Barbara has just returned home from a rather nice date with a rather nice guy. She gets comfortable in a t-shirt and sweatpants, cracks open a bottle of wine, and turns on the TV. Then she notices the smells of rotting flowers. The table is a few degrees off-center. She’s not alone. The Joker has let himself in. Things are about to get difficult for her in Batgirl #47. Writer Cecil Castellucci painstakingly etches a sharply detailed drama that is drawn by Robbi Rodriguez. Writer and artist circle their way through a conflict that’s so intimate that Babs doesn’t even have a chance to get into costume. 

Babs doesn’t even know who she’s throwing the wine glass at until after it hits the Joker in the head. Then adrenaline kicks-in. The Joker has shown-up in a place she calls home before. It was a traumatic experience that left her paralyzed until advanced tech implanted in her body allowed her to walk again. Now the Joker has a device that can control that tech. If Babs is going to be able to defeat the Joker, she’s going to have to do so with only the upper half of her body. 

Castellucci constructs a very dark conflict between hero and villain. Writer Alan Moore’s tale of Joker meeting Batgirl at home in The Killing Joke was one of the 1980s’ darkest moments on the mainstream comics page. Castellucci echoes that moment with a shadowy chess match between villain and hero in the discomfort of her own home. Babs is fighting on her home ground, but she’s fighting someone who knows everything there is to know about her. Castellucci takes advantage of giving Babs a truly heroic challenge that makes for one of the most starkly entertaining Batgirl stories in recent memory.    

Rodriguez locks the psychological action of the story into a tiny, dingy little apartment in Gotham. Under Rodriguez’s pen, Babs looks every bit as heroic out of costume as she does fully suited-up. The wild locks of red hair suggest a day that’s already come to an end as she wears a white, nondescript t-shirt and a pair of grey sweatpants. She’s extremely vulnerable here, but Rodriguez captures her resilience with craftily heroic poise even as she’s taken control by the Joker’s remote control. Rodriguez draws The Joker as a twisted, young hipster who is squintily cosplaying as himself. Oddly enough, the villainy of a garish guy in green and purple controlling a woman by remote control IS actually pretty horrifying in Rodriguez’s hands. 

A Batgirl tie-in to the Joker War tie-in could have been really tedious if it hadn’t been handled correctly. The relationship between Batman and the Joker has been garishly over-rendered over the years. Batgirl could have been a pale reflection of that. An issue that pulls everything into a tight close-up in a run-down, little Gotham City apartment, transcends the crossover to become something far deeper and more satisfying than anything else in the Joker War crossover thus far. Anything else in the series is going to have a hell of a time topping the elegant minimalist appeal of this issue’s conflict.

Grade: A