Reviews: Birds of Prey: End Run, Birds of Prey: The Death of Oracle, Batgirls Vol. 3 and Spirit World

Birds of Prey: End Run. Birds of Prey: The Death of Oracle. Batgirls Vol. 3: Girls to the Front. Spirit World. 

What do these four comics collections have in common?

Well, they are all published by DC Comics. And they are all written (or co-written) by female (or non-binary) writers. And they all star female (or non-binary) heroes. 

But the reason I read them all in the last month or so, and the reason I decided to group reviews of them all together in a single post, is that they are all comics I decided to read during the course of writing about the first year or so of writer Kelly Thompson's run on the new Birds of Prey series.

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DC relaunched Birds of Prey in 2010, just about a year after the first volume of the series was canceled. They did so as part of their "Brightest Day" initiative, an event which included a bi-monthly, year-long series with that tile, and various branded tie-in series, of which BOP was one (At least, the first five issues, and the first collection, included the "Brightest Day" branding on their covers). 

The premise of the series and its tie-ins was that, after the events of "Darkest Night," a dozen dead superheroes and supervillains had been resurrected for mysterious purposes and they would have to discover what those purposes were. 

In a sign of just how erratic DC's planning was at that point, that particular Birds of Prey series only lasted 15 issues, before it was cancelled and then re-relaunched as part of the New 52 initiative, which—temporarily, at least—rebooted the entire DC Universe continuity and all the extant books were relaunched with new #1 issues. 

The real sales hook of the 2010-2011 Birds of Prey though was that it marked the return of fan-favorite writer Gail Simone, who had a four-year, 52-issue run on the original series. And, for some fans I suppose, it also featured the return of artist Ed Benes, who was the first artist to work with Simone on that earlier run.  

While I confess to having quite enjoyed Benes' work on BOP in the early '00s, when his style was much looser and more obviously manga inspired, I had since tired of it by 2010, due largely to his tendency to draw all of his characters exactly the same (with two body types, male and female) and the exploitive nature of his drawing of female characters, which could, at times, be wholly contrary to the tone of the story he was drawing (His brief run on the troubled 2006-2011 Justice League of America was the breaking point for me). 

His presence on this volume of Birds of Prey is almost certainly why I had skipped it when it was originally released, although I guess 2010 Caleb need not have worried: He ended up only drawing most of the first four issues, before other artists took over. 

Reviewing the history of this team book in my post on Kelly Thompson's run, I remembered that I had never actually read this short iteration of Birds of Prey, one that I imagine is now probably neglected by newer readers, being so incredibly short—filling just two trade paperbacks—and coming between two much longer runs.

Luckily, there are public libraries though, and I was able to find collections of it quite easily.

Gail Simone seems to have taken the title of the comic a little more literally as she and her team were relaunching the book, adding to her old, core team of Oracle, Black Canary, Huntress and Lady Blackhawk two more bird-themed character, the late-80s version of the Steve Ditko and Steve Skeates characters Hawk and Dove. 

Oh, and another bird-themed character, The Penguin, plays a major role in the first story arc, as a kinda sorta ally of the Birds. 

I do wonder if including Hawk and Dove in the book was Simone's idea, or an editorial mandate, given that Hawk had been resurrected as part of the "Blackest Night"/"Brightest Day" storyline, and thus maybe needed a home or status quo somewhere outside of the Brightest Day limited series. Reading the first collection of the 15-issue series, Birds of Prey: End Run (2011), it's not really that hard to imagine Simone, Benes and the other artists telling the exact same story without Hawk and Dove in it, their roles either eliminated or taken by other—really, almost any other—heroes.

For the most part, the focus is on the core team, their relationships to one another and their pasts. Hawk and Dove are the focus of just a few pages of the first issue/chapter, a two-page fight scene followed by two pages of them in plainclothes at a bar, Lady Blackhawk Zinda Blake arriving there to recruit them for Oracle. 

The rationale for her doing so seems to be that they need Oracle more than she needs them, "And your boy don't look like he's gonna make it without her," Zinda tells Dawn after giving her a card. The pair will spend the majority of the first, four-part story arc from which the collection gets its title in the background, Dove carrying the wounded Penguin around, while Hawk acts as occasional muscle.

That first issue introduces us to the rest of the team (their first appearances each heralded by a block of text announcing their names and skills or powers, which will get tiresome quickly, as these intros continue throughout each issue/chapter of the entire collection). They have all continued to do superhero or vigilante stuff, but solo, after...whatever happened to break them up in the last issues of the previous series (I, um, didn't read those either...or, if I did, I have now completely forgotten them). 

Oracle, now operating out of the empty Batcave, calls them all back together to announce a terrible new threat facing them: Someone has sent her extremely detailed files containing all of their secrets and those of many of their allies. Not just their secret identities, but the names and addresses of their loved ones too.

This seems to be happening simultaneous to an elaborate plot to frame the Birds as bad guys, an extremely skilled martial artist having killed someone Canary recently fought with a rare technique few know (Canary being one of them), and later (and on panel), a new player lures them to a particular location, grabs one of Huntress' crossbow bolts, and stabs The Penguin in the throat with it, just as the pre-called police arrive. 

That new player turns out to be another extremely skilled martial artist by the name of White Canary, who Benes draws in what looks like a long white coat over lingerie skimpy enough to make Black Canary's bathing suit-and-fishnets get-up look like business attire. She is working with two other surprise players, one with a long history with the Birds and another an old Batman villain, but she seems to be the driving force behind the plot...as well as being intent on betraying her partners after she gets what she wants.

While Oracle deals with one of those villains, who comes at her in the Batcave, the rest of the team deal with the other two, fleeing the police carrying the wounded Penguin to the Iceberg Lounge, where a Gotham SWAT team lays siege to them. 

As an excuse to get the team back together and recruit Hawk and Dove, the plot works well enough (After the scene in the bar with Zinda, Hawk and Dove appear as Oracle-sent back-up, there to save Black Canary and Huntress from White Canary, who is kicking their asses pretty badly). It also seems to set up a new status quo for the team, that of outlaws, although it's not clear if this will stick—or even have time to. After "End Run", there are only 11 more issues left in the series, and only nine of those will be written by Simone. 

The art is...well, it's as predicted. 

Benes is still drawing just two different body types (with the short, round Penguin an unusual departure for him), and his women are all exact clones of one another, their big-breasted, well-muscled forms all identical to one another, with only their hair colors and costumes distinguishing them (In an amusing scene, Hawk refers to Zinda as "the blonde with the legs", although she, of course, has the exact same pair of legs as all the other characters).

Benes is also drawing the already mostly skimpy costumes as skimpy as possible, so that Zinda's skirt is so short that it barely covers his ass, and Canary and Huntress's costumes similarly revealing as much ass as editorial would probably let him get away with (Although he does seem to have pushed it pretty far, here; if you look closely at all of the images of Huntress he draws, there's often no ink line between her exposed stomach and the purple panels covering her breasts; colorist Nei Ruffino is responsible for filling in the white portions of the costume there).

I don't think it's great work, although I suppose the Charlie's Angels-esque premise of the book excuses a high degree of cheesecake. Simone also seemed to be encouraging this tendency in Benes' art, as the third issue contains an eight-panel sequence in which The Penguin, apparently hallucinating due to blood loss, imagines the Birds all coming on to him, stripping out of their costumes and, in Huntress' case, straddling his lap and kissing him. (Hawk is there in the hallucination too, but merely tells The Penguin, "Hey. Don't look at me, man.")

While Benes manages the entire first issue himself, by the second, fill-in art is needed, and this arc includes a lot of really sloppily constructed and rendered work. There are no credits for each issue in the trade—they could reproduce those introductions of each character issue after issue for the trade, but not the credits?—and, instead, all of the artists are simply listed at the beginning of the collection. A few minutes at comics.org, however, will reveal that Benes got help on the pencils for the second, third and fourth issues from Adriana Melo and on inks by Mariah Benes.

It looks pretty rough, and like Melo didn't get much time to work on those issues at all. There are quite a few panels that it's kind of surprising DC even published, like ones where characters might be having conversations, but one of the participants won't be drawn at all, their dialogue bubbles coming from off-panel, or a few in which the figures are just unbelievably wrong and amateurish (If you happen have a copy of the collection in your hands for some odd reason, see, for example, Black Canary on page 62, panel 1). 

The collection also includes a two-part story, "Two Nights in Bangkok," which flows directly from the first. It mostly stars Black Canary, Huntress and Lady Blackhawk (Oracle is mostly busy setting up a new base for the Birds in a Gotham City building owned by Ted Kord with her re-recruits Savant and Creote, and Hawk and Dove are in the hospital—Hawk does get a scene related to his "Brightest Day" status quo here, though, appearing in a "White Lantern" costume and conversing with his dead brother Don Hall, the original Dove, in a dream sequence). 

