Batgirl #9

The Talon's left arm is simply fucked up.

How is Gail Simone going to make the Talon a reflection of Batgirl? From the cover, it's female, so that's a comparative start. Is it going after Commissioner Gordon? If so, maybe some of Batgirl's daddy issues will be worked out in this comic. It's hard for me to guess since I haven't really followed Batgirl much. I mostly knew her as Oracle when she appeared in Suicide Squad.

This issue begins in Japan in November of 1944. A girl named Ayumi is writing a letter to her mother. The girl has gone off to school. She mentions her brother, Makoto, which makes me think of Sailor Moon since Sailor Jupiter's name is Makoto and it means truth. Which then leads me to Youtube where I spend the next half hour watching Episode One of the live action Sailor Moon series, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. It was Pretty Guardian Awful.

Reading comics is time consuming!

And then I took a break to cook up some Spinach-Cheesy-Rice Balls. These things are probably 200 calories per inch ball!

Worth every calorie!

Back to Batgirl #9 where I haven't even gotten to the third panel of page one, I see that...man, my fingers are still greasy! My laptop isn't already disgusting enough, I'm now making it a slippery mess as well! At least I haven't touched my comic book yet! What a disaster that would be! Let me go wash up and I'll be right back again!

Okay, so this young Japanese girl is making balloons for the Emperor. These balloons will carry bombs across the ocean!

I believe these hundreds of bombs had a kill ratio of barely anybody to all of them, which according to that wikipedia article is a kill rate of 0.067%.

The story continues on the outskirts of Gotham City in 1946 where Haly's Circus is being set up. A representative for the Court of Owls has come calling to Mr. Haly for a new Talon. Haly's best aerialist is a disfigured girl named Mary. Her family were killed by that single Fu-Go bomb incident in Oregon. I first learned about the Fu-Go after having moved to Oregon around 1999. The anniversary of the incident is often mentioned by local reporters since it was the only incident of American deaths on the continental United States during World War II. Reading over the Wikipedia article, it looks like Gail Simone got all of the information she needed from that article, as she mentions the school girls making the balloons, the people eating the paste, the timing, and the accident in Oregon. Obviously she's taken some liberties with the accident as the father survived and all the children were killed. But Flashpoint probably changed it so that everyone was killed except this one small girl. Whether she was disfigured from the Fu-Go attack or something else remains to be seen. She leaves with the man from the Court of Owls to begin her new life as a Talon. Oh yeah, she can't speak either because she has no tongue!

Also, the Fu-Go story explains why balloons are floating around and buildings are exploding on the cover of the comic.

Batgirl's Talon wears a sexy veil.

Batgirl's Talon gets a head start on all of the other Talons. Or else it just gets to its location much quicker than the rest since Batgirl is already fighting her Talon at 6:07 PM and the other Talons don't arrive at Wayne Manor until 7:01. This Talon attack is taking place in Little Jakarta, "home of Gotham's long-standing Indonesian community." Well maybe it's time they take a seat! Bwa ha ha!

What brought Batgirl to investigate was a bomb that was delivered by a balloon. And then the Talon appeared. So did this Talon get let out early so she could plan her Fu-Go attacks on Gotham? Or is the Court of Owls main nest in or around Little Jakarta while Wayne Manor and the other targets are all the way across town? Maybe little Mary isn't very good at reading or telling time and she just jumped the gun. Or maybe she was just out for dinner at some of the best Thai places in Gotham when her beeper went off and it was time for some murder!

I think I've mentioned before that Gail Simone relies way too much on the Narration Boxes, right? In the two pages after the full page splash, Batgirl uses 17 Narration Boxes. Batgirl sure does do a lot of thinking while in a life and death struggle. I mean thinking that isn't focusing on the staying alive part of her day. When she does speak during these two pages, it's that bravado crap I can't stand.

Maybe you shouldn't waste your breath trying to act tough while you're also thinking about how you're going to die. Where's your fucking Bat Grapple?! Geez. When has a member of the Bat Family ever been done in by a fall?

