Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews
Futures End Batgirl #1
DC Comics
Simone, Garron & Fajardo Jr
Gail Simone's run on Batgirl concludes in a very surprising and creative way with this comic book. The book is mostly set five years into the future and Simone makes the best of what little ground she has to cover in this issue. The story and the direction are surprising, but in a good way. The artwork has its high points but doesn't quite line up with the story in my opinion. I enjoyed this book and literally did not know what was coming next when I turned the page. This is a nice cap on Simone's run on this controversially rebooted character.
I'll go on record and state that Batgirl's reboot has been botched up to this point. I'm not talking about taking Barbara Gordon out of the chair either. The book plunged Gordon into a depressing state from the first issue and never had the length to build her back up. It never seemed to gain any momentum after DC pulled Simone and then stuck her back on the book. This left the character in a stunted state for the last 18+ issues and it leaves the character in a bad state going forward. Apparently the reinvention is coming next month anyway.
Simone continues the depressing story, but first, we open the issue with Babs getting married. This is set only two years in the future and she seems to finally be happy. Until her brother shows up. This is another aspect of the reboot that never found its ground: her crazy, over-used brother. Well he shows up again and ruins the wedding.
Fast forward now another three years and Batgirl has a team of three Batgirls working under her. This is the best part of this comic book. As they serve the severely depressed and overly muscled-up Gordon we get some action, some fun and some wit. All of the things that make the original Babs-Batgirl such a great character. Except this comic has three of them.
The book eventually leads to the origin of the evolution of Babs-Batgirl to mean-muscle-Batgirl and I didn't see this coming at all. Babs trains with a character that she eventually squares off with in a griping ending to Simone's run. I'm not spoiling this more than I already have.
The book's strengths out-numbered the weaknesses but there are a couple. For example, the muscles get connected to a certain "something" for half of the book but then are subsequently hand-waved away at the end of the book and never explained. The comic also ignores Batman, which I found to be an issue because to frame this up properly we should have some idea of what happened to Batman, Commissioner Gordon and others.
The comic reads wonderfully as Simone has terrific pacing and placement of scenes. She gives unique and strong voices to all of her characters and that is quite a feat for one-single issue. I enjoyed this book's ideas as well. I felt Simone was really getting creative here in ways most of these Futures End books are not.
The artwork had some highs and lows. The depiction of the characters when lined up alongside other, larger characters seemed difficult to reconcile. There are other strange anatomy issues, such as one character that is twisting their torso half way around. The panel just didn't look right. However, the action scenes are well rendered and the roof top scene provided some nice emotion in the character's expressions. The book just had a lot of ups and downs artistically unfortunately.
Batgirl has been an interesting run. Simone did some great things, some not so great things and DC pulled the rug on her a couple of times to make the ride interesting. This comic presents the best of what she does: provides great character voices to female leads while squeezing every last bit of drama out of the story at hand. If you like a very different take on Batgirl and you like the fun times Batgirl then you are going to love this issue. Don't let the gimmick cover fool you, there is a good story in here.
4 out of 5 Geek Goggles