White Canary has convinced Black Canary to travel with her to Bangkok and face Lady Shiva in a fight to the death to save her kinda sorta adopted daughter Sin (here, still very young; writer Kelly Thompson, who states her age as 16 in the current Birds of Prey, must be assuming a lot of time has passed since this series). While Black Canary wouldn't have much of a chance against Shiva under the best of circumstances—no matter what Tom King might have to say on the matter 15 years later—here she has a broken wrist and is wearing a sling around one arm. The fight is a death sentence.

Huntress intervenes, forcing Shiva to fight her instead, and Huntress is even less of a match for the world's greatest martial artist (Or second greatest if you count Cassandra Cain...or third greatest if you count Richard Dragon). She wins anyway...or at least survives through a mix of belligerence and dirty tricks long enough that the rationale for the fight expires before she does.

These two issues are drawn by Alvin Lee and Melo, with inkers Jack Purcell and J.P. Mayer. It seems a vast improvement over Benes' arc...not necessarily because of style, but because of consistency. (Lee and/or Melo are also very cheesecake-focused; there's a panel where Huntress is shown zipping up her top in which her breasts are falling out, even though it isn't clear her top had a zipper there) 

It's pretty clear that Simone had no idea that the New 52 was coming at this point—one wonders how many folks at DC did, including editorial—as she is here still setting up a new status quo for the team, but it would turn out that her run was already about half over at this point.

The volume collecting the rest of the series, Birds of Prey: The Death of Oracle (2011) provides more evidence of this fact still. The four-part title story arc has Barbara Gordon showing elements of her new base off to the recently resurrected Batman, as well as initiating a new plan that involves faking her own death as part of an effort to reduce the number of people who actually know about her existence and work (At that point, she had become the "infojock" serving pretty much the entire superhero community; after the events of the story, she has shrunk her circle of operatives and allies down to just the Birds and most of the Bats). 

Heck, the very last issue that Simone writes, the thirteenth of the series' fifteen issues, ends with the Birds having been defeated by a terrifying new enemy, and Oracle vowing to go back after her and bring her down. But that doesn't go anywhere, obviously. The last two issues of the series wouldn't follow up on that plot. Instead, writer Marc Andreyko would write what reads like a two-part inventory story (Another portentous scene in this volume, in which Hawk visits The Penguin for some secret business that is never revealed to the readers, would also go unresolved anywhere).

In "The Death of Oracle", Barbara provokes a battle with The Calculator, a particularly goofy old supervillain that writer Brad Meltzer had previously transformed into a villainous analogue of Oracle, playing the same role she does in the superhero community for DC's supervillains. Their conflict apparently hinges on something that happened in the pages of Batgirl (the Stephanie Brown-starring series), at least according to an asterisk and an editorial box, but essentially wants to convince him that he has successfully killed her.

This involves The Calculator sending his agents Mammoth, new characters Current and Mortis and a host of H.I.V.E. soldiers to abduct the female Birds, who are celebrating Dove's birthday at a strip club. 

That story is followed by two more Simone-written ones. The first, a done-in-one, focuses on The Huntress, and Catman's elaborate efforts to manipulate her into not liking him anymore, while the second, a two-parter, involves most of the Birds trying to infiltrate a mysterious building that turns out to be the base of Junior, the daughter of the Golden Age Rag Doll (and thus the brother of Secret Six's Rag Doll) while The Huntress attempts to recruit Question Renee Montoya to the team.

Again, Simone doesn't really have an artistic partner in this volume either (You'll note hers is the only name on the cover above), but the art is at least much better this time around.  Ardian Syaf pencils the first issue of "Death", Guillem March the second and Inaki Miranda the third and fourth. Pere Perez draws the Huntress/Catman issue, and Jesus Saiz and Diego Olmos each draw an issue of the last story arc.

Stylistically, the art is all over the place, but it was a treat to see March's work here. Like Benes, he seems to have a special interest in drawing sexy women, but he's much better at it, giving his figures a slightly more cartoony sheen, and he's able to pull off a variety of body types (He also does a wonderful Penguin, and draws the hell out of Batman in a few panels). I also like Miranda's work here quite a bit. 

The Andreyko-written issues are drawn by Billy Tucci and Adriana Melo, both of whom contribute to both issues and, like most of the issues in the first volume, the art looks pretty rushed. 

These Andreyko issues are completely disconnected from the stories that precede them. The original, Golden Age Phantom Lady, now a senior citizen, joins Lady Blackhawk and Black Canary in an event for World War II veterans organized by her granddaughter Kate Spencer (secretly Manhunter).

Flashbacks to a 1950 adventure Phantom Lady, Lady Blackhawk and Canary's mom detail an encounter with a Nazi mad scientist in Argentina, and he and his followers return in the present to seek their.

The story itself is fine, if weird in how free-floating it is, not being connected to the preceding series in anyway and, unfortunately, not reading at all like it was the last Birds of Prey story of the post-Crisis continuity. 

And with that, the short-lived second Birds of Prey ongoing reached its conclusion.

The series would be relaunched in November of 2011 in a new, third ongoing by Duane Swierczynski and Jesus Saiz, the new line-up consisting of Black Canary, Poison Ivy, Katana and new character Starling. As for the other characters from the 2010 Birds of Prey of series, Barbara Gordon would appear in a new Batgirl series written by Gail Simone that reverted the character back to the role she abandoned back in 1988 and Hawk and Dove would appear in Hawk & Dove by Sterling Gates and Rob Liefeld, which lasted all of eight issues. 

All three series looked pretty terrible to me, and I didn't read any of them. 

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In discussing my immediate reactions to the new Birds of Prey, based solely on that first Leonardo Romero image that was released, I mentioned that, upon seeing Cassandra Cain, I wondered how her being on the team would square with where I had last seen her. 

That was, of course, in the pages of the (very) short-lived Batgirls series, which, despite its weaknesses, was at least a great status quo for Gotham City's three Batgirls: All active heroes, working together as partners and living together as friends.

Of course, that reminded me that I never actually finished reading Batgirls...and thus I had no idea if the team had, like, broken up or something at the end of it. I wasn't overly enamored with the series, which I found quite wanting, despite my affection for the characters and my agreement with the basic premise, but, as a Cassandra Cain fan, I figured I should at least do my due diligence and read the final issues of the series. (I talked about the first volume, in regard to trying to fathom why it did so much more poorly than past Batgirl series, here, and then reviewed the second one in this column.)

I was glad to see that my hope that the book would continue to get better, with each new volume being better than the one that preceded it, was met. Despite the rather...un-Batmanly story that opens the collection, Batgirls Vol. 3: Girls to the Front (2023) is the best-written collection of the 19-issue series. Although I guess that trend line doesn't matter too much; sure, a potential fourth volume would seem to accordingly be even better still, but, well, there's no fourth volume coming. 

The rather stuffed 144-page collection opens with the sole Batgirls annual, drawn by artist Robbi Rodriguez, who contributed some art to the previous volume (As for the artist who launched the book with writers Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad, Jorge Corona, he remains on cover duty only). 

There's a sizable change to the status quo in its story, with Barbara Gordon moving out of the team's loft in Gotham neighborhood The Hill and back into her Clocktower headquarters (which has apparently been rebuilt after being destroyed in the earlier issues of the series), but the main focus is on Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown expressing their interest in trading places with one another, if only for a day.

This casually articulated wish actually comes true, thanks to a magical coin that a mysterious old lady hands Steph after she rescues a cat from a tree, and the two junior Batgirls swap bodies, Freaky Friday style (Or Ultimate Spider-Man #66-67 style, I guess; I don't know, has this also happened in other superhero comics I haven't read, too...?). 

The timing could be better. While Babs, Batman and magical consultant Zatanna try to figure a way out of the problem for the girls, their supervillain parents both come calling simultaneously, with Lady Shiva asking Steph-in-Cass' body to board a helicopter, and Cass-in-Steph's body being drugged and delivered to Cluemaster. For reasons never made clear, Steph doesn't try to explain to Shiva what happened at first but tries to trick her into believing she is actually the real Cassandra. 

In this volume, one story leads to the next pretty organically. When their minds revert back to their correct bodies, Cass knows the danger Steph is now in, and  she goes to rescue her from Cluemaster, who I guess has recently been brought back to life...? (Odd; I don't remember him dying...at least not this time. I do recall him dying in the short-lived 2001 Suicide Squad relaunch, but not this particular death. Did he get killed at the end of Batman Eternal, which I totally read, and I simply forgot about it...?). At any rate, the now-alive Cluemaster is holding his daughter captive and forcing her to play along in a game show he's set up in a remote, trap-filled cabin. 

(Oddly, the body-swapping shenanigans focus completely on Steph-in-Cass'-body. Cass-in-Steph's-body spends the entire time tied-up, gagged and in the backseat of a car).

Cluemaster reveals that The Mad Hatter brought him back from the dead, and so then the next issue focuses on the girls battling the Hatter.

Only the last story, the three-part "From Hill's Heart", doesn't flow from the preceding issue. In that one, there's a mysterious sniper targeting random civilians in The Hill, a sniper with an apparent vendetta against the Batgirls. It turns out to be minor, Chuck Dixon-created villain Gunbunny (who, to my knowledge, has never even met any of the Batgirls). She, in turn, is confronted by a counter-sniper, who appears to be her dead partner Gunhawk, but is actually Batgirls villain Assisi from the first volume, disguised as Gunhawk for, um, some reason...?

