Batgirls #10 // Review
Babs has a conversation with the current police commissioner of Gotham City. It’s not great, but it’s not exactly openly hostile either. Meanwhile, Steph and Cass are trying to break a cipher at the local library. Steph manages to get a date out of it, so the three head out to the zoo to celebrate in Batgirls #10. Writers Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad continue a very satisfying run with the three heroes in an issue brought to the page by artist Neil Googe. Babs, Cass, and Steph continue to be a great deal of fun to hang out with as the series continues.
Steph and Cass are trying to crack a very complicated code involving books. They figure that the best place to look might be books with some relationship to eyes or…maybe vision. It’s difficult to tell, and time may be running out. In the meantime, they have the Killer Moth to deal with. Elsewhere, Babs may not have a whole lot of luck with the current commissioner, but she DOES have an active and working romantic relationship with one of Gotham’s best-masked crime fighters, so she swings by his place to rest and recuperate after a rough night.
There was a time when Babs would have done the work to crack the code. Conrad and Cloonan allow her a bit of distance from the hands-on problem-solving on that end of the investigation. It’s interesting that an issue of Batgirl would so prominently feature a library, and Babs wouldn’t be attached to it. (She used to be a librarian.) Conrad and Cloonan are clearly showing some progression of the entire extended ensemble. The scene with Nightwing is nice. It’s slow, steady progress that allows the characters considerable growth as readers get to know them a bit better. This simple approach to storytelling that embraces an active relationship between character and audience is one of the bigger strengths of the monthly issue format.
Googe frames the drama on the page with very dynamic storytelling; the movement of intrigue on the page feels very atmospheric. Steph and Cass’s library study feels distinct from the massive computer set-up that Babs is working with. The focus on the atmosphere of the Batigrls’ world doesn’t compromise the more interpersonal ends of the drama, which also says a lot about the way that Googe frames the balance between character and setting. As the Batgirls engage Killer Moth, Googe shows off a very fluid action dynamic that makes for an impressively well-rounded issue from beginning to end.
The gradual development of ensemble conflict and setting makes Batgirls one of DC’s better-balanced books. Conrad and Cloonan have found a compatible artist in Googe, who has a style so similar to the series’s original artist that the visual world of the series doesn’t feel at all inconsistent across the first ten issues. It doesn’t hurt that the series’s original artist (Jorge Corona) continues to do such a good job with the covers every month.
