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 Batgirls Vol. 1: One Way or Another

Well this certainly sounded like a slam-dunk of an idea for a Batman-adjacent series. 

Batgirl Cassandra Cain starred in a solo series that lasted 73 issues between 2000 and 2006; in it, original, retired Batgirl Barbara Gordon served as her mentor. That was later followed by a new Batgirl series in which Stephanie Brown, aka Spoiler, took up the mantle from her friend Cassandra (this required some unconvincing hand-waving to get the costume off of Cass and forcing her into story limbo for awhile). In that volume of Batgirl, which lasted 24 issues between 2009 and 2011, original, retired Batgirl Barbara Gordon once again served as the new Batgirl's mentor. 

Then, when "The New 52" happened, Gordon returned to the Batgirl role for awhile, starring in a series that lasted 53 issues between 2011 and 2016, and then immediately relaunching for a new volume that lasted another 50 issues, into 2021. By that time, both Cassandra and Stephanie were both reintroduced into the Batman universe, with Cassandra resuming her Batgirl codename and costume after going by "Orphan" for a while. 

What to do with all these Batgirls? Why not put them all together in a new series, the premise of which would be the obvious one, of the older, original Batgirl Barbara—who had been gradually drifting back towards her pre-New 52 status quo as computer expert and information broker Oracle—serving as the mentor of the two teenage vigilantes? 

That was the idea behind the new series Batgirls, which launched in 2022 after the team-up concept was tried out in some back-up stories in the pages of Batman, during writer James Tynion IV's big "Fear State" crossover storyline. As I said, it sounds like a good one, and given the relative success of the three heroines in solo series throughout the 21st century, putting them all on a Birds of Prey-like team together seemed like an obvious move, one that would bring with it three different fandoms.

Oddly, it only lasted 19 issues, fewer than any Batgirl's solo series to date. 

What went wrong? I don't know, beyond the obvious fact that it's pretty hard to sell an ongoing comic book series these days.

I was a faithful reader of the original Batgirl series, a big fan of the Cassandra Cain iteration of the character, and an advocate for this very premise for a book, and I wasn't reading it, for a variety of reasons (The New 52 essentially having broken the contract between me as a reader and the DCU as an ongoing setting, comics costing more than $3 a pop now, my not reading enough titles to justify journeying to a comic shop each Wednesday any more, etc). 

I can't speak for the rest of the potential Batgirls readership, though.

The title had officially been cancelled by the time I got around to reading the first volume of the series, Batgirls Vol. 1: One Way or Another, by the creative team of writers Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad and artist Jorge Corona. Having finally done so, I suppose I can offer some guesses, the main one of which the title just wasn't very good. 

Extremely plot-heavy with little attention to character, characterization or ideas, it wasn't really a book about anything more than our heroes fighting some villains, the sort of comic of which there is and has always been dozens and dozens of similar books, many of which offer more than just fight scenes. 

(I wonder to what extent the series' launch being tied to "Fear State" might have been a factor. That was a fine storyline by Tynion and company, but it's credibility-straining villains weren't so great as to justify much in the way of tie-ins or the involvement of characters from throughout the extended Bat Family. That said, Bat events have long been used to introduced new Batman-adjacent titles, including the original Batgirl series, which came in the wake of "No Man's Land".)

The Magistrate from "Fear State" are hunting Batgirl Cassandra Cain and Spoiler Stephanie Brown, the latter of whom has apparently recently altered her costume so that he has a purple bat on her chest and is also going by "Batgirl" now (Should Stephanie have resumed wearing her own Batgirl costume if she was resuming the Batgirl name...? I don't know; I personally prefer her original Spoiler costume to this more ninja-like, detail-heavy version.). The Magistrate are presumably doing so because of doctored footage showing a Batgirl killing someone that was released to them.

This leads to The Magistrate, which you presumably already know all about because you were reading Batman—remember, the series started in the pages of Batman as back-ups, which, again, may or may not have been a factor in the series' failure to catch on—targeting sometimes-Batgirl, sometimes-Oracle Barbara Gordon's clocktower headquarters. At the same time, an anti-Oracle of sorts, known as Seer, has targeted Babs, corrupting her information network.

This leads to the two teens having to lie low for a few days, while Barbara sets-up a new status-quo for them and, of course, the new series: The three of them move into a loft together in a new neighborhood, The Hill, and become something similar to a Batgirl-only version of the Birds of Prey, with Stephanie and Cass going out and doing the leg-work of Batgirling, while Babs stays behind-the-scenes, doing the Oracle-ing.

They're immediately set upon by a series of villains, none of whom, I'm afraid, are terribly engaging, which is sort of unfortunate, as Cloonan and Conrad focus on these and their conflict above characterization of the girls and their relationships with one another. (Where were Cass and Steph living before they moved in with Babs? What were their previous status quos? I have no idea; the book offers no clues). 