Obviously, Cloonan and Conrad's scripting still leaves much to be desired, even if the series has gotten much better at getting inside the girls' heads and exploring Steph and Cass' friendship as it progressed. 

There is, as unfortunately seems to the case far too often now, no regular artist on the series. Rodriguez draws the annual and issues #17-#19 ("From Hill's Heart). Jonathan Case draws issues #13 and #14 (the rest of the body swap story that starts in the annual). Neil Googe, who contributed art to the second volume, draws issue #15 (The Cluemaster story). And Geraldo Borges and Rico Renzi draw issue #16 (the Mad Hatter story).

All are excellent artists, and I like each of their styles just fine (despite Rodriguez's reliance on using manipulated photographs for backgrounds), but none of them go particularly well together, and the book suffers in the most basic, panel-to-panel continuity. Case, whose style is the most dramatic departure, gives Cassandra a radical new hairstyle, in which she seems to have cut three to six inches off between issues, for example, and while one issue ends with a captive Steph covered in electrodes, the next picks up without any electrodes on her (as Case also colors and letters his own work, his issues are an especially sharp departure from what precedes and follows them).

To answer the question I had before reading this volume though, no, the team doesn't break up or anything at the end. The two junior Batgirls jump off a building together, presumably on their way to their next adventure, in the last panel of the series, with only Cloonan and Conrad's omniscient, third-person narration indicating that the series is ending. 

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Near the climax of Birds of Prey Vol. 2: Worlds Without End, in which the team is trapped in an ever-changing pocket dimension that can be manipulated by their thoughts, Batgirl Cassandra Cain comes up with a plan to defeat the villain pursuing them. This involves making the dimension resemble "Spirit World", which an asterisk leading to an editorial box reminds readers she visited in the 2023 miniseries Spirit World. 

This reminded me that I had never read Spirit World, despite my affection for the Cassandra Cain character. 

Spirit World's star, Xanthe Zhou, also appears briefly in the story, called in by the Birds' ally John Constantine to help investigate the mysterious portal that the team disappeared into. When the Birds and the story's villain all emerge from that portal, zhou helps them fight the villain with their giant sword (Xanthe, by the way, is, like their co-creator Alyssa Wong, non-binary).

Luckily, DC made it easy to catch up on the six-issue Spirit World in a collected edition, which also contains its 10-page prologue "The Envoy" from one-shot anthology Lazarus Planet: Dark Fate #1 by the Spirit World creators and  an eight-page Batwoman team-up from the pages of DC Pride 2023 by Jeremy Holt and Andrew Drilon. I'm pretty sure that means it has all of Xanthe Zhou's appearances up to the point that the book was published, then. 

And as for that book? 

Spirit World (2024) is the work of writer Alyssa Wong (probably best known for her 40-issue run on Marvel's Star Wars: Doctor Aphra, although she has done some writing for both of the big two superhero publishers), and artist Haining. (Both creators are credited both by these names and in Chinese characters, as are the colorists and letterers). 

It introduces a brand-new character to the DC Universe, the codename-less Xanthe Zhou, who serves as a sort of go-between for the real, living world and the title locale, an afterlife inspired by Chinese beliefs. They also have magical superpowers similarly inspired by Chinese superstition: They can make folded paper constructions into the objects they represent, most often a giant sword. 

It's an always welcome effort by the publisher to introduce a new character and expand the DC Universe.

In the 2023 "Lazarus Planet" crossover storyline, a volcano on Lazarus Island erupted, ultimately causing magical storms and rain all over the world that have strange, unpredictable effects on the people and characters. The events played out in a variety of "Lazarus Planet"-branded specials, like the aforementioned Lazarus Planet: Dark Fate. These events are apparently what Wong and Haining use to incite the introduction of Zhou, who hails from Gotham City's little-visited Chinatown. 

Zhou is visiting the grave of her grandmother in a Gotham cemetery when they are suddenly set upon by jiangshi, the hopping vampires readers might be familiar with from kung fu movies or other pop culture; the creatures have apparently awakened by the magic rain. 

Zhou is soon joined in battle by Batgirl Cassandra Cain, who helps them put the undead attackers down by kicking them in the head and affixing magical pieces of paper (talismans) to their heads. The pair are soon joined by a rather unlikely third character, making for a rather eclectic cast for the Spirit World story that is being set up in this short: John Constantine. 

After the vampires are all vanquished, a new threat emerges: A "collective" of angry spirits, which take the form of a scary tree; it is the "necromantic" energy of this which had drawn Constantine to the cemetery. Zhou manages to exorcise it and send it back to the underworld, but not before it grabs Cassandra in a branch-like limb and drags her with it. 

And thus the plot for the series to follow is established: Cassandra Cain is trapped in the spirit world, and it's up to Zhou and Constantine to mount a rescue mission.

There's a slight hiccup as the short, Lazarus Planet prologue leads into the Spirit World series proper, as the story essentially restarts, and some amount of time seems to have passed since Cassandra was taken and Zhou and Constantine re-meet one another, the urgency of the situation somewhat downplayed by their having separated in the first place. 

Wong and Haining start off the narrative on parallel tracks. There's the characters in the living world trying to find their way to get to spirit world, which involves a meeting with Zhou's family, who have been mourning their loss since they first ventured into spirit world (Zhou's own status is somewhat ambiguous throughout much of the story; they are apparently simultaneously alive and dead, able to travel between the two worlds when presented with a portal or other opportunity to do so). 

And then there's Cassandra in the Chinese underworld, where the various undead are irresistibly drawn to her as a living being, and seek to eat her. She luckily finds allies in the form of Po Po and Bowen, friends of Zhou's who help her mask her presence with a new, temporary costume and some magical tea. 

When the heroes finally all reunite, they find themselves facing a new threat to the underworld, in the form of another collective (or is this the same on that they saw surface in Gotham?), one that once attempted to absorb Cassandra during her short trip to spirit world years ago, and is now currently absorbing other innocent spirits at an alarming rate in an attempt to challenge the remote gods who rule this afterlife.

(Don't remember Cass visiting spirit world? You wouldn't, as it wasn't actually depicted in the comics at the time, but remember when she dies* near the Andersen Gabrych-written end of her series in 2006, before Lady Shiva resurrects her in a Lazarus pit? Wong posits that her spirit briefly visited spirit world, and Haining draws highlights of her trip. Cassandra is, remember, part Chinese). 

At Spirit World's climax, which involves our unlikely trio of heroes battling both the now giant collective and an honest-to-goodness god, it is Zhou who manages to save the day, with both their understanding of what ultimately drives the dead of this particular underworld, and a bit of negotiating and deal-making that reminded me a bit of some past Constantine storylines. 

Xanthe Zhou proves to be a unique and compelling character, and one that I hope sticks around the DC Universe. They seem to be doing well so far, appearing not just in Birds of Prey, but also, apparently, in an early issue of the new Mark Waid and Dan Mora Justice League Unlimited. 

I was quite taken with Haining's art, which, based on her online credits, I must have seen a few times before in other books. I was especially impressed with the fact that the artist drew the entire six-issue arc, as that is, quite unfortunately, something of a rarity today, even on miniseries.

I suppose that, at a glance, the big-eyed character designs will suggest manga art, but it actually suggested Chinese comics art to me, as little of that as I've actually read (Publisher ComicsOne published some Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon collections in the first years of the new millennium, before I had even started EDILW, which I quite enjoyed at the time). 

The layouts and panel-flow don't suggest Asian comics at all, though; this reads very much like a traditional Western superhero comic, if one with more dynamic, creative layouts than some others (Which lead me to wonder how the team made the book; if it was done "Marvel style", or in a more rigorously scripted manner). 

Given how much of the book is set in a fantasy underworld, there is obviously a lot of cool stuff for Haining to draw, and the book is filled with weird characters from Chinese folklore and, one imagines, the creators' own imaginations. 

I'm...not 100% sure how I feel about Constantine's smoking here. He almost always has a cigarette in his mouth, which he lights with a burst of magic energy from his fingertip, and he rarely seems to take it out, even to hold in his hand. It looks really unnatural, but, as the book went on, it gradually started to become endearing to me, as if Constantine is so committed to smoking that he never spits out his cigarette, no matter how dangerous the circumstances or pitched the battle (And this is very much a more superheroic DCU Constantine than the Vertigo one I'm more familiar with, constantly summoning, using and fighting with magic like Dr. Strange in a trench coat).

Haining's Xanthe Zhou and Cassandra Cain are both beautiful, the latter looking quite a bit younger, perhaps because her bigger, wider eyes. As I was reading, I did question why Zhou's shaven head never seems to grow out any—they spend three straight days unconscious at one point in this adventure—and I did wonder if they were ever going to change clothes, given that they don't wear a costume, just (admittedly cool-looking) street clothes. But then I realized Constantine's constant stubble never seems to grow either, and he seems to be wearing the same damn outfit he's been wearing since 1985.

