Birds of Prey #21 // Review
Ninety miles above the Earth, Barda is unconscious. In Gotham City, Barbara Gordon is panicking. It’s a Code Black. Barda is down. Things are a bit complicated for everyone else too. She’s requesting that everyone report-in, but they’re all kind of busy with their own life-threatening issues in Birds of Prey #21. Writer Jill Thompson continues a remarkably well-articulated superhero team title with artist Sami Basri. There’s a strong focus on three different characters...each one of them gets some considerable time in the center of the page. It’s an impressively well-balanced issue.
Black Canary is being attacked by Copperhead...a snake/human hybrid. Not exactly much of a threat, but not exactly her favorite person to have to deal with. She tells Barbara that she can’t tell if she’s the target or not. Given that the entire team is under attack, well...it’s complicated. And it’s only going to get more complicated as the conflicts continue. To make matters worse, here’s a breakdown in the basic order of the team. Barbara is ordering Canary to stand down and get to safety. She’s not going to do that. Things are going to get dangerous for everyone involved.
Thompson has a few major elements in focus for the issue. It’s fun to see just how different the dynamic is for each of the three characters that Thompson is focussing on over the course of the issue. Canary is active in the field and she’s running into some conflict with Barbara, whc comes across as a major badass just by being able to juggle everything on an executive level. Then there’s Barda...who is prominent by virtue of the fact that she’s incapacitated. It’s very cool to see Thomspon juggle the different heroic dynamics of an action story with so many moving parts.
Thompson hands the art team a whole bunch of different challenges. She’s cycling the narrative through a series of different locations that are all connected into the same narrative. It can be diffciult to bring that all together into a cohesive visual narrative. Basri does a sharp job of maintaining the distinctive moods for each of the different conflicts that are going on while maintaining a single, coherent and cohesive narrative momentum for the issue that maintains from beginning to end. It’s quite an accomplishment given everything that Thompson’s trying to do.
It’s kind of weird to think of all the different formats there have been for superhero team script formats over the years. What Thompson is doing with her run on Birds of Prey seems like a natural outgrowth of the evolution of the concept of characters in the field being aided by Barbara in a command center as everything goes to hell. Thompson has really increased the complexity with a variet of different characters rolling into an interesting, textured dynamic which feels like something completely new even though she’s dealing with characters who have been around in one format or another for decades.
