Batgirl, Volume 1: Batgirl of Burnside

★ ★ ★ 1/2
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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My dabbling into The New 52 continues . . .

Like everyone who has at least one social network account, I was deluged by images of the new Batgirl uniform back in 2015 – and I dug it. I liked the Cassandra Cain incarnation of the character – but had missed just about all of them post-Barbara Gordon, who didn't do much for me (I was a big Oracle fan, in my defense). So I decided to give this a shot when I saw the collection. Oh, so glad that I did – the best of the New 52 comics I've read so far.

Barbara Gordon's in some sort of tiff with Dinah Lance (I'm assuming it's Lance, didn't care enough to check), she's moving out of her old digs into a very trendy, hipster part of Gotham (the part that Nolan or Burton never showed) with a roommate she met doing physical therapy while working on a Master's/Doctorate with a predictive algorithm that will probably go on to turn Gotham into Minority Report or will be Oracle. Doesn't take her long to need to do the Batgirl thing, so she slaps together a new costume (her old equipment was no longer available) – the purple leather coat and sneaker thing – and gets to action.

(you can really tell I'm into detailed research here in that paragraph, can't you? Well, maybe not today)

There's a new gaggle of friends, mostly university based, who help her tremendously. There's a romantic interest or two, conflict with the cops, some good stuff with Dinah, a brush with celebrity culture, and a few laughs. It's light-hearted when it can be, kick-butt when it has to be. Which pretty much sums up Barbara, too.

The art? Wow. I don't know how to describe it, but it makes you think of a animated show, it's fun, it's dynamic – it absolutely wouldn't work for a lot of titles, but this one has enough spirit, enough joie de vivre, that it works perfectly. It supports and doesn't distract from the story, just what you want from comic art.

I really dug this, and hope that this version of her sticks around for a bit (as I write this, I'm fully aware that she's likely morphed at least once into something more Christopher Nolan-esque) – I'll be looking for more of this one for sure.

This is probably my all time favorite batgirl! This book has a brainy capable female protagonist and also have a ton of diversity AND current issues throughout the volume. We all know Babs is smart but in this volume you get to visually see her intelligence! You see her visually retrace her steps when she has to think about a party, you get to see her take out BLACK RIOT (a villain about issues of online privacy) out by using a QR code, and while saving the world she is trying to save her research thesis from her when her computer crashed! The art for this graphic novel is what made me fall in love at first glance It deserves 5 stars for the art alone!

Great batgirl that I strongly recommend! What an awesome hero! Batgirl of Burnside and Ms.Marvel are my top comics recently.

This comic made some really questionable story decisions, especially early on. At times it was ridiculous throughout. Despite that, there are some really fun characters in this, and the twist at the end made a lot of the stranger ideas make sense. I recommend if you want some shameless fun to try it out, but give it until the end before making a decision on it.
I also just personally love the ongoing grad school thesis plotline, it gets me.

The art was great, but didn't really care for the story.

It was only when I was halfway through this that I remembered, “Oh yeah, this is the Batgirl plotline that was called out for being transphobic!” They'd altered the text in the collected edition but it still seems like, really weird? Like why not just... have another woman impersonate Batgirl? It's not like Dagger Type is an established character, right? Why not just have had a woman perfomance artist steal Batgirl's identity. Why.

Whatever.

Overall, I liked this okay. I do like it when books/comics use social media, and I thought the overall storyline was something relatively fresh. Also, although I'm sad to see Alysia from Gail Simone's run leave, I did appreciate the diversity of Batgirl's new squad. And of course, the much-vaunted new costume is pretty dope.