Batgirl #5 // Review
Cass is entering the Nest of the Unburied. It sounds like a perfectly safe place, right? I mean...nothing could possibly go wrong in the Nest of the Unburied. The thing is: Cass HAS to go there. She doesn’t really have any choice in the matter. She enters straight into the jaws of danger in Batgirl #5. Writer Tate Brombal and artist Takeshi Miyazawa move Batgirl into a brush with her inner demons in and issue inked by Wayne Faucher with colors by Mike Spicer. The hero gets closer look at her own personality and I think that she is dealing with a while, encountering an old friend and a very emotionally compelling issue.
There are those that are ready to defend. She is, after all, going in at someplace where she is unwanted. And so she's going to have to deal with quite a bit. It's not like it's anything that she hasn't handled before. But that doesn't mean it's going to be easy. Danger comes in and it's not always very obvious. Help, however, can come in some pretty interesting forms as well. Cass is going to find comfort and solace in someone she would least expect to find in the Nest of the Unburied.
Brombal isn't exactly working with pieces that are terribly original. Everything is going on here has been Totton before by so many heroes that it's hard to list them all. As the type of thing that had been identified by Joseph Campbell as the journey of the hero. But there's a lot more going on here than that. And certainly it's the specifics of the emotional make up of Cass that makes this so interesting. The author has given quite a bit of perspective, the character and her and the course of the preceding issues. It gives her personality that much more definition in a chapter like this.
Miyazawa has a solid fundamentals in producing some really compelling action sequences. the emotions involved in the situation that feel very powerfully present on the page. Particularly when Cass meets an old friend isn't exactly alive. This can be really difficult to manage in the right way. Lean too far in one direction and it could come across as being kind and comical. But the art team does a really good job of delivering something that feels very potent with respect to the way it comes to the page.
Cass is really supposed to be totally emotionless and unflappable. This can be really difficult to bring to the page and the reader to connect with them emotionally. However, the whole creative team is doing a really good job. Cass needs to really connect with the reader without betraying the overall aloofness of her and her ability to move around on the page amidst all of the danger that she runs into. It's really delicate that they managed to maintain quite well throughout the entirety of the issue. They've been doing a pretty good job on the whole in the issues this well.
