Comics Review: Batgirl #1
It will probably surprise no one to hear that I’ve been simultaneously anticipating and dreading this book for months. On the one hand, a new Batgirl series is an opportunity for some of my favorite fictional characters to come out of the storytelling limbo that they’d been left in. On the other hand, it was also an opportunity for my favorite fictional characters to potentially be written wrong, to once again have their characterization derailed by hack writers too lazy to do even basic research on their subjects or be abused by the short-sighted editorial mandates of a misogynistic editorial staff, or to be thrust into incoherent stories with nonsensical plotlines.
So it was with a great deal of caution and some faint optimism that I started reading the first issue. As it turns out, both emotions were appropriate. This issue is not as terrible as we might have feared, but it does suffer from deep flaws.
In a publicity stunt, the company had been keeping secret just who would be wearing the mask. We all had our theories, and the prevailing one among the readers I knew was correct: Stephanie Brown is now Batgirl. Cassandra Cain, the previous holder of the title and one of my favorite characters in any medium, chose to give up that identity and pass it on to Steph, her closest friend and another character I’m quite fond of. As much as I hate to see Cass go, if I can’t have a book starring her then one starring Steph would be my next choice. I’m disappointed that Cass won’t be staying around as a supporting character, however, although she might return at some future point. I wanted to see these two together again, playing off each other like they did in the first Batgirl series, perhaps with Cass training Steph.
That Cass would quit being Batgirl is an entirely reasonable notion: she’d done it before, after all. Nor am I entirely opposed to the idea. When she walked away previously, at the end of the first Batgirl series, it was because she’d developed serious doubts about whether the way the Bat-Family operated and her own personal philosophy were really the best way to save lives-a valid concern, considering that as far as she could tell the Way of the Bat had gotten the entire population of Bludhaven killed-and felt that the Batgirl identity no longer suited her. I was looking forward to seeing her find her own path and her own identity, but of course we never got that chance due to interference from an editor-in-chief with an axe to grind and instead an incompetent writer gave us a massive character derailment. Perhaps this time we’ll actually get that chance.
On the other hand, the reasons she gives for quitting don’t seem right to me. At the current time, Batman is believed to be dead (by the other characters… I doubt there’s a single reader anywhere who thinks it will stick) and as Cass is shedding her costume she declares, “That symbol… his crest, his fight… I fought for him. But no more.” But this rings false. (The content does, at least. The terse diction and simple, direct style fits Cass’ speaking habits exactly. More on that later.) Cass never fought because of Batman. Cass fought because she couldn’t stand to see people get hurt, and because fighting was what her entire life had been built around. Batman just gave her a way to do it. Cass even told him at one point that her true loyalty wasn’t to him personally, but to the Bat symbol itself… which for her I would presume represents saving lives. A great deal has happened since then, but Cass’s fight is still driven by her empathy (an unavoidable consequence of her ability to read body language, since she’s constantly aware of other people’s emotions). Of course, abandoning the Batgirl identity isn’t the same thing as giving up the fight. Cass is utterly incapable of standing by and doing nothing when lives are in danger. But it’s strange that she would decide to leave Gotham when, for the first time in a long time, there’s people there who care about her: Steph and Barbara. Then again, Beechen’s idiotic retcon that Dick Grayson hates Cass has apparently stuck, so now that he’s Batman she may want get the hell away from him. Not to mention that pint-sized psycho-boy Damien is now Robin. Come to think of it, I’d want to get the hell out of Gotham right now, too.
The writing is problematic in other ways, as well. Where do I start in the catalogue of things that don’t make sense? During the drag race in the opening scene, how exactly did Steph rip the axles off both cars? She connected them with a grappling line, but it wasn’t anchored to anything. Even if one car had stopped suddenly, the other would just drag it along. The axle isn’t going to rip right out of the chassis just like that. Is Steph really just keeping the costume in her closet with the door not even closed all the way? She used to be a lot better at hiding it from her mom than that. Also, why does her mother have the sort of white coat one associates with doctors? She’s a nurse. (No two artists in the history of the character have ever agreed on what Mrs. Brown looks like, either. Blond or brunette? Long hair or short? Emaciated or pudgy? Come on, people. Do any of you bother to read back issues and check this sort of thing? What exactly do we have editors for?) When exactly did Babs get all these rage issues? Why is a freshman taking a 400 level philosophy course, and since when is philosophy a required course at college? (It’s a nice touch, however, that everyone in the class has a laptop and poor Steph has to scribble in a notebook. She’s always been working class. She was the one that had to make do with what she can make or scrounge while everyone else had Bruce Wayne’s fortune to throw around, the one who had to struggle and never had anything handed to her, the self-made one. There’s not enough of that in the DCU.) Why did Cass and Steph have a personal conversation with names being used and masks coming off on the dock where they’d just knocked out a bunch of thugs and they could easily be seen instead of on a rooftop out of sight?
The dialogue they exchange during the fight on the docks disappoints as well. Part of it is that this is the first time we’ve seen the two together since Steph was supposedly killed in War Games (barring the afterlife conversations that will have to be retconned into being dreams now) and it’s very short and surprisingly impersonal given how deeply Steph’s “death” hurt Cass at the time. But a greater part of it is that Cass’ voice is all wrong for the first half. Steph’s comment that Cass is “less chatty than usual” could be taken as wisecrack regarding Cass’ laconic nature. The exchange that follows makes no sense, however.
