There’s a specific era of DC that many of their legendary runs originated—that specific bit of the late eighties and into the early nineties where Vertigo originally sprang. It’s from these years that we saw pure bombast take side stage for stories that wanted to address societal issues through the lens of the superhero comic. We can look at Watchmen as a progenitor, but The Question and Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters later took the idea even further. Fitting that now we have the first issue of Batman/Green Arrow/The Question: Arcadia by Gabriel Hardman, Romulo Fajardo Jr., and Simon Bowland to continue the tradition.

Hub City is as it’s always been—a desolate landscape of urban sprawl that seems to swallow hope and spit out acres of rusted warehouses. Despite everything, it’s still home to Charles Victor Szasz—or Vic Sage or the Question depending on the situation—and he still has to find the story at the heart of the rot in the city. But that rot comes from a familiar place in Queen Industries out in Star City—the home of Green Arrow. While Oliver Queen has been forced out of his own company, he still has just enough contacts inside to get an idea of what might be happening, or at least enough to point The Question in the right direction to be kidnapped. And then we have Bruce Wayne attending a summit on climate change from a company that wants to build floating cities while Batman stops an environmental group from bombing said conference. 

What’s most interesting here is how the framing of the story is handled. While we jump to each of our main characters, the narration itself comes only from The Question. It’s a roving camera, but we only hear one person’s thoughts, heightening the missing pieces we feel when we get to the stinger of Batman on the final page of the first issue working with the people who kidnapped Question. Maintaining that single interiority gives his thoughts more weight when we notice them missing—even more so as the narration boxes are larger and bolder than the dialog boxes—but not so much that it takes away from the different perspectives. This is one of the reasons why Batman’s section of the story feels almost out of place at the moment—we have that link between The Question and Green Arrow, but Batman maintains a distance that further issues will likely fill.

One of the more difficult things about writing a first issue is keeping the audience engaged enough to go into the second issue. With the kind of final page stinger here and the purposeful lack of perspective, we crave answers to a mystery that isn’t ready to be solved. It’s the skill of creators like Hardman, Fajardo Jr., and Bowland that can draw out a mystery and give their audience the kind of first issue that hooks in that interest for months. 

Get excited. Get reporting.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.