Batgirl Is Intense. Trust Me: Batgirl #0 Review

Batgirl #0 is kind of a strange book. It endeavors to explain Barbara Gordon’s first work in a bat costume, and some of her motivations behind her initial moves into costumed adventuring, and it does that… kind of. But it also leaves open as many questions as it answers, introduces a bunch of vague mysteries that allow writer Gail Simone to tease assumed future stories, and winds up leading directly into the flashback of one of the most famous moments in the history of the character. It also spends a lot of time telling us Barbara’s character traits by, well, telling us about Barbara’s character traits, and it never really explains why Barbara is so fascinated with Batman – certainly not to the point where it makes sense that she’d put on a suit and start working with him.

But on the plus side, this is a superhero comic drawn by Ed Benes that features almost no gratuitous ass shots. Then again, depending on your taste, that might be a negative.

Put On A Happy Face: Batman Panel at SDCC 2012

Editor’s Note: I acknowledge that these pictures suck. We’ll upgrade our cameras once we receive your subscription check. Oh, you don’t pay for this? Then fuck you and enjoy the pictures you got.

Last year we kind of wandered into the panel for Scott Snyder’s American Vampire, mostly to make sure we’d have a seat for the DC New 52 panel that followed directly afterwards. Don’t get me wrong, we were following American Vampire in kind of a general way, but I had fallen away; the initial hype around one of the early stories being written by Stephen King hadn’t been enough to keep me in the book except in a “flip through when I happened to see it on the shelf” way. The point is that last year, we were able to walk right into Snyder’s panel without having to wait around in a line.

That was 2011. This year, Snyder’s writing Batman, which has consistently been one of the best books of DC’s New 52 and the source of the first post-reboot DC crossover event. So this time around, for the Batman panel yesterday? Yeah, we waited in line.

The Batman panel covered all the Batman family books, from Batman to Red Hood And The Outlaws… meaning walking in Amanda and I steeled ourselves for exciting news running the gamut from Batman’s post-Owls Joker encounter to Starfire’s post-Red Hood stranger’s penis encounter. However, weird former Teen Titan sex revelations or no, Snyder started the panel off with a laugh: “Avengers Vs. X-Men, who wins? Batman.” I hate it when my comic writers are funnier than I am. But I digress.

“Am I Being A Jerk Right Now?” – Review Of Batgirl #10

Barbara Gordon finds herself questioning her approach to crime fighting as issue #10 of Batgirl opens. While punching out one of a handful of local thugs attempting to boost expensive cars at a fundraiser being held in the low rent Cherry Hill neighborhood, she asks herself, “Am I being a jerk right now?” Rich folks show up with their pricey vehicles in an area of town where the people have nothing, as if purposefully tempting those on the down and out to do wrong, and Babs helps them out with a punch to the face. Is she part of the problem?

Of course, that’s a giant oversimplification of the economic, cultural, and legal forces at work in poverty stricken urban environments, but writer Gail Simone is willing to at least posit the question as to how poor neighborhoods could improve their quality of life and decrease their crime rates. Sure, her question includes the potential of assistance from masked vigilantes, but it also begins to broach the larger issues of community involvement versus gentrification. As someone who moved into a neighborhood that is undergoing a slow process of gentrification, I must admit that Simone has my attention with this topic. As more folks like me move into this neighborhood, I worry that the quirky little things that drew me to it to begin with will begin to vanilla out: the ethnic grocery stores, the mom and pop hair cutting businesses, the porn stores. Yes. In the age of the internet, I somehow live in a neighborhood with two “adult entertainment” stores.

But, with the nifty local amenities, there is still a sketchy element to the area. The first time Rob and I had guests out to out place for New Year’s Eve, they were greeted by the sight of a wino pissing on one of our neighbor’s front steps. I’ve had my car side swiped while its been parked on the street and was unlucky in trying to find witnesses due to language barriers. Oh, and did I mention the porn stores?

As satisfying as it might be to dress up as a giant bat to terrify the local drunks coming out of the Salvation Army across the street in hope that they remember that the nearby stoops are not for pooping, I suspect that I’d eventually run afoul of the law. So, I must wait for gentrification to continues its slow process of squeezing folks out renewal. Since Gotham seems to take a broader view to the whole masked justice thing, what answers to the problem of decay in urban neighborhoods does Gail Simone uncover?

Barbara Gordon does a little soul searching and considers ways to “monetize asskicking”…along with spoilers…after the jump.

Mixed Martial Artistry: Batgirl #5 Review

The latest issue of Batgirl opens with a shot of Batgirl’s splayed-open ass and ends with her at about crotch-level to Bruce Wayne, who is in the process of preparing to beat her with a crowbar. In between, in at least three different panels, she is hit so hard her face is temporarily deformed – literally, the pretty is smacked off her face. If I had written this, my writing would be decried as reprehensible on every female-centric comics Web site in the world. This book, however, was written by Gail Simone, so y’know… women power?

