Creative Staff:
Story: Brendon Fletcher, Cameron Stewart
Art: Babs Tarr
What They Say:
Barbara Gordon is no stranger to dusting herself off when disaster strikes so when a fire destroys everything she owned, she spots the opportunity for a new lease on life—and seizes it! Following the rest of Gotham’s young adults to the hip border district of Burnside, Barbara sets about building an all-new BatgirlÉ and discovers all-new threats preying on her peers!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I’ve long been a fan of the Batgirl character, owing to my minor exposure with the Batman ‘66 TV series and a dabbling of instances in the 70’s and early 80’s. I really fell for the character with the changes from the Killing Joke and her evolution into Oracle and I just finished rewatching the Birds of Prey TV series recently as well. I dabbled a bit with the New 52 incarnation, but time kept me away from it. With this issue, we get a kind of soft relaunch of sorts of the character under a new creative team and I was certainly interested, but also seeing it as a potential gateway book for my eleven year old daughter since she’s been watching Gotham and kind of getting into things a little bit. So part of my question is just how accessible this book is.
Written by Brendon Fletcher and Cameron Stewart with artwork by Babs Tarr, the book isn’t quite as accessible as one might hope. And in a lot of ways, it’s certainly not one that fits in the all ages category that I had kind of hoped for. The book kicks off with Barbara moving into her new place in Burnside with new roommates as she’s moving on to the next phase of her life, so we get some awkward goodbyes and see you soons with characters that as a new reader we haven’t a clue about, which then segues into quick introductions with her new roommates, some of what’s going on in the area and other recent events, including the Blackmail event that was going on recently with a site called Black Book that was revealing a slew of private info, pictures and data to ruin all sorts of lives.
Barbara’s life is on the upswing a bit with the new place and her plans, but she’s facing a lot of struggles with work, school and money in general as she tries to get her bearings and move forward. Even worse is that there was a bit of a party at her and her roommate’s place the night before and now a bunch of tech is missing, including her laptop with a whole lot of material on it – as well as college papers. To make matters even worse from there, apparently she got pretty wasted during part of it and was making out heavily with Troy, which she was eventually separated from but Troy ended up crashing on their couch. Suffice to say, there’s all sorts of issues going on for her here with her sense of control completely out of balance.
Everything goes in the kind of post-shame spiral that you’d expect as she just tries to cope with all that’s thrown at her, but we also see events move in a direction that lets her natural detective abilities come to life as she starts to figure out who the thief was, which leads to the connection to the Black Book guy that’s like a living data sponge. He has complete creep written all over him and his dialogue peppered with hashtags makes him eyeroll inducingly bad. We get a kind of convoluted approach to dealing with him, one that plays fast and loose with technology as you’d expect, but it also has a weird attempt at balancing heroics, ticked off Barbara and a mini speech on data privacy rights. While she’s fully justified in all of it, it’s the execution that leaves you kind of cringing through all of it.
In Summary:
Honestly, the book doesn’t really come across as accessible to new readers and there’s so many moving parts that it’s just overly dense and pointlessly complicated at times rather than being a good read. I like the detective work material, but the villain du jour was just awful and really felt like it was being written by someone completely on the outside of these things. Barbara’s a fun character and seeing her struggle makes you empathize, but there’s no quiet before the storm to really make it work for those visiting for the first time. We also get some baggage arriving through in the form of Dinah, which she apparently has issues with from the Birds of Prey comic, and that introduces its own tension that we’re not privy to if you haven’t read that book. Story wise, there’s not a lot that really grabbed me in a positive way here, though I like her more home grown costume that she manages to put together. The artwork is great in general and I like the style, but that’s really the only saving grace here. It’s pretty much a teen-plus book here and not one that I’m likely to share with my younger kids who are interested in the character.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: October 8th, 2014
MSRP: $2.99
