In this review of Batgirl #2, Batgirl and Shiva take refuge with friends, unaware that the Unburied are hot on their trails!
Batgirl #2 main cover by David Talaski
BATGIRL #2
Written by TATE BROMBAL
Art by TAKESHI MIYAZAWA
Main Cover by DAVID TALASKI
Variant Covers: JORGE JIMÉNEZ, SKYLAR PATRIDGE
Page Count: 32 page
Release Date: December 4, 2024
This review contains spoilers
Batgirl #2 begins as Cassandra Cain and Lady Shiva, daughter and mother, battle the Unburied in Shiva’s temple. When the dust clears, Shiva urges for the two of them to escape, but Cassandra wants to alert Batman as to what’s going on. Shiva warns her that such an action would only bring about his death, so Cass relents and takes to her to backroom kitchen of a nearby friend, Ba Bao – an elderly woman with grown grandchildren.
While the two women take refuge, members of the Unburied rise from the ground, regrouped with other arriving warriors. One of them is given a blue flower to consume, which gives him a vision of Batgirl and Shiva escaping, tracking down their exact location.
As Ba Bao stitches up Shiva’s wound, she explains that years ago Cassandra would visit as a young girl in search of food, and help her grandkids with their martial arts training in exchange for learning the Voninam – the Vietnamese martial art. She also talks to Shiva about the difficulties in being a mother, explaining why Cass has never mentioned her to her friends before. Soon after, Shiva tells Cass that The Unburied came from a war between monks with a mystical blue flower containing the gift of super-abilities, and the warriors who sought out the flower. Many lives were lost, but the Unburied sprang out from that war, seeking the flower to this very day. Just then, a blind member of The Unburied whom Shiva identifies as Kalden the Unseen arrives, demanding that Shiva come with him. Ba Bao and her children jump in to defend her, and Cass springs into action. Kalden is too fast and strong for her, and begins to overwhelm her before Shiva horse-kicks him into a wall. Fleeing the scene, Cassandra begins to black out as she has thoughts of Ba Bao, Stephanie Brown, Batman and Barbara Gordon, despairing at the thought of abandoning her friends to their deaths while she and Shiva are aboard a train out of Gotham.
Analysis: To reiterate what was screeched about in the previous issue’s review, I am a huge Cassandra Cain fan. I’m beyond grateful to get not only a brand new ongoing series but one that starts the book off with her and Lady Shiva together. Every issue from now until it ends has got my money.
That being said, aspects of issue #2 bugged me quite a bit more than they did in issue #1.
First and foremost is the dialogue, specifically the voices Tate Brombal gives Shiva and Cassandra. To the uninitiated, Cassandra Cain was raised without the education of speech. For most of her life until very recently, she did not know how to speak. Depending on whichever retconned version we’re going with, it’s still ultimately canon that her speaking and reading skills were stymied until she came into contact with the Bat-Family. But for most of her original series – and something that James Tynion IV brought back in his Detective Comics run – Cass’ quality of speaking was fractured. She doesn’t – or shouldn’t – communicate as easily as others, to reflect her lack of education. Now, going through her appearances since Joker War and especially in the Batgirls title, this is mostly been ignored in favor of some convenient (and in my opinion, trite) love of reading that Cassandra’s developed. All of-screen, by the way. Okay, whatever. But that’s a long way to say that the voice Brombal imbues her with in this issue is quite flowery and articulate. Beyond the breadth of vocabulary, it doesn’t sound like things Cassandra would think to herself or say out loud. The issue opens up with Cass pontificating poetic musing about her ability to read body language and how she utilizes that against her enemies.
“My sight is my prophecy, and my fists are my medium.”
That’s not something that would ever cross Cass’ mind as written. In my opinion.
It’s the same thing with Lady Shiva. She – or Sandra as she’s also called in this issue – has a Japanese/Chinese background, but spent much of her early years living in Detroit with her sister Carolyn. America is not a foreign land to her. And while she’s not speaking with any affected accent, her dialogue is just as overripe as Cassandra’s.
