Birds of Prey: Batgirl (Feb. 1998)

After Revolution and Wolves, the quarterly Birds of Prey one-shots continue with the third installment teaming Black Canary up with Batgirl.

Wait.  Whaaaat?

Birds of Prey: Batgirl is written by Chuck Dixon with Gary Frank once again providing a knockout cover that reveals Black Canary in an updated version of the costume he had already updated for her in the original Birds of Prey special.  Now her legs are fully covered in what looks like a mostly-solid gray jumpsuit, further cementing her transformation to DC's Black Widow.  On the other hand, she now has a jacket over her jumpsuit, which harkens back to her more classic look.  That's a nice touch.  Also, uh, Batgirl is on the cover looking buff and beautiful and fully upright.  On Batgirl, we meet Greg Land, the fifth interior artist in as many Birds of Prey stories, but unlike the others, Land will hang around for some time.

Land's artwork is on full display from the start with lots of big action-packed images.  In the first five pages, there are only eight panels.  Dixon and Land throw the bang-pow spectacle of Black Canary and Batgirl wailing on some brainwashed thugs of the Mad Hatter--

Wait, why is Batgirl there?  Barbara Gordon is paralyzed, now functioning as the cyber-hacker and information dealer known as Oracle!  What's going on?

Batgirl tells Black Canary to let the other hat-wearing hoods run for their lives.  The ladies shouldn't pursue them with undo force because the hoods are not in their right minds.  Every one of the Mad Hatter's entourage have been brainwashed by the unique microcircuitry transceivers in the hats.

Black Canary asks Batgirl's help in taking the Hatter down.  She seems a little uncertain, a little green, like she doesn't have much experience in this.  The women also sound like they don't know each other all that well.

After shaking out her dizzy spell, Batgirl sees to the one remaining henchman who'd been brainwashed by the Mad Hatter.  They discover that the henchman is actually a district judge who tells them he was at the Homburg Club when the Mad Hatter came in and put hats on everyone.  It's the lead they need to chase down the Hatter, even though Batgirl hadn't heard that he'd escaped from Arkham Asylum.

As crazy and inexplicable as it is that Barbara Gordon is up and around swinging from rooftop to rooftop in her old Batgirl garb, Black Canary is the one behaving strangely.  When they arrive at the Homburg Club, she refuses to split up, citing the dangerousness of Mad Hatter as reason to stick together.  Sure...

Together, they break in through the roof and sneak up on Mad Hatter's meeting with a newly brainwashed Jeremiah Arkham.  The Hatter wants Arkham to release all of the inmates so madness can run rampant on the streets of Gotham.

Batgirl gets nauseous at the thought of all those Arkham inmates running lose.  Well, one specific inmate to be exact.  And it ain't Two-Face or Poison Ivy or Scarecrow.

Black Canary can see that Batgirl is mentally and physically upset and asks her for help contacting Batman.

Black Canary presses the matter and the more she insists they bring Batman in, the more Batgirl senses that something is wrong about this whole situation (no kidding!).

Then Mad Hatter's hat-wearing hoods are upon them.  Batgirl and Black Canary take on the brainwashed Gothamites while Hatter escapes with Jeremiah Arkham.  Canary continues to insist they call Batman for reinforcements while Batgirl persists they can handle the situation themselves.  They argue and bicker and Black Canary seems to whine more and more as they chase their prey from the city to Arkham Asylum.

They arrive too late, however, as Dr. Arkham has already freed the patients.  The Mad Hatter, Two-Face, the Riddler, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Killer Croc, Bane, Mr. Zsasz, the Ventriloquist and more ambush the heroines.  Black Canary escapes somehow, but Batgirl is knocked out and captured.

Batgirl's memories are flooded with the horrific images of the Joker shooting her, paralyzing her, leaving her in a wheelchair.  Memories that don't make sense because, well, she's not in a wheelchair now, is she?