Cass: “I’ve had a lot on my mind…”
Steph: “Like?”
Cass: “Enough.”
“Enough”? “Enough,” what? Enough on her mind? That’s not what Steph asked. Or “Enough of you asking me things.” But then Cass asks a question of her own right after this. The whole exchange is non sequitur.
Then a couple panels later, Cass gives us this little gem:
Cass: “I think self-delusion like that is what makes us friends.”
Ignoring the content for the moment, which is open to debate, this is not a sentence Cass would ever say. It doesn’t fit the way she talks. She’s laconic and prefers to put things simply and bluntly. The spoken word is her second language, and her first language does not allow for dissembling or polite phrasing. Cass would probably put it more like this: “You lie to yourself. So do I. I think that’s what makes us friends.”
All of this, however, pales in comparison to the extended non sequitur that is the last fight scene. A few panels in, after taking out four of the bad guys, Steph is standing the middle of the room, posing with her arms crossed while the last two are behind her raising their weapons.
What… the… hell?
I’m not sure if the writer or the artist is to blame, but apparently we’re meant to believe that two-thirds of the way through the fight, Steph decided to stop and strike a pose while crooks were getting ready to shoot her. And then the cop she was rescuing has to take out the last two guys before they can. Way to devalue your female hero right out of the gate, Bryan Q. Miller. Nothing like having a man have to finish her job for her to make things all empowering. And her inner monologue during this? “Oh, he’s pretty. Look tough, Steph.”
…WHAT?
So apparently, in the middle of a life or death struggle, automatic weapons being fired at her, Steph has decided to stop in mid-fight to ogle the eye candy. What an utter load of bull. (Never mind that he had just been pistol-whipped, and I doubt anybody looks good after being pistol-whipped.) She’s fighting to save at least two lives here. Did Miller read all the worst interpretations of all the characters as his research before writing this? Steph does not think this is a game. Steph grew up surrounded by criminals, including her abusive father. She’s seen people she was trying to help die. She’s been shot before. She’s a chatterbox with an inner monologue that’s pretty tongue in cheek, but she doesn’t play around when it comes to the fight itself. And she’s certainly not vain. She doesn’t pause to preen.
I really hope this guy isn’t going to be a love interest. It’s trite. Not to mention unpleasant. If Gordon was trying to set him up with Babs, he’s probably too old for her. She just finally managed to cut loose her last sorry excuse for a boyfriend. And can we, just once, have a female lead without automatically needing to give her a love interest? Why can’t we ever have a story about a young woman without needing to add romance?
Anyway, when the cop knocks out the last bad guy, the bad guy drops his rocket launcher nose down. Now, I would think that even a Russian-made RPG would have safeties to keep it from detonating when it hasn’t actually been fired. If not, the soldiers would be blowing themselves up quite often. Our own 40mm HE rounds can’t detonate unless they’ve traveled thirty meters. But let’s assume our foolish gang member tampered with the safeties. Rather than killing every (unarmored) person in the room, the explosion apparently hurls them all out the window. Even the ones who weren’t between the RPG and the window. You mind explaining to me how that happened? (Steph may have leapt, since she saw what was going to happen, but the bad guys were all out cold.) Steph lands on her feet (gymnastics, plus Bat-Family ninja training), the bad guys land on their spines, and the cop lands on his face. He’s apparently fine, despite the explosion and the by-all-rights-fatal landing. (Personally, I don’t care if the bad guys were killed-they fired on an ambulance, after all-but Steph and the other Bats would, so I doubt they were given the glibness of the scene.) Is this book actually set in the Looney Tunes universe?
The artwork also has some serious problems. Lee Garbett draws all the individual objects and characters quite nicely, but seems to have serious trouble with spatial relationships and panel-to-panel continuity. A batarang in the first fight scene seems to come in from a angle nowhere near Steph’s position, and although this may have been Dick interfering (since he was watching the fight from afar) Steph’s inner monologue doesn’t match that. Steph, in a rush to keep her mother from looking in her closet, drops a plate of waffles with butter on her bed. I pity the bedspread! But Mrs. Brown doesn’t seem to find anything strange about this. Is she on the pills again? In the fight with Cass on the docks, the enemy that Cass warns Steph is “behind you” is in fact not behind her and seems to be rushing at Cass, not Steph. No one is behind her, and the guy she backfists in the next panel is someone else entirely. And what is with this apparent tendency for Steph to stand with her arms crossed when people are behind her with guns?
There are things I like here. Steph and Babs are both characters I’m fond of (both characters I became fond of, in fact, as the supporting cast of the first Batgirl series) and I wouldn’t mind seeing Babs mentor Steph. It would be nice to see somebody mentor her, considering that every time Batman said he would he never actually bothered to and kicked her to the curb whenever the mood struck him. Steph being torn between her need to help people and her insecurities makes sense to me given all the things that have gone wrong for her lately. But this book needs to find its footing and improve if it’s going to hold my interest. It’s dragging around some serious problems.