An extremely well-made, beautifully drawn comic that introduces a great new character, a cool new corner of the DC Universe and proves a nice showcase for one of my favorite characters, I was quite pleased I finally got around to reading Spirit World.**

The end of the Spirit World mini-series isn't the end of the Spirit World trade paperback, though. There's still that DC Pride short story. I was a little surprised to see that it wasn't by Wong and Haining, but by writer Jeremy Holt and artist Andrew Drilon. 

In their story, Xanthe Zhou, still wearing the same outfit as in the previous series and short story, is in the world of the living, and is bored, narrating about how living their life can feel like a burden. They eventually break into a cemetery after dark and practice folding objects out of paper. Suddenly, vandals with ridiculously high-tech equipment—gauntlets that generate what look like laser Wolverine claws—arrive to attack the Kane family mausoleum, and Batwoman promptly appears to defend it from them.

The two team-up to fight the bad guys and rather swiftly drive them off, and they then have a three-page conversation, in which Batwoman seems to rather randomly reveal her secret identity to this person she just met (Or, at least, she tells Zhou her late mother's name, which is pretty darn close to doing so). 

There's a bit about relationships with the dead, and birth families versus found families. And the story seems to indicate that Zhou might like women. "Batwoman?! Okay. Stealth is officially hot," they narrate when Kate Kane first appears. Later, Kate says "If I didn't know better, I'd say you're... ...flirting with me," although I saw no indication that Zhou was.

Like many of the shorts from such anthologies, there's not really much to it, but I suppose it's good that they included it in the collection, making it easier for readers who want to have all of Xanthe Zhou's appearances in one place able to do so.

 Of course, now they have to also track down two issues of Birds of Prey and at least one issue of JLU...

*I'm actually unclear on this point, as it's been almost twenty years since I read that story (It, um, wasn't so good that it was one I ever revisited). Here, Haining draws Shiva holding a gun and shooting Cassandra through the chest, and later, after a two-page spread depicting her journey through Spirit World, Cass exclaims, "My mother. She killed me. Then brought me back." But checking Wikipedia, it says that Cass was actually mortally wounded by a character trained by her father David Cain, known as Mad Dog. I am too lazy to go dig through long boxes just to settle the question for myself at this point. I don't suppose anyone has a trade paperback of Batgirl: Destruction's Daughter handy, do they...?

**If, like me, you enjoyed the book, and the various bits of Chinese myth, legend and folklore seen throughout it, from the setting to the rules and practices involving the dead, I would heartily recommend you also check out Remy Lai's exellent 2023 graphic novel Ghost Book, which I reviewed here. 

Although the tones and art styles of the two books are quite different, both seem to be drawn from the same well of inspiration, with Ghost Book's two heroes trapped between the two worlds similarly to Xanthe Zhou, and much of Lai's book also being set in the Chinese underworld. There's even some slight overlap of characters. While psychopomps Oxhead and Horseface have more substantial roles in Lai's work, they do make a brief cameo in Haining's art, appearing in the spread where Cass remembers her first trip through the spirit world. 

I wondered if Ghost Book might have provided any inspiration to Wong's Spirit World, but it looks like the first issue of the latter shipped in July of 2023, while Ghost Book was released in August of 2023, so the two came out pretty much at the same time, and Lai and Wong and Haining must have all been working on their stories at around the same time. 

On the first year or so of Kelly Thompson's Birds of Prey

I'm not entirely sure who gets the credit for originally conceiving of the Birds of Prey. 

Long-time Batman group writer Chuck Dixon penned the original Birds of Prey adventure, which appeared in the 1996 over-sized one-shot special Black Canary/Oracle: Birds of Prey #1 and was drawn by Gary Frank and John Dell. On the other hand, I've also heard that editor Jordan B. Gorfinkel came up with the idea (Wikipedia doesn't offer any clarity; the entry for "Birds of Prey (team)" credits Dixon as the creator, while Gorfinkel's entry says he created the team.)

At any rate, Dixon was certainly integral in creating the team and setting the template for the many other writers to follow him, as he wrote all of the team's original late-90s adventures in one-shots Birds of Prey: Revolution and Birds of Prey: Wolves and miniseries Birds of Prey: Manhunt. 

At its inception, Birds of Prey seemed to be a way to give both Black Canary Dinah Lance and Oracle Barbara Gordon something to do in the DC Universe other than playing occasional supporting characters in Green Arrow and Batman comics, with Canary going on missions planned and coordinated by Oracle, who would feed her intel remotely through an earpiece. 

At the outset, Canary had never actually met Oracle, nor even knew her actual identity. Other female characters would occasionally join Canary on these missions, like The Huntress and Catwoman in Manhunt (Or, in the case of a Showcase '96 short written by Gorfinkel, Lois Lane). 

Dixon was also the initial writer of the eventual ongoing monthly series, writing the first 46 issues for a variety of artists, including Greg Land, Butch Guice and Rick Leonardi. Dixon was followed on the book's 10-year, 127-issue run by a pair of talented, if perhaps unlikely, writers, in the form of Strangers in Paradise's Terry Moore and Love and Rockets' Gilbert Hernandez. 

And then Gail Simone took over with 2003's issue #56, initially working with pencil artist Ed Benes, and she stuck around for four years. (Writers Tony Bedard and Sean McKeever would follow her, keeping the title going another year and a half before it faced cancellation.)

Though that was hardly the last we would see of the Birds of Prey, Simone's run was probably the high point of the team's history. She added first The Huntress and then, later, Lady Blackhawk to what became a core line-up, although that line-up would quite frequently feature guest-stars, almost all of them female superheroes, who would come and go. 

And that eventually became the default premise of the book, for all the iterations that followed: A team of female superheroes, led by Canary, Gordon or both. 

While no other ongoing lasted nearly as long as the original—and, let's be honest, at a certain point DC and Marvel stopped even allowing books to run that long, preferring to relaunch books with new #1s every time the writer changed—the concept was popular enough that it never really went away, either. 

It was relaunched in 2010 by the returning Simone and Benes (and canceled at issue #15, both creators having left by then), and again as part of the New 52 in 2011 (lasting 35 issues) and in 2016 as Batgirl & The Birds of Prey (22 issues).

The comics also inspired a 2002 TV series (which, despite veering pretty far from the source material, was pretty fun, and my friend Meredith and I certainly enjoyed watching it for ComicsAlliance), and a 2020 film that had a lot to recommend it (despite some extremely questionable choices, especially regarding the use of a character named "Cassandra Cain", and the fact that it was a stealth Harley Quinn film).

After a weird film-inspired 2020 Black Label miniseries entitled Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti and a weirder still Black Label one-shot by Brian Azzarello, Emanuela Luppacchino and Ray McCarthy (the apparent results of what was originally announced as an ongoing), DC was ready to relaunch the team yet again in 2023, this time with writer Kelly Thompson and artist Leonardo Romero.

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I've long enjoyed the work of blogger-turned-novelist-turned-comics writer Kelly Thompson, ever since I used to regularly read her 1979semifinalist blog back in the Golden Age of Comics Blogging (I just looked, and I can't find her old blogging online anymore, though; I assume it's all been taken down. I guess you just had to be there!). 

I haven't read everything she's written since going pro, but I've read a lot of it, and I haven't read any of it that I didn't like. 

That includes 2015's Jem and the Holograms (with Sophie Campbell, one of my favorite artists), 2016's Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Pink and Hawkeye, 2017's Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi—Captain Phasma, 2018's Jessica Jones and the first volume of West Coast Avengers and 2019's Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, as well as some anthologies she's contributed to, 2016's Lumberjanes: Don't Axe, Don't Tale 2016 Special and 2019's Amazing Spider-Man: Full Circle (Looking at her credits online, I see there's actually an awful lot of stuff of hers that I've never read, much of it published by Marvel. As you guys can probably tell, I've always preferred DC to Marvel, and I have an especially hard time generating interest in comics featuring the X-Men or Captain Marvel Carol Danvers). 

Considering her facility with writing great comics starring compelling female characters (characters as disparate as Jem and Sabrina and Jessica Jones and the Pink Ranger) and her years writing various superhero and genre comics for publishers throughout the mainstream market, she seemed like a slam-dunk choice for a new Birds of Prey comic, and I was excited when she was first announced as its writer, although I had at least one big reservation, which we'll get to in a moment.

I'm much less familiar with the work of artist Leonardo Romero, whose name I did not recognize. Consulting his credits though, it appears he has experience at both big superhero publishers, as well as for some other genre comics publishers, and I have in fact at least read a little of his work, in the pages of Batman '66, Wonder Woman: Black and Gold and Thompson's own Hawkeye, even if I couldn't connect my memories of reading those books to the name.  

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Like I said, I had a few reservations upon the solicitation of that first issue, which was released with the above image of Romero's, an image that ultimately became the cover for the first issue of the series and, later, the first trade collection.

These reservations all had to do with the line-up.

First, someone seemed to be missing. There was no indication that Barbara Gordon was involved. That, of course, seemed odd, but then, maybe she just didn't make the cover; if her role was going to be as Oracle rather than as a Batgirl, then it would make sense not to have her leaping into action alongside the rest of the team.

