Broken Frontier

Batgirl is back and she’s got a mission... question is will it tear the Bat-Family in two?

In an issue filled with intrusive recap, there are few good things. We do get one of those dead on character bits that makes Alfred such a great support cast member. It actually steals the whole comic. So much of this issue is bogged down filling in readers with what happened between the end of the last volume of Batgirl and now. I guess it is useful to purists, but it makes for a cumbersome read and in the end it doesn’t really serve its purpose very well. I think most readers could carry on from Slade and Cain brainwashed the child and now she wants revenge.

What’s left is odd. Cassandra is a dark and moody character not prone to introspection, but Beechen spends a lot of this issue with internal monologue, a technique that will rub fans of the old book the wrong way and really just leads to lazy scripting. Instead of making us care about Batgirl, we are shown that Alfred cares and in the end, that no one else does. I guess having the old English gent show affection for us is one way to make her sympathetic, but it is a straw argument. Having her whine incessantly about her situation is even worse.

However, the idea of her going after Slade and her abusive father is dead on and the tension that it will cause between Batman, Nightwing, and Robin is set in full swing in this book. There is potential for good story in the future, it just isn’t in this issue. Instead we get a very emotional, wordy comic centering around Nightwing acting like a jealous step-brother, not compelling reading.

I don’t know what it is about Jim Calafiore. His stilted angular lines look awkward on every character unless they are part of the Bat-Family. It is a really weird thing that I have a problem with him working on any other book, but when he does the Bat characters - it looks great. Maybe he just connects to the world as a fan or something, because he steps up his game. His art becomes more consistent and his story telling more clear. The angular chins work well with Robin, Nightwing and Bruce and the overall grittiness just belongs in Gotham. In fact, the whole art team should be commended, the book just looks great!

This comic is flawed by its over exposition. If it had been reined back just a little, it seems to be an intriguing start to a story, but it is lost in all the words. I thought the idea of a comic was to tell a story with pictures and words.