There's the aforementioned Seer, who can hack his or her way into Oracle's networks and seems to have an unexplained grudge against Babs and the Batgirls. There's Tutor, a prolific spray-paint artist with an anti-society bent and some sort of mind-control abilities that turn victims into mindless zombies that do his bidding. There's Tutor's patron, the latest villain to go by the name Spellbinder (The third, by my count). And there's The Saints, former, radicalized members of The Magistrate who resemble cartoonier versions of Peacekeeper-01 (you did read "Fear State", right?) and are each named after a different saint: Tarsus, Valentine and Assisi. And then there's the Hill Ripper, an unknown, unseen serial killer who seems to be stalking the girls' new turf, though they don't come into direct contact with him or her this volume, despite Steph's certainty that it is a neighbor, based on some Rear Window-esque suspicions. 

If that seems like a lot of moving pieces for the first six issues of a new series, it's mostly just Tutor and Spellbinder who are involved. Seer makes an attack and some taunts but is mainly a background player until they're surprise appearance at the cliff-hanging ending, and the Saints, seemingly manipulated by Seer, attack a couple of times, but they aren't the focus of the storyline either. 

It's all...fine, but it's also light on substance, and what I'd expect from the series, with, as I said, no real focus on the characters or their relationships with one another. 

The art by Corona is pretty great, and it's hard to imagine fans being turned off by it. His Cass highlights her visual characteristics, of being something of a creepy cross between Batman and Spider-Man, in a tight, little, slightly feminine package (There's one great splash panel, near the climax, where her arms blend into her cape, giving the appearance of a monstrous bat). The other two Batgirls are less visually interesting in conception, but nevertheless well-rendered, as are all three characters when they are out of costume. 

I'm curious about what went wrong with the tile, exactly, and interested enough in the characters  to follow the rest of the series in trade, but, with only the first third to go on, I would guess the low-calorie approach to comic book storytelling didn't retain enough eyeballs on the book to make it as successful as any of the girls' solo outings to date. 

The one passage in Luke Skywalker Can't Read that I did not care for at all

Becky Cloonan makes history in 2012's Batman #12, by being the first woman to draw an issue of Batman. The character was around 73 years at that point. 

I've been reading author Ryan Britt's Luke Skywalker Can't Read and Other Geek Truths (Plume; 2015), a fun, funny collection of essays addressing modern geekdom's greatest touchstones–Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of The Rings, Doctor Who, etc–from various, sometimes rather quirky angles. Like how he learned the birds and the bees from Barbarella and dinosaurs, how discovering the modern Doctor Who helped him overcome depression and whether or not anyone in the Star Wars universe is functionally literate or not (The title answers that question, actually).

I've been greatly enjoying the book, and I assume it must be a pretty good, for the simple reason that many of his subjects are ones I know very little about (Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter) or have zero first-hand experience with (Star Trek, Doctor Who), and I've still found the pieces all engaging and interesting.

The penultimate essay involves superheroes, something I do know quite a bit about and have quite a bit of first-hand experience with, however. It's entitled "Nobody Gets Mad About Hamlet Remakes: Rise of the Relevant Superheroes," and it is a discussion of the current boom in comic book superhero films and various complaints about them, from fans and critics.

It's a fine essay, but I was actively irritated by this passage:

The idea that the movie isn't as good as the source material because it contradicts the author's vision is another criticism of comic book movies. We might claim Batman was "created" by Bob Kane, but most people will tell you he was co-created by Bill Finger. So, are we seeing a vision of Batman that is true to Kane's or Finger's original conception of him when we go see the latest Batman movie? Absolutely not. From Alan Moore to Frank Miller to Jeph Loeb to Gail Simone to Marguerite Bennet to artists like Neal Adams, Alex Ross, Jim Lee, Tim Sale, Lee Bermejo, Becky Cloonan, and countless more, the image and words of Batman aren't the purview of any one sacred person. And this is true for every single other superhero, too.

The point he makes there is correct (even if there are examples that can be found to make the last sentence incorrect; I would have suggested he changed it to "for almost every other superhero"), but it's the specificity of the character and the creators that bugged me.

Because if you've seen "the latest Batman movie"–which, at the time of his writing, was The Dark Knight Rises and not Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice–and are familiar with Batman comics, than you know that list of creators is complete bullshit.

But before we pick it apart, I should note that this is just a portion of a single paragraph in an essay, and not even the focus of the essay. So maybe I should also quote what follows, so as to at least contextualize the passage.

Britt goes on:

Comics have always had several different narrative voices behind the scenes, which means that by the time the stories get translated into big, watchable movies, all of those narrative voices are condensed down into a single composite story. Because there's probably a lot of good stuff left over, who wouldn't want to make another movie?

Now let's look at that list of Batman creators, shall we?

First, the writers. Frank Miller's Batman output is far from the greatest in terms of volume (The Dark Knight Returns, "Batman: Year One," Spawn/Batman, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder), but he remains probably the single most influential Batman writer (and that just for "Year One" and The Dark Knight Returns). Fair enough. Jeph Loeb has also written a lot of very popular Batman comics (Three Legends of The Dark Knight Halloween specials, Batman: The Long Halloween, Batman: Dark Victory, "Hush").