“Those pawns are the least of your worries, Cassandra. If the sun rises and still you resist my cause…involve whatever Bat you like and commence their funeral rites.”
Simply put, these characters don’t talk like this.
I can’t put it any other way than to describe the thinking behind this as how one might presume a worldly, stereotypically wise Asian person might talk. But it’s just not them. Even if we’re granting that Cassandra’s disability in speaking has been lessened and Shiva talks to her daughter in a different way than she might with others, it was too distracting for to let go soon into reading the book. Brombal’s a self-professed fan, and on social media he’s shared scenes from comics past with the two of these characters speaking how they have for years – unspectacularly. Lok no further than Batgirl #25 (2000), when Batgirl and Shiva have their death duel. They speak very plainly to each other. This is before the revelation (or retcon) that they’re mother and daughter, but even still it simply reads like two fighters communicating.
I don’t want to accuse Brombal of anything untoward when it comes to these two. I wholeheartedly believe he loves them just as much as the rest of the fans do. So I’ll just settle on the idea that in this martial arts comic, he’s overthinking his characters. It’s not the first time people have gotten Cass’ voice wrong (Batgirl Convergence or Meghan Fitzmartin come to mind), but for her ongoing series, I hope this is something that straightens up before long.
I also didn’t love the utilization of new character Ba Bao – which is to say to introduce this kindly elderly mother figure that Cass has known for apparently years, reveal she too is a martial artist, and seemingly have her die by the end of the same issue. That’s cheap and lazy, because Cassandra already has her friends in the Bat-Family. We se how much she cares for them. Having someone close to her die is going to mess her up emotionally more than most, but to have it be a previously unseen and unknown character whom she may’ve have known of for years before Batman and the others…it’s an invisible stake in her story that can’t affect the reader as much as the writer tries to tell us it affects Cass. At the very least, have the whole issue take place in the kitchen, so we have more room of Ba Bao and Shiva’s conversation, cliff-hanging the story with Kalden arriving and maybe even killing Ba Bao off then as a cliffhanger, understanding that we’ve the next issue to ponder how badly Cass will be hurt by this loss. But it’s a huge trope to have this badass older woman archetype (someone who’s probably influenced by Jackie from Sarah Khun’s Shadow of the Batgirl YAGN) to the typical things like given guidance to Shiva about being a mother, show of some martial arts and die for our heroes to escape. It’s simply impossible to land as honest storytelling when it’s soaked in cliche’.
Is Batgirl #2 a bad issue? Thankfully no, we’re still ultimately in better hands than not. Miyazawa’s artwork is strong, with Shiva’s kick to Kalden being a big “WOAH!” moment in the issue. That was entirely sold by his art, punctuated with Shiva’s closeup panel on her face as a follow-up. I also think – dialogue aside – Brombal has a good handle on Cass’ character. Cassandra started off quite cocky and reckless, but here she knows that the right thing to do in this situation is call Batman. Even when she’s not afraid of the Unburied and up to that point handled them easily, leaning on strength in numbers was a good tactical call from her, something that shows growth from many mistakes over the years.
I also very much enjoyed how Batgirl #2 closes out. Once Kalden gets that nasty hit up Batgirl’s head, she spends the remaining pages in a dizzy, confused headspace, thinking about her loved ones starting with Steph and ending with Babs – both who are referenced for the first time in the series. We also see her unmasked at the end (face bloodied), something that I hadn’t noticed until after writing the review we didn’t see last issue. The sense of dread and desperation are neatly rendered, and while The Unburied are still just a bunch of super-buff ninjas at this point, they’re beginning to live up to the hype more now than how Shiva previously spoke about them.
It’s the last act of Batgirl #2 that brings my feeling up a bit. While the characterization has been solid where Cass is concerned, I’ve not loved Shiva’s depiction. Her running away from something just never feels in character, even if she’s facing certain death, but I do enjoy the scenes of her and Cassandra arguing. The fight in the kitchen was decent, and the descending action leading towards the final page was solid as well. I think Brombal needs more time finding a stronger footing for these characters’ voices, as it’s seriously distracting right now. But as I started off saying, I’m still buying.
