We'll never be lonely anymore: Graeme thinks about Wedding Specials from 9/19.

The interesting thing about the cover blurb from GREEN ARROW AND BLACK CANARY WEDDING SPECIAL #1 is that it's more true than was probably intended: "Everyone who's anyone in the DCU will be there! (And you won't BELIEVE this WEDDING NIGHT!)" it says, and it's entirely right; by the end of the book, I didn't believe the wedding night at all. Immediately, I just assumed that there was going to be some kind of out within six months or so, some way of undoing what just happened - Not because I am such a Green Arrow fan that I'm that upset over the end result, but because it not only came from nowhere, but came from nowhere right in an epilogue after the main story and therefore seemed even more gratuitous and "Oh, hell, we need a shock ending" than it would've otherwise.

Another reason why I'm assuming that there's going to be a get-out clause (even if that get-out clause invalidates the wedding, such as "It wasn't really Green Arrow at all!") is because... Well, there's just something super-shitty about having an otherwise light and positive book have such an ending. Never mind that the entire wedding event so far has been so light and frothy that I think everyone and their aunt have been waiting for the other shoe to drop - presumably on someone's head - the entire time; this particular one-shot is (like the Wedding Planner, and pretty much the JLA special as well) a comedy right up until the last four pages. Judd Winick's script plays everything - even the wedding crashing party made up of Deathstroke and an army of supervillains - for laughs, aided and abetted by Amanda Conner's amazing artwork, which nails everything effortlessly; she's an artist who can really get her characters to "act" without breaking the reader's involvement in the story to marvel at the art. It just seems like bad manners - and kind of bad writing, to be honest - to have such a dramatic and unexplained tonal shift at the story, especially going from comedy to tragedy without warning or, more importantly, any sense of it being real or believable.

It's all a set-up for next month's Green Arrow/Black Canary ongoing series, of course, and that's partially why I expect everything to be set right within the next half year or so (The other part of that is that I really don't expect DC to do anything drastic to Oliver Queen after just having Andy Diggle and Jock do a Year One mini about him; I'm that cynical), but the ending really sours what was otherwise a charming, suprisingly Good book. Maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic, but pick it up and stop before the last four pages.