DCU Comic Book Reviews

BIRDS OF PREY #109

Stone Cold Knockout

October 2007

Written by Tony Bedard

Pencils by Nicola Scott

Inks by Doug Hazelwood

Cover by Stephane Roux

Synopsis

Barbara Gordon (aka Oracle) relates to Dinah Lance (aka Black Canary) a story of the time Oliver Queen (aka Green Arrow) once tried to put the moves on her to show the type of person Ollie is in the hopes that Dinah will reconsider Ollie’s marriage proposal.  Elsewhere, Scandal and Knockout are enjoying a private moment together when Scandal ruins it when she mentions the time Big Barda defeated Knockout.  Annoyed Scandal thinks that she lost a fight, Knockout storms out of the hotel room.  Meanwhile, Misfit approaches Big Barda with help keeping Sin occupied while Babs and Dinah are talking.  Barda confronts Sin, who manages to occupy the Apokoliptan warrior with a game of Pokemon.  Watching them from a distance is an unidentified person.  He gets attacked, however, by Knockout who thinks he is after Big Barda.  He tells Knockout that he is after her.  He then kills her.  Big Barda sees what happens and goes down to investigate.  Nearby, Scandal sees Knockouts dead body and Big Barda standing over her....

Review by Binkley (e-mail)

Gail Simone has been writing Birds of Prey long enough that the book has become her own in such a way that following her will be a tough act to follow.  And it is not so much the quality of her work (which is good), but also the style of her writing.  These characters are so much a part of Simone’s idiosyncratic writing that it should be easy to spot someone else’s style.  Should be is the key word.  Remarkably, Bedard does a good job maintaining Simone’s style.  It still feels like the Birds of Prey under Simone’s guidance.  From the encounter between Batgirl and Green Arrow, to the conversation between Babs and Dinah, and to the off-beat humor in Big Barda playing Pokemon to the ending, it still feels like Simone’s off-beat humor.  As a transition phase, this is good, but I hope eventually Bedard gets the chance to put his own stamp on this title.  As long as the quality is there, of course. 

And this is a good issue, which is amazing given the way Bedard was entrusted in connecting the dots.  Bedard does a good job of tying this issue into his own Black Canary mini-series, making sense of what happened to the Secret Six from their last appearance in this title to the recent appearances elsewhere, and tapping into the Death of the New Gods story of Countdown (which he is also a co-writing) without making the entire thing seem forced.  The story stands up on its own, which is mean feat when it comes to Countdown.  Hell, Bedard manages to even make sense of Dinah’s decision to join the JLA after she quit the Birds to spend more time within Sin.  As an exercise on how to tie your book into current continuity, it works, but I will be curious to see how well Bedard handles these characters in a story that exists on its. 

In a book that is so tied to current continuity, it is amazing to note that for historical DC events, someone was asleep in the editor’s chair.  Yes, Ollie was raped by Shado, but the result of that rape was not Connor Hawke.  If so, that would make this issue really, really creepy.  No, Shado does have a son, Robert, from that rape, but he is Connor’s half-brother.  Connor was conceived while Ollie was in college, long before he met Shado.

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