entire story arch.
The story by the end of the first issue establishes that the Green Arrow has returned from the dead with really long hair/beard, a costume made of rags and an arsenal of trash including 40oz. Beer cans as arrowheads. By issue two we find out Ollie, with the financial help of Stanley Dover--the man who’s life Ollie saves in the very first issue, is hunting down a child killer in Star City. Spanning a few issues Ollie (Green Arrow) discovers he has ten years of memory unaccounted for and that he may not actually be Oliver Queen at all. “The Demon” Etrigan gets involved and reveals to Oliver that he is what is called a “Hollow”: a body without a soul, a “potential walking apocalypse.” Etrigan whose job it is to dispose of such things seemingly does so, until Queen wakes up in a void and sees that Hal Jordan, former Green Lantern, is responsible for the quick save due to the fact that he has now assumed the role of the Spectre. Ollie travels through time and space with Hal, who shows him how he brought Ollie back from the grave after his case of megalomania wore off and just wanted to “make things right again.” Part of making things right again involved bringing “the good part” of Ollie, which is Ollie with ten years of regrets wiped clean, back from the dead. The other part concerned Hal giving his life in a face off with “the sun-eater.” Now Hal’s intention wasn’t just to bring back a hollow for the sake of planting a ‘walking apocalypse’ in the earth, way to go Hal, it was to bring back the real Oliver Queen from, well, Heaven; a Heaven inhabited by M.L.K jr., Gandhi, Abe Lincoln, and yes even JASON TODD, probably only because he was brutally killed. So basically the whole result of the entire story was to bring back a character that was killed during zero hour, which I thought was disappointing.
What really bothered the hell out of me was the part of the story involving the Star City Slayer, who turned out to be Stanley Dover, probably the only filthy rich Satan-worshiping child killer in need of a body void of a soul to ever walk into Star City, right? Who knows? So anyway the motive for this child killer was to gain eternal life, and his ingenious plan for doing so was to summon a kind “undemonly” beast called “The Beast w/no Name.” How exactly he would’ve attained eternal life from that demon before the amnesiac Ollie Queen conveniently fell into his lap is never specified, all that was explained was how Stanley Dover was going to transfer himself into Ollie’s soulless body, but maybe it could’ve been done w/the demon.
“The Beast” first appears at the end of chapter two inside of a round glass bubble. His captor, at this point just a shadowy figure in a robe, has just murdered a young boy and slurps up his blood from a goblet and then proceeds to feed The Beast what’s left. In the last panel we see a large rather demon-like tongue and fangs indulging in the red plasma. Then “The Beast” appears again in the fourth chapter with a narrative describing how it “Dreams of a little boy it hasn’t seen in [forever]. A boy whom it loved and lost.” The third time we see “The Beast”, he turns out not to be a beast at all but Stanley Dover’s grandson! Who had been connected to “The Beast” due to his grandfather babysitting him while summoning the demon. This is exactly what bothered me! How could the Demon all of a sudden be the grandson? After seeing its tongue and fangs so clearly, after conveying that “The Beast” dreamed about the boy? The Demon and his grandson couldn’t have been one in the same somehow because in chapter nine the demon and the boy appear as two separate beings!
Despite this error in consistency I do recommend the story as a great read, I did enjoy it very much so. I apologize for being so trite and geeky about it all!
