Batgirl #22 // Review
She is Cassandra Cain,. She is eight years old. She is a weapon. She isn’t though. She’s older than that. But she’s. reliving her childhood. It isn’t a good one, though. It was dark. She had been trained to become a killer. She had killed at eight years old. She’s been trying to overcome her past. She’s got a lot to deal with in Batgirl #22. Writer Tate Brombal continues a deep dive into Cass’ past in an issue that is brought to page and panel by artist Stephen Segovia with inker Jason Paz. Color comes to the page courtesy of Rain Beredo.
Cass is being confronted by Doctor Forget-Me-Not. He’s a well-dressed man with a leering grin and a single eye visible beneath a dense cluster of living forget-me-nots. Suffice it to say, he’s not exactly a normal doctor. And he’s not exactly a nice guy. Cass presumably hasn’t seen him in years and now she’s forced to deal with the past and the memories of that past that he’s surfacing. He once had total control over her. Will he be able to pick-up where he left-off so long ago? Can Cass really escape her past?
Brombal sets-up a weird, little nightmare funhouse in which Cass has to confront potentially faulty memories to figure out what might or might not be real about something that may or may not have actually happened. It’s a fun idea, but it would be a hell of a lot more fun if it got just a little bit more into Cass’ mind and dealt a little bit more with ambiguity. Cass would make for a much more interesting unreliable narrator of her own story if she was allowed to dive just a bit deeper into her own psyche.
Segovia does some really impressive layouts for the issue. There’s a really appealing spread involving Cass’ investigation that has her elegantly gloved hands handling panels of the investigation like they’re photographs that she’s looking at. Very clever layout there. And the composition of some of the panels is very sharp as well. There’s a tremendous amount of atmosphere being brought to the page through both Paz’s ink embellishments and Beredo’s colors. The contrast between a young Cass’ face as a child and her masked face as an adult echoes through the issue with powerful resonance.
Cass has really come a hell of a long way since her introduction to the comics page a quarter century ago. It’s been a slow and steady evolution for her that’s been a great deal of fun to watch over the years. Brombal’s excavation into her past in the course of the current series hasn’t always been perfectly-framed, but it’s been a lot of fun to watch. The current storyline with Dr. Forget-Me-Not has been a real high point for his work with Cass as she continues to prove herself to be a respectably interesting Batgirl.