Here we see that Batgirl and this Talon have something in common! What is it? Why would the Talon let Batgirl live unless it saw something of herself in her? Well, there could be other reasons as well! But this is a Gail Simone story and so far every one of Batgirl's enemies was a reflection of Batgirl. I feel this trend will continue.

7:04 PM and the Owls are now invading Wayne Manor. Commissioner Gordon is stopped on the street by a mysterious man that tells him he will do nothing tonight or his city will burn and his daughter will die. He mentions that one of their own (the female Talon!) has prepared a warehouse full of ancient ordnance! So that's what's happening. I'm not sure why the one bomb went off early. Perhaps a test. Perhaps that's why the Talon let Batgirl go. The time wasn't right to start decapitating people.

Barbara Gordon gets home to find that my favorite character in DC's New 52 has not yet gotten home. That's because her roommate Alysia has been kidnapped by Barbara's nutso wacko brother! I hope she's okay! Barbara stole a scrap of paper from the Talon's hand as they were fighting. Seems weird that the Talon was holding it in her hand and that she allowed Batgirl to take it. But it's a scrap from the balloon that Ayumi, the Japanese girl from the beginning of the comic, made and probably that same balloon is the one which killed Talon Mary's family and injured her. Barbara Gordon begins to put the crazy pieces together because Barbara knows everything. She was Oracle, remember!

The threat to Gordon wasn't just a threat. Gordon begins to get reports of city leaders winding up dead and strange assailants all over Gotham. He finally decides to do something about it. The first call he makes is to his daughter, probably to make sure she's safe. But his call is immediately interrupted.

And then the bombs start falling immediately! Were they just hanging from a sky crane above Gotham?

Barbara gets Alfred's message and rushes off to Police Headquarters which she finds partway blown to rubble. She also sees the same Talon she met earlier high up on the roof. And this time she has her Bat Grapple and shoots up to the roof. On the roof, she finds supplies for balloon bombs which explains why they fell immediately on Police Headquarters. But the Talon has also sent up others to float about the city.

See? The first thing that happens is Batgirl is kicked off of the roof but her Bat Grapple saves her. Why would she think she would die from a fall earlier in the comic? It would never happen.

During this scene, the internet once again distracted me as I had a conversation with a friend about the new Watchmen comics. I should do some special commentaries on those and see if they're really ass-raping Alan Moore's pride (or bank account?) as Mister Moore seems to think.

Batgirl can't win the fight by playing nice like Batman taught her. But Batgirl doesn't realize the Talons are just reanimated corpses. Or are they? They retain the personality of the person they were when alive, so what's the difference? Even though they should be dead, they aren't. Since Batgirl doesn't know that anyway, she asks two things that don't give a shit forgive her: Gotham and God. She flips the Talon off the roof and into one of the bombs. The Talon lives long enough to text an answer to a single question.

But there's nothing wrong with her face!

So the Talon empathized with Batgirl thinking that Batgirl was forced to wear a mask as she was. Sisters hiding from the looks of others. Women forced to hide who they really are.

Gordon makes it to the roof and turns on the Bat Signal. But it's been turned into the Owl Signal now! Bwa ha ha! Fooled you, stupid!

So much better than the Bat Signal!

I'm also unclear if Mary was supposed to actually be an American child who was hurt in the Fu-Go bomb blast or if Mary was actually Ayumi after having survived the bombing of Nagasaki since the comic ends with the end of Ayumi's letter stating she was in Nagasaki. That would make sense since she was horribly disfigured without a tongue and she knew how to make the balloon bombs. But there's no real reason why she would have been in the states and picked up by Haly's Circus either. Oh well! She's dead either way!

Batgirl #9 Rating: +1 Ranking. Okay, this Night of the Owls issue worked well. I only wish it would have been more evident that Mary was Ayumi. And I wonder if any more of these Balloon Bombs are going to make an appearance in any of the other Night of the Owls issues. I haven't seen one yet!