Batgirl #2 – Review

By: Gail Simone (writer), Ardian Syaf (penciller), Vicente Cifuentes (inker), Ulises Arreola (colorist)

The Story: Maybe spending most of her free time reading doesn’t sound so bad after all.

The Review: I essentially stopped watching The Office after Steve Carrell (who played the show’s lead and emotional center, Michael Scott) left.  Without the character I cared most about, the show didn’t have a pull on me anymore.  I’ve seen clips of the show since then, and some of them have been funny, and no doubt some people still have good reason to love the show.  I’m not about to say the show instantly became terrible because my favorite character is gone.

So yes, the departure of Stephanie Brown and, in a way, Oracle, for the sake of bringing back Barbara Gordon as Batgirl may be painful, but it shouldn’t stop you from seeing the pluses of the move.  For one thing, Babs comes into the role with very complicated baggage.  You have to remember she started out as Batgirl pretty young, got cut down in her prime, and now returns to the cowl having grown and matured quite a bit.  And that’s before we get to her trauma issues.

Simone balances all these layers to Batgirl’s personality very well.  As Babs confronts Mirror, her inner narrative fires on all gears, bringing to the forefront her fear of getting shot again, embarrassment at her own rustiness, and her determination to fight on regardless.  In a way, it’s a message to us: she may be starting from square one in the direct crime-fighting biz, and she may be in way over her head, but she has no plan to step back now, nor should we expect her to.

One thing that doesn’t quite compute is Mirror’s motivations.  You can accept that the particular tragedies he experienced made him go nutty—in Gotham, that’s hardly news—but you don’t quite buy Batgirl’s conclusion that, “This guy doesn’t want to kill.  He wants to die.”  His list of people he wants to bump off out of projected bitterness indicates otherwise.  Simone’s attempts to characterize him as a zealot rather than a psycho come off clumsy and have little merit.