Second, Jack Kirby's Barda seemed like an...unusual choice. I've always liked the character, of course, even though she usually appears as a supporting character in Mister Miracle or New Gods comics, rather than a protagonist or a hero in her own right*. She had of course been a Justice Leaguer, later in Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA run (when she and Orion joined the already power-heavy line-up in preparation for the coming of Mageddon, a relatively rare case in which we saw Barda without her superhero husband), and she had obviously teamed up with the Birds before, as one of Oracle's many occasional operatives during the original Simone run.

Still, in her origins and her powers, she's a pretty cosmic character, more suited to straight superhero adventures than the more street-level and espionage style stories that the Birds are most associated with (Although, to be fair, at a certain point in their runs, both Dixon and Simone did stray pretty far into standard superhero fare; in fact, in one of her later stories, Simone even featured resurrection of a dead Justice Leaguer). 

Third, while I was of course happy to see Batgirl Cassandra Cain, one of my favorite DC characters, I was a little unsure about her presence here...at least at this particular time. Don't get me wrong, I think the character is perfect for the team (and, for a while, I thought she and her fellow Gotham City teen vigilante Spoiler should have been official junior members, working with and learning from Canary and Huntress). But given where we last saw her, fighting alongside and living with Stephanie Brown and Barbara Gordon in the short-lived series Batgirl, it seemed...well, I hate to say "odd" again, but I will...odd that she would join a Birds line-up without Steph or Barbara. (Hey, now that I think of it, I'm not sure I ever read the final Batgirls collection...maybe they all broke up and went their separate ways in the end of that volume? I suppose I should look into that...)

All of those were really just questions I had about Thompson's new line-up, questions I assumed would be answered in the book itself (And, to be perfectly fair, they all were...immediately. By the time the first issue ended, which, reading the trade, meant by the time I finished the first chapter, I understood why all of the characters, including wild card Harley Quinn, were on the team, and was sold on Thompson's logic in justifying their use...which, even if it was in reality "Because Harley will boost sales," got a compelling in-story reason nonetheless.)

But then there was that other character on the cover: Zealot. 

Created by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi for their 1992 Image Comics series WildC.A.T.s: Covert Action Teams**, she and the rest of Lee's "WildStorm Universe" characters became the intellectual property of DC Comics when he sold them to the publisher in 1999. 

For a long time, the various WildStorm characters seemed to occupy their own little discrete fictional universe, separated from the DCU, but during 2011's ill-considered New 52 line-wide reboot, we saw a concerted effort to insert the WildStorm characters into the DCU proper. This led to books like a 30-issue Stormwatch in which Martian Manhunter was on a line-up with redesigned members of The Authority and a nine-issue Team 7 which included Black Canary along with characters from Gen 13 and WildC.A.T.s.

For the most part, the DCU seemed to reject these attempts to graft WildStorm characters into it like a body rejecting transplanted organs, and, of course, whether it was market pressure, creators' dislike of the new status quo or the utter revilement of the DC fanbase, the New 52 status quo itself was done away with, writer Scott Snyder devoting two event crossover series (2017's Dark Nights: Metal and 2020's Dark Nights: Death Metal) and a 39-issue run on a Justice League comic that basically amounted to an epic, years-long undoing of the New 52. 

Still, a few WildStorm characters seemed to fit in better than others, and a few even stuck around after Death Metal. The ones I've always had the hardest time avoiding were Superman and Batman analogues Apollo and Midniter, and Grifter, who appeared in some Batman comics after the de-reboot.

And, of course, here's Zealot, apparently a new member of the Birds of Prey.

I've read a few comics featuring the character, most memorably Morrison and Val Semeiks' 1997 one-shot JLA/WildC.A.T.s, and surely she must have appeared during the Alan Moore-written issues of WildC.A.T.s, which I read from library-borrowed trades in the years before I started EDILW, although I'll be damned if I can remember much of anything about those comics (There was a punk rock cyborg with a purple mohawk and tank top, right?). Basically, all I knew about Zealot was that she had white hair and a sword. (And that both she and Wonder Woman have seen Tom and Jerry, as is revealed in the aforementioned crossover.)

Anyway, that was basically just a four-paragraph way of saying, "Ugh, a WildStorm character." 

I guess DC has officially owned them for over 25 years now, but they still feel...weird and wrong to me, especially in DC team books like Birds of Prey. (I wonder, did older DC Comics fans feel this way about, say, The Marvel Family or Charlton characters like Blue Beetle and The Question officially joining the mainstream DCU after Crisis on Infinite Earths...? Did they still feel that way 25 years later?)

As you can see by the fact that I am just now writing about a run that started in the calendar year 2023, it took me a while to get around to Thompson and company's Birds of Prey. Sure, that was, in large part, because I have switched from comic book-comics to trades, but I have a feeling knowing that Zealot was in this comic made me drag my feet a bit in finally picking it up.

I am assuming that was probably just me, though.

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Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Megadeath Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero hit the ground running in the first issue of their new Birds of Prey series. Indeed, within the very first panel—depicting a shirtless Oliver Queen in a bed talking to Dinah Lance, who sits on the edge of the bed with her hands folded, looking somewhat worried—they have already begun to establish the building of a new Birds of Prey team.

I mentioned how thoroughly Thompson answered questions regarding the new lineup in the first issue above, and it is quite a remarkable first issue, as they use those first 25 pages to introduce the full six-characters who would make up the new version of them team, thoroughly enough that even if a reader wasn't already  terribly familiar with them they would be almost immediately, as well as establishing a rationale for Black Canary needing a team, the criteria of its make up (and why Barbara Gordon can't be on it), their incredibly dangerous, fairly crazy-sounding mission and an in-story excuse for Dinah to take such an enormous risk and work with such an unusual team in the first place.

It's a remarkably effective and efficient first issue, and one that not only doesn't waste any time, but also has room for multiple well-orchestrated and executed action scenes, and some really fun grace notes, like a two-page spread in which multiple drawings of Canary and Batgirl Cassandra Cain are shown taking on a small army of ninjas, or, even better, a four-page sequence in which Cassandra tells the others a story about a past fight with Harley Quinn, one that evokes both 2002's DC First: Batgirl/Joker #1 and the 1993 film Batman: Mask of The Phantasm (Both on purpose, I presume). 

As for the mission, it is this: Black Canary's little "sister" Sin is being held captive on Themyscira by the Amazons, where she is in danger of being possessed by a supernatural monster that will use her to destroy the entire island, and, perhaps, the world. 

This is all according to half-new time-travelling character from the future named Meridian, who is apparently Gotham Academy's grown-up Maps Mizoguchi. (Maps also tells Canary she can't bring Barbara, or she'll die and, if you're wondering why they don't just ask Wonder Woman to release Sin, Thompson has an answer for that, too: If Wondy refuses for any reason, Canary and her team will have lost the element of surprise necessary to invade a remote island full of formidable warriors.)

The review of Megadeath that recently ran at Collected Editions already effectively pointed out the problems with this set-up. 

First, there's the fact that the time-traveler warning of peril to a hero's family (and being the driving force behind a new series) was so recently used in Green Arrow Vol. 1: Reunion (featuring Black Canary!). 

And then there's the fact that we haven't seen or heard anything of Sin, a character introduced during Simone's original BOP series, in a while...2007, during the Tony Bedard-written Black Canary miniseries that essentially wrote the character off, if I am remembering correctly (And not only is that close to 20 years ago, it was on the other side of that weird gaping continuity gulf of the New 52, which makes it difficult to be confident which events prior to, say, Death Metal are actually canonical). 

Those elements aside—and I didn't have any trouble putting them aside, given how well they end up setting up the story—it's damn good comics. This first six-issue arc, which fills the entirety of the first trade, scans a bit like a superhero comic/heist movie mash-up. There's the recruiting a team of misfit, mismatched specialists, the plotting and planning, the gathering materials and making preparations and then the heist itself which, naturally, has dramatic complications that challenge our heroes in unexpected ways.

Given that the plan involves sneaking onto Themyscira, one of those complications is, of course, Wonder Woman herself, and we get to see not only Barda try to go one-on-one with her (as is depicted on one of the covers), but also Cassandra, who surprisingly attacks her in a very Batmanly way, using trickery and a utility belt full of gadgets and weapons (I had, back when I still thought I might grow up to write comics myself, previously imagined a Cassandra/Wonder Woman fight that went quite differently than this, making this one an awful lot of fun to read). 

For all the sneaking around and fighting, things eventually go pretty much as the heroes would want them to, with Wonder Woman ultimately taking the side of the Birds, Sin being rescued and the threat of her being possessed by the Fury of Greek myth Megaera adverted...sort of. (Don't read the later sections of this post if you don't want that plot point to be spoiled later.)

While the focus is obviously and appropriately on the ladies, several male allies also make notable appearances, giving the book a slightly more expansive feel, and further anchoring it in the DCU. 

