Quorren’s #CBR4 Review #44 Brids of Prey: Between Dark and Dawn by Gail Simone

This is the third volume in Gail Simone’s Birds of Prey series.  I’ve ordered the previous volumes, to do a comparison reading, for future reviews.  I want to see how much having a woman at the helm has changed the tone of the characters, as well as if Simone had any influence on the art decisions.  For my hypothesis, I’m going to guess the the writing has changed (in a good way), while the art still has women’s bodies defying physics (although Simone does sneak tongue in cheek references to the ridiculous costuming).  On the plus side, I think almost every issue has at least one panel of Black Canary stuffing her face with food; in this volume, she chowed down on a huge cheeseburger.

Anyway, in this volume, Simone splits up the trio, with Oracle sending Huntress to a cult that may be convincing impressionable teenagers to commit suicide.  Huntress meets up with another friend of the Birds, Vixen.  Vixen has also fallen victim to the brainwashing at the cult, so Huntress has to deal with creepy cultists and a women that can channel the attributes of any animal she wants (some days I really wish I could spit cobra venom into people’s faces).  Meanwhile, Oracle does fancy, magical internet stuff and connects to the cultists’ server, motherboard, laser mouse, Ethernet, I have no idea.  Once inside, she gets telepathically linked to Brainiac, who had been living in the cultist’s computer and now he wants to knock up Oracle.

Yeah, this wasn’t Simone’s strongest story.  Aside from the weird plot machinations just to get from point A to point B, the pacing was, again, too fast.  This is becoming my most common gripe about this series and I don’t know who to blame.  Is it Simone’s fault or was there pressure from DC to ramp up the action in an effort to increase sales?

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