Tuesday, October 03, 2006

The Girls: One Year Later

Birds of Prey #92
By Simone, Siqueira, and Riggs

There are two stories here: The defection of the Crime Doctor and Black Canary’s training to be Shiva’s second liner. The panels jump from one story to another and things happen in both story-lines at break-neck speed.

Shiva’s on the team (because of a deal she made with Canary – that they exchange places - Canary trains to be an assassin while Shiva takes her place) and I thought she was always a “page-turn” away from killing someone. You knew that the team will never kill anybody but with Shiva smashing the Ventriloquist’s dummy, jumping from a moving car to take out two flying HIVE agents, facing Killer Croc head on… No wonder Oracle and Huntress were constantly worried and - as any decent woman would do - endlessly nagged Shiva.

Canary was in a village somewhere in Asia and her initiation to the training was getting beat up by men while tied and blindfolded. Oh and it was expected that she defend herself. If she lives, here education will continue. No superheroes here – just fists, feet, and guts.

With Gail Simone writing, there were moments where I found myself chuckling and grinning – kinda weird when you’re sitting at Starbucks alone.
My favorite panels were Huntress shooting Clay Face with three explosive charges in the crotch (Clay face: “Aw. Now that’s just cold.”) and Shiva telling Croc, “Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll have made myself a pair of boots. Something tasteful, perhaps with nipples on the toes.”


Supergirl #6
By Greg Rucka and Ed Benes


Good lord, what the hell is happening to Kara?! From Batman/Superman she quickly went into self-destruct mode --- OK, her best friend died (Harbinger), she was manipulated by Darksied and exposure to black kryptonite made her remember that she was sent to Earth to kill her cousin – I give her that.

Now she and Powergirl seemed to be superheroes in a reality where Kal-El is evil and is ruling Candor. How the hell did they get there? Also the last time I saw these two together, they couldn’t literally be near each other. It’s inevitable that they kill each other off (This has a headachy but logical explanation - P.G. is Kara’s Earth 2 version – they could not occupy the same space – something like that). It was as confusing as time travel! But since the issue raised more questions than answers… well, I just had to see what happened next.

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