Birds of Prey #5

When did Canary's fishnets become hex tiles?

The Birds have just appeared out on the street after being inside the half-floor offices of Choke. But they weren't just scooted out and mind wiped of the escort out of the building. Starling's hand is no longer broken and Batgirl is missing. The Birds seem to have quite a large chunk of missing time.

Can we please agree to stop using the term 'big bad'? I know it just rolls off the tongue. But this isn't Buffy Season Whatever.

While they're trading memories, they're suddenly attacked by a bunch of men with guns. None of them seem concerned in the slightest that men are shooting at them. Men they've never seen before because they aren't Cleaners. Perhaps it's just a Gotham thing. If you're going to stand around in an alley yacking it up, you have to expect that at some point someone is going to come along and shoot you in the groin.

They all have various memories of what happened but I tend to believe Katana since her husband shouldn't have been mind-wiped and he can tell her what happened. Unless her husband actually is a figment of her mental illness and then she's possibly the least reliable. After Poison Ivy!

Oho! So Starling doesn't know about Katana's husband. Or, um, she forgot again in the mindwipe.

The Birds defeat the men with guns and retreat when the police arrive. They then decide to split up, rest, and meet up again in 24 hours. They never show an ounce of concern over the guys with guns that just tried to kill them.

Unless she aims better when she's drunk, whatever she's planning to shoot shouldn't need to worry. Unless she's planning to shoot a wall.

Starling goes off to the shooting range to blow off some steam and think about how she could never have busted her hand because she needs it to shoot guns and drink whiskey. She spelled whisky with an 'e', not me! I'm a traditionalist! But she's shooting like crap (so, you know, like usual) and gets frustrated, so she goes out walking but still feels like she's being watched.

"Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

Oh, no. Her Uncle Earl's "great take on paranoia" is that "most times, they ARE out ta get ya." Wow. He's a modern day Confucius. A trailer trash Voltaire! Ev goes off to meet someone named June who begins crying. If we've met June previously, I sure don't remember her and I didn't make any mention of her in the earlier commentaries.

Black Canary tracks down Batgirl who remembers nothing about involving herself with the Birds and is adamant she'll have nothing at all to do with them. Tatsu tracks down Black Canary and they train a bit and giggle like Japanese women gossiping about their neighbors over a game of Mahjong.

No, seriously! See!

Poison Ivy spends her time communing with nature until an X-Files Smoking Man Wannabe intrudes on her space and asks her if Ivy will still honor their arrangements. She says yes and is given a briefcase that contains a green glow. So it's a different briefcase than that one in Pulp Fiction.

The Birds all meet up at the place Canary suggested. Even Batgirl comes along. But not Starling. Starling ends up on a bridge in the middle of an ambush because the address on her arm was different than the address given to everybody else. Starling immediately thinks Black Canary set her up (for some reason). I guess they don't trust each other as well as I thought. So either Black Canary wrote down the wrong address because of the mind control or Starling read the message incorrectly because of mind control. I only think it could be on Starling's end because I thought Poison Ivy copied the address from Starling's arm and onto her own instead of letting Black Canary write it on her with evil chemical ink.

Whatever has happened, none of them seem overly concerned with the missing time in their lives. I guess if you can't remember something, you cease to worry about it, right?! And Poison Ivy tells Batgirl all about Katana and Katana's dead husband, so I guess everybody gets to know about it when the writer thinks the reader needs a refresher on what the hell Katana is talking about!

Here is Black Canary's plan now that she guessed the Cleaners are just mind controlled sleeper agents of Choke:

How is this any different than the last plan where they found Choke's lair from information from a Sleeper agent and then were all mind wiped?

Black Canary's plan is dumb. And none of the Birds seem to particularly care about the things that keep happening to them. They just shrug their shoulders and move on in their quest to find Choke. The characters are as flat and boring as the backgrounds. I was really kind of feeling bad that Birds of Prey was so far down in the rankings. I was going to give it a pity bump after this read because I didn't think it deserved to be below comics like Hawk and Dove or Detective Comics. But it does deserve to be this low. Birds talk. Birds have action. Birds have same conversation as before as if the action never took place. Birds have action. Birds forget action and don't care. I know it's only the 5th Issue but I don't think it's much to ask to have the characters grow from the consequences of their actions.

With the remainder of my pity, I won't drop this comic book a ranking. But I will if the Birds don't try to figure out what happened with their missing time next issue. If they just drop it and never care about it again, I'll never care about this comic again! Okay, that's a little dramatic. Actually, I'll probably just whine and bitch and moan a lot more than normal.