Don’t get me wrong; I liked this book. It’s the start of a new story arc so it’s a good jumping-on point, it’s got a new villain we’re just beginning to learn about, some interesting character background beats involving Barbara Gordon’s mother, and plenty of action. And frankly, there is a lot of fairly graphic violence for a superhero book, and while I talked a little shit before, it was actually kind of refreshing; fighting crime in Gotham City would not be good for you. Plus, I’ve got a thing for redheads, so it’s got that going for it.

I Don’t Have To Listen To You; You’re Not My Real Dad!

"Diana, please, I just want to get to know you." "Screw you, man! You're not my real dad!" "But, I have *alimony*..."

Look, frankly I was going to go to bed but, as I take after my own dad, I have an affinity for Scotch and rolling into work egregiously hungover. My liver knows its place and will do as its damn told. Now, what was I talking about…? Oh, yeah, Wonder Woman.

See, here’s the thing, today Josh Kushins posted this on the DCU Blog:

In DC COMICS-THE NEW 52, Wonder Woman will have a new origin, in which she is the daughter of Hippolyta … and Zeus! In recent interviews, writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang have teased that readers should expect the unexpected in this edgier, horror take on the superhero genre ­and the king of the gods will ensure that nothing goes as planned for his defiant daughter.

Originally created by the goddess Aphrodite and raised to perfection on the Amazon island of Themiscyra, the newest incarnation of Wonder Woman has a new costume and now a new origin ­ but she remains Wonder Woman. Strong. Proud. Fearless. WONDER WOMAN is the 12th title in DC COMICS-THE NEW 52 to sell more than a 100K copies.

No Nukes: The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men #1 Review

The one thing I’ll give the first issue of Gail Simone and Ethan Van Sciver’s first issue of The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men is that it compelled me to go on an all-day hunt for the 1978 first issue of Firestorm: The Nuclear Man.

I called my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me not to come in to the store until my sinus infection passes and I stop dribbling green snot on the copies of Obama The Barbarian (or at least until I start pretending that I’m not doing it on purpose), but as good as he and his store is, he didn’t have what amounts to an obscure back issue just lying around. Or maybe he had ten of them, but allow me to refer you back to the whole snot-dribbling thing.

I had reached the point where I was willing to purchase it as my first digital comic from Comixology, who has the issue available for less than a buck… right up until I reached the point in my registration process when I discovered that they don’t take my credit card and worse: that I don’t own an iPad, so I couldn’t read their comics even if I wanted to. Sure, they have a Web reader, but if I’m going to blind myself I’m going to do it the old fashioned way: frantic masturbating. But I digress.

The new Firestorm made me want to find the old 1978 origin issue, which I haven’t read since I was seven or eight years old, because I have vague memories that Gerry Conway wrote the relationship between Ronnie Raymond and Professor Stein as an examination of the generation gap. And why is that something so important that it made me spend a drinking day hunting for a 33-year-old comic that’s nobody’s idea of a classic and when at the time I liked Nova better anyway?

Because if that element to the characters were, in fact, there, then I can extrapolate that Simone and Van Sciver made high school race relations a cornerstone of Firestorm in an attempt to modernize Conway’s original character intentions. If it isn’t, then this book just is a ham-fisted racial parable that’s a sparkly vampire away from being Twilight with nukes. Which is, actually, a book I would line up to buy. The new Firestorm? Not so much.

Does She Walk? Does She Talk? Does She Come Complete?

I will warn you now: as I sit here contemplating Gail Simone’s Batgirl #1, I am full of mediocre Pu Pu Platter and 12 year old Bunnahabhain Scotch whisky. The Pu Pu Platter was to provide grease to medicate myself after reading Batgirl #1 and then trying to solve my disappointment with Jagermeister. The Scotch is, well, I just like Scotch.

I was in San Diego this year at the convention when the decision to give Barbara Gordon her mobility back was formally announced. Now, I liked Oracle and I think that John Ostrander made a masterful use of leftovers by adding a paraplegic Barbara Gordon to Suicide Squad after the events of “The Killing Joke”. However, and perhaps this says something about me, the only incarnation of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl/Oracle I actually was ever really attached to was the one embodied by Dina Meyer in 2002’s Birds of Prey. Did I mention I drink? So, I was willing to keep an open mind for the new Batgirl relaunch – if only because I’m fairly certain that Gail Simone’s Batgirl will show up more regularly on my comic book store shelves than J.H. Williams’s Batwoman, which appears every 100 years or so out of the mist like Brigadoon and then fucks off again about as quickly.