The return to Burnside can’t come fast enough.
Creative Staff:
Story: Hope Larson
Art: Rafael Albuquerque
Colors: Dave McCaig
Letterer: Deron Bennett
What They Say:
“BEYOND BURNSIDE” conclusion! Batgirl faces down Teacher in the streets of Shanghai, but will fists be enough against the intelligence-enhanced foe? Babs will have to conquer the pathways of her own mind in order to defeat this vicious predator once and for all!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The five issue arc for Beyond Burnside is one that opened the series up to a whole lot of potential but ended up failing to meet even the most basic of expectations. With the conclusion here, Larson delivers a fairly flat ending piece that works just as the rest of it did while still feeling meaningless and kind of trite. The plus to the whole thing continues to be Albuquerque’s artwork as he delivers some dynamic material here but he can’t make the story itself compelling, especially with such lackluster villains and characters that simply don’t connect on any level. The only saving grace to this installment was knowing that it’s the end of the arc and bringing her back home next time around can only move things upward.
Her battle with Teacher is what dominates this book and that’s enjoyable from the visual perspective but the character is just a one-note lackey overall, a young woman who failed her own entrance exams while trying to do good that has fallen to bad things made worse by the drug that she’s unlocked and taken. There’s some good stuff as the fight plays out because Barbara keeps getting smacked around and trying to figure out how to deal with her while Teacher, one of the worst named villains in quite some time, becomes more unhinged along the way. It’s a nice visual treat as well to represent it through the hair loss caused by the drug as she becomes more and more feral as it goes on, which only serves to push Barbara harder to figuring out how to overcome her.
Where the book kind of loses me is in that the struggle Barbara is having in overcoming Teacher – Teacher, of all possible villains – is that her eidetic memory is getting in the way because she’s got too much going on in her head. This leads to an amusing internal conversation over a drink with Kai and Fruit Bat about it where the solution is to turn off her eidetic memory, because that’s a thing, and to visualize it as a door that she can open again – if she can remember it. While there’s a nod to that with a red string, the whole thing is just so eyeroll inducing, especially when she’s now trying to figure out why her memory is so off and not remembering what happened, that it’s like we’re going to get a somewhat different character going forward. Which is fine to some degree but it just feels like a really awkward and goofy even for comics kind of approach.
In Summary:
Though I had reconnected well with the Rebirth special that got this project underway, the Beyond Burnside arc just did not work for me, no matter how much I tried to get into it. Goofy villains that should never be seen again, awkward as hell regional exploits that landed with a thud, a dullard in Kai, and a lead character that felt lost within her own book. I’m going to give the book a couple more issues to see how things are when she gets back home to see how she’s handled there and what kind of stories are going to come from it, but this book is pretty much ready to be dropped and I hate that I feel like that as I want to enjoy this character so much.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: October 26th, 2016
MSRP: $2.99
