Batgirl #24 – Review

By: Bryan Q. Miller (writer), Pere Perez (artist), Guy Major (colorist)

The Story: Presenting: the unsinkable Stephanie Brown!

The Review: Most of the Batman titles have painted Gotham City as perpetually grim, God-forsaken, almost inconceivable to believe it can be saved.  In Scott Snyder’s Detective Comics run, Gotham becomes a force unto itself, a living entity out to consume its inhabitants.  In the end, we have to realize this is a fictional pretension; a city’s just a city, with all kinds of people living in it, most of whom deserve salvation.

Good thing Gotham has Stephanie Brown, who may have had an auspicious start as a vigilante, but certainly now deserves credit as the staunchest defender of people just trying to live normal lives, as she does even when schooling some villainous goon in a power-suit.  The rest of the Bat-family fights crime for justice, vengeance, because it’s the right thing to do; Batgirl does it from the heart.  You won’t see schoolchildren hugging Batman, that’s all I’m saying.