Alan Moore's a little tricky, as he really only wrote a single Batman comic of any note, although, because he's Alan Moore, it is a perennial-seller and a touchstone for a lot of readers: Batman: The Killing Joke (That it set the stage for the transformation from Batgirl Barbara Gordon into Oracle, and that it was one of the ultimate Joker stories, certainly helped keep it relevant for a long time, too).

The other two on the list, Gail Simone and Marguerite Bennet are both spectacularly poor choices, and I'm baffled as to why they were included at all. I know Simone has written the character Batman in the pages of her long run on Birds of Prey and in at least one Justice League comic, and it's certainly possible he popped up in the pages of her relatively short run on the current volume of Batgirl, but I honestly don't remember her ever writing a Batman story for any of the many Batman titles, or doing a miniseries or original graphic novel. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Bennett is a relative newcomer to comics, and while she has written Batman–co-writing 2013's Batman Annual #2 with Scott Snyder–he's not someone I would even think of including as an influential Batman writer. she's there instead of Denny O'Neil, Chuck Dixon, Alan Grant, Grant Morrison and Snyder, for example. And remember that Dark Knight Rises was a 2012 film; she didn't write any Batman until well after the release of the last Batman movie.

It's possible–all right, probable–that Britt includes the pair because they are both female writers (Something that seems like a pretty good possibility, seeing as he includes the only woman to ever draw Batman when listing artists, even though she drew just a handful of pages, which were likewise published after the last Batman film).

I think that's too bad. Firstly because it gives a mistaken impression to his readers that the Batman comics aren't as inexplicably dominated by male writers and artists as they actually are. And, secondly, there are better choices, or at least a better choice: Devin K. Grayson, who wrote parts of "No Man's Land" before eventually earning her own Batman title, the 2000-launched Batman: Gotham Knights , which she wrote for 32 issues. She also had substantial runs on Batman-adjacent titles Nightwing and Catwoman.

If the idea were to mention writers who influenced the The Dark Knight Rises, and/or the entire Christopher Nolan cycle of films, then that list looks even more questionable. If that were the point of the list, then you'd keep Miller, of course, as not only did his late-80s Batman comics influence just about everything to follow (and, along with Moore's writing, the entire direction of the superhero comics industry), but director Christopher Nolan and company drew plenty of inspiration from Miller's "Year One." Hell, maybe Loeb is an okay fit, too, as he did so much work within Miller's "Year One" milieu in his Long Halloween and Dark Victory comics.

But what about Chuck Dixon, who co-created Bane and wrote swathes of the "No Man's Land" arc that dominated the second half of Rises? Or Dixon's peers on the "No Man's Land" era of Bat-books, like Greg Rucka and the aforementioned Grayson? What about Denny O'Neil, who created Batman Begins heavy Ra's al Ghul and Rises player Talia? Or Len Wein, creator of Lucius Fox?

As for the artists he mentions, Neal Adams is largely credited with making Batman darker and more reaslitic, in addition to creating the first villain in the Nolan cycle–Ra's al Ghul. Alex Ross is kind of an outlier in that he's only really ever drawn a single Batman comic of any length, his 1999 collaboration with writer Paul Dini, Batman: War On Crime, but through his work on Kingdom Come and his paintings of Batman on covers, posters and merchandise, it's certainly easy to see how many could consdier him an influential Batman artist/

No questioning the inclusion of Sale, either, who drew all of the above-mentioned, Loeb-written comics save "Hush," and whose design for Two-Face in Long Halloween was taken almost directly for usage in 2008's The Dark Knight.

Jim Lee seems an odd choice, despite the continued popularity of "Hush" and the fact that the New 52 era of DC Comics was so beholden to his style.

Bermejo just boggles my mind, as his main Batman credits are Batman/Deathblow, the not-very-good 2008 original graphic novel The Joker and the almost-as-bad Batman-ized version of A Christmas Carol, 2012's Batman: Noel; the former featured a character that resembled The Dark Knight's Joker visually, but Bermejo was inspired by the film, not the other way around.

Cloonan has the dubious distinction of being the only woman to ever draw Batman, a fact that sounds shocking at first, and becomes depressing when one starts trying to find a single example to prove it wrong and comes up blank. Listing her there is like listing Dan DeCarlo or Steve Mannion; yeah, they technically drew a few pages of Batman comics, but so what?

Better inclusions would have been David Mazzucchelli (Miller's collaborator on "Year One"), Jerry Robinson (long-time Batman artist and creator of Dark Knight villain The Joker, as well as Alfred) and pretty much anyone who drew Batman for a reasonable length of time: Dick Sprang, Sheldon Moldoff, Carmine Infantino, Marshall Rogers, Jim Aparo, Norm Breyfogle, Greg Capullo and so on.

Aside from the names on those two lists, however, the rest of Britt's book is just fine.