This obviously includes the previously mentioned Oliver Queen, who is tasked with attacking Wonder Woman in Washington, D.C. and holding her off as long as possible (And he fares about as well as you might expect a guy with a bow and some trick arrows to fare against Wonder Woman, in what turns out to be a great six-page action sequence). 

And then there's John Constantine—who Romero actually draws to resemble Sting, as his creators Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben intended—who helps Canary procure some magical supplies for her mission. 

And a brief surprise appearance by one of Harley's Suicide Squad colleagues, who proves integral to her plan of arriving on the island undetected. (Oh, and Grifter Cole Cash makes a brief appearance; I guess he and Zealot are an item? No cameo from Scott Free though; Barda gets recruited in the middle of a brawl, rather than at home.)

It's actually kind of hard to over praise Romero's work on this book. It's really that good.

If you look back at BOP history, some of the many artists to have drawn the books have had the unfortunate tendency to draw all of the characters the exact same, veritable clones of one another, distinguishable by their hair color and costumes (I'm thinking of one particular artist here, who had a couple of runs on the title). 

Romero doesn't do that. The characters not only have a variety of body types—a task perhaps helped along by the fact that there is such a natural variety to the characters, from the giant Big Barda to the petite Cassandra Cain, who the former charmingly refers to as "Small Bat" throughout—but easily distinguishable designs, including their faces, expressions, postures and attitudes. 

He also manages the neat trick of drawing the characters in a style that looks realistic, but without being staid and boring; his work still looks very drawn and very comic book-y. I was repeatedly reminded of the work of the great Javier Rodriguez throughout.

I've already mentioned the quality of the action scenes, something that modern American comics are usually, well, fairly trash at depicting, but are here quite strong, with actual image-driven storytelling and fight choreography, rather than the more standard drawing of heroes posing while their foes are drawn in freefall (We'll actually see a fight of that style in the next volume, drawn by different artists).

And Thompson certainly gives Romero a lot of fun stuff to draw, including some fun costume designs. I mean, these are some really fun designs to begin with, like Kirby's Barda (who appears in both her full armor as well as her bikini costume) and the Batman x Spider-Man design of the Cassandra Cain Batgirl that artist Damion Scott perfected (I really like how Romero draws this Batgirl's ears here, by the way, set as they are on the side of her head and extending at an angle, evoking the first appearance version of Batman). But there's also a very short sequence in which the Birds all adopt aquatic gear, and rather than generic matching scuba suits like the one Canary dons, they all get what look like personalized, toy-ready costumes of their own. 

Unfortunately, Romero doesn't draw the whole story arc. The fill-in artist, Arist Deyn, comes in at a rather inconvenient time, drawing the fifth issue of a six-issue arc, and, worse, has a style that couldn't be more incongruous with that of Romero's.

Remember what I said about some Birds artists drawing the characters more or less identically? Well, that's what Deyn does. Not only do they all have the same slim body type (Barda is just a bit taller than the others), but they all have the exact same face, with a big forehead and large, glossy eyes that give them all a doll-like look.

A change in the art in the middle of an arc is always annoying, and Deyn's work, while fine on its own (Googling the artist later, I quite liked a lot of what I saw), it is incredibly jarring to read here (Deyn also handles the coloring on that particular issue, further distancing the imagery in this chapter from that of the rest of the story, which is colored by Jordie Bellaire; you probably can't tell from my scans from the book, though).

The denouement of the final issue, for which Romero returns to draw, pretty deftly moves the characters on to a new threat, one that manages to justify the team's continued existence....at least in some form. As Canary and Cassandra discuss the new threat that Meridian/Maps has shared with them, the last panel has Canary declaring "We're going to need a new team."

I was heartened to hear that. A small core team with Canary and Cassandra (and, as we'd find out in the next volume, Barda and Sin) and rotating guest characters is not only in keeping with earlier iterations of the book, and not only means we will get to see more characters get a story arc or so in the spotlight, but it also means I don't have to keep reading about Zealot (although she does make appearances in the next volume) or Harley Quinn, who is fine in this book, but is definitely a character I've had my fill of over the last decade or so. 

Megadeath is pretty much a perfect trade paperback, telling one single, complete story in such a way that is perfectly acceptable to long-time fans of the team or individual characters while also proving accessible to newer readers (And I do hope Thompson brought some of the fans of her Marvel work to Birds of Prey for the first time). Simultaneously, as all good serial narratives should, it teases the next story in a way that is compelling enough to make one want to keep reading.

The good news for me then is, because I waited so incredibly long to actually sit down to read this first collection, the second one was already available, and I could read it immediately. 

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Birds of Prey Vol. 2: Worlds Without End Unfortunately, the series kind of falls apart a little in the second volume. 

It's easy to diagnose the problem—Leonardo Romero stops drawing interiors, retreating to covers only, and instead of the previous volume's two artists, this time we get six —but not necessarily the source, as it is all behind-the-scenes.

Obviously, comics work best when there is a solid, stable creative team working together throughout the run, and while it's become increasingly rare for any super-comic from any publisher to produce comics with a consistent writer/artist team for very long anymore—and I should note that that may be considered a good thing, if it means publishers and fans are no longer pressuring artists to work themselves to death to meet monthly deadlines—there are better, smarter ways to handle fill-ins (I think Mark Waid and Dan Mora's run on Batman/Superman: World's Finest did a pretty good job of this, with Waid crafting story arcs for Mora to draw, then writing a done-in-one single issue for a guest artist to draw and give Mora a break, before launching a new arc for Mora). 

Anyway, whatever went on with Birds of Prey personnel behind the scenes, that's all on DC. All I can say, as a reader, is that it's disappointing and annoying to get a truly great creative team on (most) of a story arc, only for that team to change in the very next arc.

Romero's main replacement seems to be the top-credited Javier Pina, who draws the entirety of the first of this collection's seven issues, and then parts of three other issues. 

I didn't personally care for Pina's work as much as I did Romero's (The downside of Romero's art on the first arc being so great? They set a very high bar for every one that follows him). There's nothing wrong with it, though. 

It's very realistic, far more so than Romero's slightly more cartooned work, although Pina does have a habit of dropping photos into the panels as backgrounds, a practice that has always annoyed me. At least with Jordie Bellaire still on colors, the art is somewhat in keeping with the tone of most of the first volume. (I think Gavin Guidry, who draws the entirety of the final issue and portions of a few others, bears a style closer to Romero's, and might make for the best replacement of any of the artists whose work appears here.)

The title story arc at least has a premise that seems to incorporate the game of artist musical chairs (There are actually two story arcs in this volume, a two-part "Undercover Animals" and a five-part "Worlds Without End", although they blend into one another in such a way that they read as one story.)

Canary and Meridian finally bring in Batgirl/Oracle Barbara Gordon and begin working their new case: A rogue time-traveler from the future is targeting the Birds, and Barbara in particular. They kinda sorta recruit Vixen, and with her help they set a trap for their mysterious antagonist, which leads to the very fun sequence in which the Birds act as scantily-clad models at a fashion show (At one point, Barda sheds her clothes to fight, so Kelly Thompson and Pina can repurpose a gag from the Matt Fraction/David Aja Hawkeye, where a classic image of the character's head is super-imposed over the art to censor nudity, looking a bit like a sticker applied to the page of the book).

During that fight—one notably not as strong as those in the first volume—a portal opens, and Barbara goes through it, the rest of the Birds going after her. What follows over the course of the next five issues is a sort of chase through different portals, each one resetting and "re-skinning" the characters and the pocket reality our heroines find themselves trapped in, their costumes and the setting changing dramatically, depending on which character enters the portal first and thus determining the style of the next "world."

So you can see how this scenario would be unusually compatible if one is working with a half-dozen different artists (Although I don't think the other artists involved necessarily all line neatly up, so that each one is given their own world to draw...if so, only one draws in such a style that it is too terribly dramatically distinguished from that of the others, but we'll get to that in a moment).

And so Black Canary, Big Barda, Vixen, the newly redesigned and empowered Sin, both Batgirls and a newcomer they meet in the pocket dimension find themselves being pursued by the monstrous, reality-altering villain who has been targeting them, from a nightmarish Gotham, to a more optimistic mid-century America, to a world of dinosaurs and a cartoon world, their costumes and/or appearances getting redesigned each time (The dinosaur world thus gives us a sort of Savage Land-ized version of the Birds, for example).

The most dramatic change comes in the penultimate chapter, when Sin tries to control the nature of the next world by thinking of cartoons when jumping through the portal. Here Thompson reunites with her original partner from Jem and The Holograms, EDILW favorite Sophie Campbell. Campbell draws the Birds as chibi versions of themselves, and they are adorable, especially Campbell's Cassandra. 

(As fun as this chapter is, I do hope Campbell returns to the book at some point and draws it in her regular style; that's the style she draws the villain in during the four panels in which she appears, and, as Campbell has proven in her contributions to 2021's Batman Black and White #2 and Superman: Red and Blue #6, she can draw the hell out of DC superheroes). 

