Batgirl #30 – Review

By: Marguerite Bennett (writer), Robert Gill (artist), Romulo Fajardo Jr. (colorist)

The Story: If there’s something strange in your neighborhood. Who ya gonna call?

In the fallout of Forever Evil, Barbara Gordon finds that she may need a new answer.

The Review: Marguerite Bennett returns to Batgirl for this horror-themed fill-in, handling Barbara’s chiropteran alter ego for the first time. It’s an interesting change for Gotham. Unlike many supernatural Gotham stories, this one doesn’t try to force our hero out of her comfort zone or attempt to piggyback off of the noir atmosphere of the city. Instead, this one plays things impressively straight. Bennett makes her goals clear from the very start, “There are rules,” one boy says to his skeptical friend, “Nothing ever really happens. The fun is in the setup…in scaring yourself.”

It’s a pretty accurate way to describe this issue. We all know that Batgirl isn’t going to die and she’s not about to get injured or seriously traumatized in a fill-in story – nothing ever really happens in comics – but this is just far enough outside of Barbara’s experience that it’s fun to wonder how she’s getting out of this.

It also helps that the Midnight Man is pretty cool as a concept. Made of that awesome generic black slime that shows up in cool movies, the Midnight Man is all the eerier for how unthreatening it is. I don’t know that it really attacks the whole issue through, but, fascinatingly, attempts something worse. Some roaring and sharp teeth are enough to trigger our self-preservation instinct but the Midnight Man truly attacks our identity, not our bodies. Sure, Batgirl regularly takes down Clayface, a much more serious shape-shifter, but the ambiguous threat of the Midnight Man’s slow assumption of your face is much, much creepier.