- Written by Cameron Stewart & Brenden Fletcher
- Art by Babs Tarr, Rob Haynes & Serge Lapointe
- Cover by Babs Tarr
When Batgirl is down, it’s Black Canary to the rescue! Dinah and Barbara reteam to try to discover the identity of the malevolent mastermind making their presence felt in Burnside!
Pickup your copy of ‘Batgirl’ #48 at Comixology now!
I’m going to admit that I read this issue back-to-back with #47 BUT I hadn’t seen the cover before pointing out that I think Stewart and Fletcher are building towards the new ‘Batgirl & the Birds of Prey’ series by using the supporting cast as new potential ‘Birds’.
As the cover suggests ‘Batgirl’ #48 features a guest spot for old pal Dinah ‘Black Canary’ Lance. Her appearance is a little out of the blue but tied to events in her own series which I’m afraid I dropped around issue three or four, not due to a lack of quality I was just reading too much!
The ensemble cast of ‘Batgirl’ has literally swelled to epic proportions in #48 with Luke Fox putting the Batwing suit back on, Dinah suiting up as Canary as well as side-kick Frankie helping out and old friend Greg crashing on the sofa. There’s no room for Spoiler and Bluebird in this issue but now they exist in this continuity and this storyline it’s only a matter of time before the whole cast of characters are in one place at the same time.
Where issue #47 focussed a little more on the effects of Babs memory loss and her espionage detective work, #48 is a little more fight orientated as she works to track down her own memories. Having Barbara questioning her own abilities has been a really interesting story point, my only criticism would be that it has escalated pretty quickly in the last two issues but then I’m sure I would complain more if the story was dragged out for months. Pacing is not something to be concerned about with ‘Batgirl’ even when it tries to balance the teen drama with the action.
There’s a twist in the story which I actually didn’t see coming but looking back it is a little obvious but with motivations yet to be uncovered this is by no means a poor direction for the story to go.
Babe Tarr is back being the pencil for much of the inside artwork in #48 with backup from Haynes and Lapointe. I’ve raved about the artwork in ‘Batgirl’ for months but this is a particularly stunning looking issue. The freshness I talked about in my review of #47 adds even more buoyancy to this issue which makes it jump off the page even more. I would go as far as to say this artwork would make for an excellent animated series given the chance. This issue is a little darker than recent issues which still retains all of the fun and all of the charm of previous issues.
I’m intrigued to see where the story develops next month.
4 stars
