Birds of Prey #23 // Review
A guy walks-up to a woman sitting at a bar. Without even looking at him, she tells him that she’s the wrong girl on the wrong day. Wrong everything. Only he’s still there. She tells him to walk away or he’ll go through the bar’s plate glass window. So he walks away off the page and out of Birds of Prey #23. Writer Kelly Thompson reaches the penultimate issue of her current story arc with penciller Sami Basri and inker Vicente Cifuentes. Color comes to the page courtesy of Hi-Fi. Thompson and company cleverly move a bewilderingly diverse ensemble through some pretty tight narrative turns on a really fun issue.
The woman in question is named Dinah, but she’s better-known on this side of the comics page as Black Canary. She just watched her entire word explode in the middle of the night. Thankfully, her friend Barbara had a protocol for this sort of thing: everyone on the team splits-up for three hours. No one talks to anyone and the rendezvous at the pre-determined safe house when three hours are up. It’s an agonizing three hours. Dinah ends-up at a bar, but that’s only because there aren’t any libraries in Gotham that are open in the middle of the night and Gotham City’s best librarian might be dead for all she knows...
Thompson has a really cool multi-phase script for the 23rd issue of the series. From initial conversation to split-up protocol to rendezvous to infiltration and cliffhanger, it all moves along with cleverly smooth grace. Any one of the scenes could have easily been awkwardly expanded to a full issue, but Thompson keeps it all moving with remarkable agility. And it doesn’t feel at all rushed, which is probably the most impressive end of it all.
Basri has to render quite a few still moments over the course of the issue. There IS some action that hits the page, but there’s a hell of a lot of fatigued drama going on. That’s something that can feel way too weighty to be enjoyable, but Basri does a remarkably good job of keeping it all visually appealing thanks to some smart framing and remarkably dynamic colors by Hi-Fi. With so much of the issue happening in the night, Cifuentes has a hell of a lot of darkness to commit to the page in ink. There might be more of a desire to add flourishes and details that would detract from the stark visual reality of the emotions. Cifuentes does a good job of keeping it stark, simply and ominous. There are a lot of different elements for the art team to bring to the page. There’s a really sharp sense of composition about the visuals that makes it all look like it really does all belong in the same world.
Once again...it’s impressive stuff. Thompson has put together a Birds of Prey team that really doesn’t seem like it should work at all on the page. There’s just enough between the members of the team to make it all work and bring it all together in a remarkably satisfying package that continues to feel remarkably well-executed on a whole bunch of different levels.