Constantine, Zealot and a shirtless Cole Cash all return, the first two gathering with Merdian outside the mysterious portal that appeared at the fashion show and worrying about how to get the Birds out of it, and there's also a brief and unexpected appearance by Xanthe Zhou, from 2023's Lazarus Planet: Legends Reborn #1 (And there's an footnote pointing to her appearance with Cassandra in the 2023 Spirit World miniseries). 

The story works, and certainly has plenty of fun moments in it, but, unlike that of the first volume, it doesn't seem as specific to the characters (despite a somewhat surprising link between the villain and a rather old Barbara Gordon foe), and the basic scenario is one that it's easy to imagine any other hero or team of heroes going through. 

Once again, Thompson gives us a last-panel cliffhanger that, while as vague as can be, points to a next adventure, and left me wanting to find out what happens next.

Based on these first two volumes (and/or 13 issues), Thompson seems to have a great handle on the characters, and a pretty good idea how to keep them together as a team. She also manages to have a fairly light touch, with lots of organically funny moments that make the book truly fun to read.

Despite all of the chefs in the kitchen involved in this particular volume, this is still the best Birds of Prey comic we've gotten since Gail Simone was writing it, and among the better showcases for many of the characters featured (like Barda and Cassandra, for example).

 I'm looking forward to volume 3...and hopefully many more volumes after that. 

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Looking ahead at the five issues that have been published since those collected in Worlds Without End, it looks like the next few issues will introduce Grace Choi and Onyx to the mix, as well as another new artist: Sam Basri, who has drawn plenty of comics for DC, including female-starring ones like Harley Quinn, Power Girl and Voodoo. 

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Here's something I did not care for at all:

As you can see in the Deyn-drawn panel above, Kelly Thompson has Black Canary quote a line from Watchmen to Megaera. 

Can't we all just agree to leave Alan Moore alone...?

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Finally, there's this, which is more of a note than a complaint or nitpick.

When Sin finally merges with Megaera, the immediate aftermath of which is pictured above, she gets an instant, magical makeover, the evil goddesses' vine-like threads forming a green, triangular pattern over her torso, and giving her matching boots and other accessories.

She also gets a green shock of hair.

Now, I am totally not the right person to be bringing this up all, being a middle-aged white guy (and a bald one at that!), but I guess I will anyway, since I don't know if anyone else has yet: It was my understanding that giving Asian female characters colored streaks of hair was something that real Asian women found to be a tired, annoying stereotype in pop culture.

I first heard this in regard to 2021's Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings. I had read that Meng'er Zhang, who played Shang-Chi's little sister Xialing in the movie, had said that her character was originally intended to have a streak of red in her hair in the film, but that she had asked that the element of the character design be removed, as the Asian-girl-with-a-streak-of-colored-hair had become a stereotype. I'm now not sure where I read it; it might have been this Axios article, as I used to read that site regularly-ish for a while, or it might have just been a headline I had seen somewhere on social media.

At any rate, so that you don't have to take my word for it, here's the Teen Vogue article that apparently struck a chord with Zhang, and here's a HuffPost piece on the same subject that was published a few years previous to that. 

I confess to having been completely ignorant of the phenomenon until I read about Zhang calling it out, even though I have seen at least a couple of the sources of the stereotype that were cited (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Big Hero 6 and the various X-Men films, for example).

In the case of Sin, I am fairly certain none of the creators gave her the green hair to signify any particular character traits or comment on the typical behavior of Asian women but were instead only using the change as a visual signifier of her transformation, her green-colored hair being a change along the same lines of her wardrobe changing and her gaining new powers. Not unlike, say, Jason Blood or Jim Corrigan, both of whom similarly merged with powerful supernatural entities, having white streaks in their hair. 

(And, for what it's worth, Sin is only one of four characters of Asian descent in that first year of the series, and she is the only one of them with a streak of color in her hair; Cassandra and Maps both have all-black hair, as does the non-binary Xanthe Zhou. On the other hand, future issues of the series will apparently feature Grace Choi, an Asian American character who has dyed red hair.)

Anyway, now that my attention has been brought to the stereotype, I can't help but notice it whenever I see it. Maybe if it's brought to the attention of the creators or DC, they will gradually phase it out. Or not. After all, as I said, the book already has several Asian female (and/or non-binary) characters, and they have a somewhat admirable variety of backgrounds, powers, personalities...and hair styles. 

*You guys did read Nogzi Ukazu's original graphic novel Barda, the very first time the character starred in her own comic, last year though, right? If not, here's my review of it. If you're a Barda fan, you definitely want to read it. It's great. 

**To be honest, just typing out the name "WildC.A.T.s" irritates me. 

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week eight

Batgirl and The Birds of Prey: Rebirth #1 by Julie Benson, Shawna Benson, Claire Roe and Allen Passalaqua

The most bizarre aspect of DC's current "Rebirth" re-branding effort was the not-terribly-coded admission by writer (and company Chief Creative Officer) Geoff Johns in DC Universe: Rebirth that the four-and-a-half-year New 52 was a failure, and that it was essentially all Alan Moore's fault. Characters from his 1986-87 Watchmen comic, which DC recently produced a suite of prequels to over the vociferous objections of the Moore, were presented as villains in the storyline, and at least one of them as the true in-story engineer of the New 52  (A more generous-to-Johns reading is that rather than my oversimplified, half-serious analysis, what Johns was attempting was some sort of mea culpa on behalf of his publisher, saying that they've collectively learned the wrong lessons from Moore's Watchmen, but, given their exploitation of that material lately, if that was Johns' point, it doesn't seem all that sincerely made).

DC has had a weird obsession with the work of Moore pretty much ever since 1987, relying on his creations and concepts to an often comical degree, while, in more recent, post-Paul Levitz years, seemingly never missing a chance to refer to some minor point of his work or un-do an innovation of his. But while the company has labored to turn the complete, standlone work of Watchmen into some sort of franchise, or to restore Swamp Thing to his Len Wein-conception rather than the more popular Moore version and so on, the company really, really loves the fucking Killing Joke (Moore's one-off, out-of-continuity 1988 prestige format collaboration with artist Brian Bolland), which has become the one, single story in the company's 75-years worth of stories that was explicitly not knocked out of continuity during the events of Flashpoint...despite the publisher's reversal of one of Killing Joke's single lasting impact on DC continuity (Barbara Gordon's irreparable paralaysis).

When the most recent Batgirl writing team of Cameron Stewart and Brenden K. Fletcher took some pains to try to un-do aspects of The Killing Joke, rather subtly implying that the sexual abuse of Gordon that followed her shooting was simply a false memory planted in her brain to torture her by a villain who had seized control of her memory, it seemed like they had infused enough equivocation that at least the most unsavory aspects of Barbara Gordon's role in that story that readers could see it either way they wanted.

So in the first appearance of Batgirl Barbara Gordon in the "reborn" DC Universe (which, unlike The New 52 did not come about due to any kind of continuity-shifting cosmic event, but is at this point just a branding initaitive), new-to-DC writers Julie and Shawna Benson recap Barbara Gordon's origin and, of course, a chunk of it is devoted to the events of The Killing Joke:

The events are slightly different in several ways from the 1988 original, of course, as they were following Flashpoint (Originally, an older Gordon had retired from crime-fighting at that point, her father was much older and grayer, it happened earlier in the respective careers of all of the characters involved, etc). There are still more differences here, including Barbara's outfit and the presence of marshmallows in her hot cocoa, but as for the sexual assault component? Well, this comic doesn't go any further into the events of Killing Joke than the above panels, and Barbara's narration, but it's strange to see the scene repeated here, as its importance in the Barbara Gordon story is, after the events of Flashpoint, not too terribly relevant. Rather than a turning point in her life, it was–or, at least until this weird issue anyway–something that benched her temporarily from her career as Batgirl until she got better. Not unlike Jason Todd's death at the hands of The Joker.

Except the Bensons actually do a pretty hard reboot of the story of Barbara Gordon and The Birds of Prey in this issue, restoring aspects of the post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint continuity. Now Barbara Gordon was super-hacking crime-fighter Oracle during the time she was in a wheel chair, she did work with Black Canary as her field agent and they were called The Birds of Prey...contrary to what you may have read in the post-Flashpoint Batgirl and Birds of Prey, two of the books one would expect to be most relevant to a new book called Batgirl and The Birds of Prey (Instead, Black Canary and Grayson are much more relevant than the previous, third volume of Birds of Prey).

This drastic change in the history of these characters–which, remember, is only five to seven years their time and just under five years our time–would make sense if DC Universe: Rebirth did include one of DC's now regular continuity reboots, but it didn't; rather, it just alluded to the fact that the last one was an orchestrated attack to weaken the DCU.

But wait, there's more! We haven't even gotten to The Huntress yet! The post-Flashpoint Huntress is pretty complicated. As far as I understand it, she was introduced as Helena Bertinelli in a six-issue, 2011 miniseries called The Huntress...but it was later revealed that she was really Helena Wayne from Earth 2 (the first Earth 2 of The New 52, the one seen in the pages of the first Earth 2 comic), who had come to Earth-0/The New 52-iverse and assumed the identity of the late Bertinelli and the new superhero codename to hide the fact that she was really ane extra-dimensional alien named Helena Wayne who had operated as her world's  Robin alongside her father, Earth 2's Batman). Then DC introduced a new, second character named Helena Bertinelli who didn't look anything like the previous two Helenas in the pages of Grayson. She was an agent of Spyral, not a costumed vigilante. But here in this issue she adopts a new codename and costume, and is revealed to have a similar back-story to that of the pre-Flashopint Bertinelli.

