In this review of Batgirl #7, Cassandra listens to a recording of Shiva’s backstory, learning her mother’s secret origin!
Batgirl #7 main cover by Reiko Murakami (DC Comics)
BATGIRL #7
Written by TATE BROMBAL
Art by ISAAC GOODHART
Main Cover: REIKO MURAKAMI
Variant Covers: DAN MORA, ISAAC GOODHART, CLIFF CHIANG
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: 5/7/25
This review contains spoilers
Batgirl #7 kicks off before Cassandra leaves to meet Bronze Tiger. She had a package delivered to her. While boarding a train, she opens it up, revealing a cassette recording and earphones. Listening, it’s a recording of Shiva’s voice, narrating her backstory…
Years ago there was a family of four, consisting of two parents and their young daughters. Living in the Himalayas, they led a dangerous but content life until one night they were attacked by a clan of Ninjas called The Blood. The daughters escaped while the parents were slaughtered, finding themselves outside of Shaolin monastery.
Ten years later the daughters, known as Ming-Yue and Mei-Xing, have lived and trained under the shaolin monks. The sisters loved each other and everyone loved them, but Yue feels a call to violence that is not shared by her sister. On the day of a festival, the two get into a scuffle with a bullying member of The Blood, who later attacks them at night once the festival begins, during a performance led by the two sisters. The attack is led by the same man who killed their father, who upon spotting Yue and Mei claims to be their uncle and that the two sisters have been hunted by the Clan for the past decade. The sisters’ master tells them to flee, in order to save both themselves and the village. Shiva narrates that over the next several years, she and her sister were all they had…until Cassandra’s father came into the picture.
Analysis
First and foremost, the star of Batgirl #7 is Isaac Goodhart. His sublime pencils along with Mike Spicer’s colors made this the prettiest looking issue of Batgirl in a long time. Right away we’ve got quite the stylish Cass sporting a black and yellow hat and jacket combo. Great look for this fanboy. The imagery going back to the train fight in issue #3 also shows that they two can illustrate a killer Batgirl design as well. And during the flashbacks, Goodhart did well in making the different locales look spacious, culturally divergent from the opening scene, and also physically dynamic with each action sequence. I enjoyed Takeshi Miyazawa up until now, but having not been familiar with Goodhart’s work, I’m really hoping he stays on for the next arc at least, or long enough to where we see him draw Batgirl in action.
The artwork seriously carried Batgirl #7 in my opinion. The writing, I didn’t like at all.
Tate Brombal clearly loves writing Shiva, and clearly is savoring getting into revamping her backstory (and there’s been a lot of that going around, with Mark Waid’s History of the DC Universe on its way in a month or so), but as I’ve been writing with every review, the voice he gives the character is so overwritten and so stereotypically “Asian” that it takes me out every time. Everything is rendered in poetic metaphor, designating an older time where people expressed themselves in ideas and imagery rather than speaking plainly. There’s a time and place for that with this issue. Their master Akhu speaking in that manner is perfectly fine, because he’s introduced (and presumably taken out) in a single issue and he fills the old master role. But the problem is everyone is talking like this – this, being the same exact manner Shiva’s spoken like up until now and not a hundred miles away from how we’ve seen Cassandra speak.
I want to be delicate here, because this is Brombal’s story and he can depict the characters’ voices however he chooses. Again, there’s clear love and affection for not just Cass but especially Shiva in that after an intro arc where we got her character in every issue we’re stopping Cassandra’s story to keep writing about Shiva. He loves her. I just wish that love expressed itself outside of seriously old cliche’d martial arts writing. Because it’s not just the depiction of language that’s the issue, but it’s how that language is endemic to unsubtle characterization that, in my opinion, lets Shiva’s character down. Throughout Batgirl #7 we’re shown headlights of the darkness that Shiva’s meant to go down toward. Everything from her father’s blood splashing on her face to her wanting to jump into action as opposed to her perfect sister, to he narration talking about this call of darkness. To her constantly wearing red. If you’re unfamiliar with Shiva – and there might be plenty readers who are – this is sufficient groundwork for building the idea of her in the future, that she’s destined, or cursed, to live a life of terrible violence.
It’s just that the best Shiva stories, including the ones with Batgirl, present the character as far less cookie-cutter than “I walk a path of blood and that sucks for me”. Shiva has been an incredibly zen character for much of her existence. Self-pity isn’t a good look on anyone, but for a grown woman who during the first arc was very shameless about her actions and her past, this reads to me as fairly juvenile. The details of her backstory in broad strokes – her parents’ murder, living in a monastery in the Himalayas, being different than her sister whom she loved – is solid as a backstory. But it’s told with such overt pathos that it lessens Shiva’s cool factor, because she’s seemingly appealing to Cassandra’s empathy and our empathy for an as-of-yet unknown reason. It’s classic dramatic storytelling, but one that is beneath the character.
I must once again admit to heavy bias when it comes to Shiva, and lend clemency to Brombal for putting so much time into reestablishing her for this new era of DC. To each their own. We’re going to get into her history with Richard Dragon and Bronze Tiger soon, which will really threaten to endanger the original elements of her creation. It will also show what parts of her character Brombal enjoys, and what parts he just throws out for simple retooling. Either way, I’m looking forward to more Isaac Goodhart artwork!