Whew!

So now that we've gotten through all that ridiculous continuity bullshit in this issue presumably meant to be a good jumping-on point–"What the hell is a matron of Spyral?" Meredith texted me while she was reading it–we can address the important question. That is, how is it, as a comic? Well, it's not very good.

I vacillate on how harshly to judge writers new to the comics medium, and the Bensons evidence a common, practically ubiquitous weakness in all writers new to comics, be they professional from the world of television, prose or even film and even, in some cases, longtime comic book artists trying their hand at writing but not drawing a comic: They are way, way too wordy. There is a lot of narration in this book, much of it redundant, and too much of it poor.

The first groan their writing elicited was on page two, after Barbara riffs to herself about the saying "Time heals all wounds" for a while, culminating in "Time in on my side...but time is a terrible sidekick."

The second groan, by the way, came when she made this particular observation, without any trace of irony or awareness that it's a completely core element of The Joker's very conception and portrayal for over 75 years:

Ironic. A guy named The Joker took away our laughs.

Ugh. Yes. That's terribly ironic, Barbara/Bensons. The Joker may dress like a clown, he may call himself "The Joker," but he's actually an evil villain. And that has never, ever occurred to anyone ever before. Very astute.

Their plotting is dependent on the changes they've instituted to continuity. While crime-fighting as Batgirl, Babs discovers that someone code-named "Oracle" is providing intel to criminals. Since she was Oracle now I guess, she decides to re-recuit Black Canary, and they go after the bad guys. But going after the same bad guys in The Huntress, dressed in a pretty cool new costume (seen previously in Nightwing: Rebirth #1), who is intent on murdering various mob types in Gotham City with her artfully designed crossbow.

Barbara and Black Canary are opposed to this course of action–at least that means Babs and Helena aren't actually yelling at each other on the cover over who has dibs on Dick–but more so because they need info from the bad guys, rather than because Punisher-types aren't generally welcome in Batman's Gotham City.

The story will continue in Batgirl and The Birds of Prey #1 (remember, this was Batgirl and The Birds of Prey: Rebirth #1), and it's all set after the first story arc of the new volume of Batgirl, which doesn't even begin until week nine.

Comics!

The sole bit of good news here is that artist Claire Roe draws really well (That's Yanick Paquette's cover, by the way, not hers). Babs is still in her "Of Burnside" costume, but Canary and Huntress wear their new "Rebirth" costumes. Roe's Barbara doesn't look nearly as fashionable or sexy as Babs Tarr's Barbara when out of her costume, but then Tarr's vision of Burnside and its fashionable twenty-something population was perhaps uniquely fashionable and sexy; she even made temporary fill-in Batman James Gordon look kinda hot...for Jim Gordon, anyway.

These characters may have appeared in more stylishly drawn books before–the post-Simone Batgirl, the short-lived Black Canary–but this is the best-drawn Birds of Prey book in...well, I can't remember the last time a Birds of Prey comic was really well drawn. Sometime during the first volume of the book, I guess, before the "Brightest Day" era relaunch.

Oh, and if one wonders overmuch why there's a Killing Joke scene repeated yet again in this comic, the last page of the comic might offer some indication.

Here's the ad on the inside back cover:

So, corporate synergy? Maybe. If so, the Bensons and DC decided to focus on the shooting, rather than the sexual assault (which may or may not include rape, based on what I've heard of the animated film) and not on the other super-unsavory aspects of the film (Batman's sidekick-with-benefits relationship with Barbara) or even the cooler aspects, like that Barbara Gordon costume being a cooler-looking, more striking and easier-to-draw one than the maybe more practical and "realistic" and cosplayable "Batgirl of Burnside" get-up.

When the book official launches with Batgirl and The Birds of Prey #1 in two weeks, this will be the exact creative team, so this, at least, has given us a pretty good idea of what the book will be like. Perhaps (and, by "perhaps" I mean "hopefully") much of this special involved the Bensons checking off editorially mandated boxes–you know, make sure they get some Killing Joke in there, make it clear than Helena Bertinelli, Age of Spyral is now Huntress, assassin of mob types–and that from here on out things will improve.

If not, well, that Roe sure does draw well.

The Hellblazer: Rebirth #1 by Simon Oliver, Moritat and Andre Szymanowicz

Since DC is rebooting their John Constantine ongoing series yet again, it's probably worth remembering how we got here. Do pay attention to the dates.

Okay, so British, working class wizard John Constantine first appeared in the pages of Swamp Thing, where he was created by Alan Moore (yes, his decades-old work does loom heavy in week eight's "Rebirth" specials), Stephen R. Bissette and John Totleben. He graduated to his own monthly series called Hellblazer in 1988, which was one of the handful of DC Comics to migrate to the new, mature readers imprint Vertigo in 1993. The title lasted an astonishing 300 issues, not seeing cancelation until 2013. At the time, it was the longest-running monthly comic book series to have not been relaunched, renumbered or rebooted.

Sales were modest, but that's a damn impressive feat for any comic book, particularly in the turbulent times in the market Hellblazer ran through.

At the conclusion of the 2010-2011 bi-weekly series Brightest Day, writer Geoff Johns reintroduced Constantine (and Swamp Thing) back into the DC Universe proper, a place they had only ever briefly visited after the formation of Vertigo. The roll-out was a bit messy, but Constantine (and Swamp Thing) received their own books after the company's 2011 "The New 52" initiative.

Constantine's new, New 52, DC Universe book replaced the Vertigo-imprint Hellblazer. In spring of 2013, his new book launched, this one just called Constantine. It lasted just 21 issues.

In spring of 2015, they tried again, launched Constantine: The Hellblazer. This attempt lasted just 13 issues.

And that brings us to The Hellblazer: Rebirth #1, a special one-shot meant to introduces the fourth volume of a John Constantine-starring monthly series, the third in four years. If the trend continues, don't expect this it to last very long.

Ironically, the title has come full-circle now back to that of the original Constantine monthly, Hellblazer (well, now there's a "The" in there, but still). The writer is Simon Oliver, and I hate to say it, but there doesn't seem to be anything terribly new or innovative here; it is rather a full retreat back to Hellblazer territory, save with a slicker, more colorful DCU look to it.

Moritat gives Constantine his original hair and look back after the character's dalliance with a new hairstyle and tighter pants in the last volume of the series. And Oliver sends him back to London, after last volume's time spent in New York City.

In fact, the plot of this entire involves Constantine's efforts to return to London, a task much more difficult to achieve than simply buying an airplane ticket and enduring the various inconveniences of flying on a major airline, since Constantine was apparently banished from London by a demon's curse.

So he has to take on that demon here, and he does so via trickery and ballsiness, essentially playing chicken with the souls of everyone in London.

It's the sort of Constantine move that is, at this point, expected, and it therefore lacks the punch it might have when you first saw him pull something clever on demonic forces (For me, I think it was when Garth Ennis had him sell his soul to three different, opposing demons so that none of them could claim it without having to go to war with the others, essentially granting him a degree of immortality). Or when you saw it for the second, third, eighth or tenth time.

I've read enough comics featuring the character that I'm pretty sure I've read all the comics I need to, at least until someone comes up with something brand new to do with him. There's none of that here, and while much of this feels like a return to the old Vertigo Hellblazer–although without any of the language or nudity in a real mature readers Vertigo comic–seeing as how John is back to looking unshaven and rumpled, he's back in London and long-time supporting cast member Chas is reintroduced, there are a few pages featuring Swamp Thing, Captain Marvel Shazam and a baby-faced Wonder Woman to remind us that this is still a DCU comic book.

Oliver does nod in the direction of Hellblazer as a horror comic, however, at least in two passing references to American politics. In the first, Constantine says that as much as he loved New York, he was eager to get out of the U.S. when "a racist, short-fingered, failed meat salesman began circling the white house...things started tot ake a turn for the strange, even for me."

On the last page, we see Constantine clutching a Midnight Standard tabloid newspaper, the headline reading: "Beauty Pageant Owner Becomes Leader Of The Free World."

It honestly doesn't get much scarier than that.

I apologize if it seems I've given short shrift to artist Moritat in this post. The fact of the matter is, he's one of the best artist DC has who regularly draws interior work for them, and while Constantine Comic 4.0 might not seem like the ideal showcase for his talents–if I were the boss of DC Comics, I might have had him drawing Detective Comics post-"Rebirth"–his ability to balance humor and seriousness serves the book quite well. Constantine may look standard issue, and the demon generic, but Moritat's crowd scenes are a real delight.

As talented an artist as he is, I don't think he's a great enough artist that I would want to read a Constantine comic just because Moritat is draw it, but I'll be damned if his presence isn't a hell of an incentive.