The Joker torments her for a few seconds, but then all of the inmates leave her to search the hospital for Black Canary.  No sooner do they leave, then Black Canary slips out of an air vent and comes to Batgirl's aid.  But she's not really there to rescue Batgirl, is she?

That's an odd reaction for Black Canary to give...

Well, it would be if this was Black Canary.

Lady Spellbinder--who does not wear pants, it seems, although who am I to talk, running a Black Canary fan blog?--reveals that she has been projecting the entire issue's worth of scenes into Barbara Gordon's mind.  That's Spellbinder's power, to hijack the sensory perceptions of her victims and force them to experience what she wants.

More than that, Lady Spellbinder seems to know that Barbara is Oracle, claiming that she was hired by someone who wanted to use Barbara's knowledge of Batman to find access to his secret lair.  Whoever her boss is has been aggrieved by Batman enough times that he wants some payback and targeted the "crippled nerdette" as the weak link his the Dark Knight's defense.  Spellbinder also scoffs at Barbara's pathetic fantasy that she would be Batgirl.

Lady Spellbinder and a team of mercenaries head out to find the entrance to the Batcave behind the Zesti Cola sign on VanMeer.  They leave Barbara tied up in the warehouse.

Lady Spellbinder is hella pissed when she realizes that Barbara lied to her.  So pissed that she gets back in the car and drives back to the warehouse...leaving the mercenaries with their guns on the side of the road!  By the time she makes it back to the warehouse, Barbara isn't tied to her chair; she has crawled back to her wheelchair and weaponed-up.

Barbara knows that Spellbinder's power is dependent on being able to see; that's her handicap according to Babs.  So she deprives her of her sight by spraying her in the face with a fire extinguisher and then kneecapping her with a broken piece of wooden chair.

The cops show up to find Lady Spellbinder tied up and blindfolded, unable to use her powers.

Safe at home in her clock tower base, Oracle contacts the real Black Canary who is in the field on assignment.  Oracle insists she's fine but hopes Black Canary gets back to Gotham soon.  They've put their philosophical differences behind and are good friends again, even though Dinah still doesn't know who Oracle really is.

The issue ends with the mercenaries making their way back to their boss, the man who hired Spellbinder.  It appears to be Blockbuster but there's something going on with his head.  There's a tag on the last page that says next: Birds of Prey: Siege.

Of course, Siege never happened, at least not in a one-shot, although Chuck Dixon says most of the story he had planned for that were used in the Birds of Prey ongoing series that would launch one year later.  But that's getting ahead of ourselves.  What about this story?

It's... okay.  There are some fun moments, like seeing Barbara Gordon as Batgirl is always fun, and this story is really about giving her a chance to be the workhorse crime fighter that she never gets to be anymore.  Dixon makes it obvious for anyone with a brain that the Black Canary we see in the first half of the book is not the real Black Canary, and the details that punctuate these incongruities are nicely done.

Honestly, though, I'm almost never satisfied or interested in these "imaginary tales" types of stories.  The last ten pages with Babs versus Lady Spellbinder are a lot more interesting to me because it feels like a real and immediate threat, while everything before felt like an indulgence in flight-of-fancy.

And let's talk about Lady Spellbinder for a second.  When I got to her reveal in this book, all I could think about was the new character created for the New 52 BoP named Uplink.  I remember an interview where Christy Marx talked about created the character with her editor.  But really they already had a character from Birds of Prey history that they could have recycled.  Uplink and Lady Spellbinder both manipulate the sensory reality of their targets, and they both have pink as a thematic color.

I do have some questions about Blockbuster's role in this story.  I don't know how he discovered that Barbara Gordon is Oracle and that Oracle knows Batman, but this seems like a really, really big deal in terms of security.  I hope Chuck Dixon addresses it, but I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't because that's not really his jam.

I think the highlight is seeing Greg Land's protoform art style.  This is back when he actually drew characters and backgrounds and didn't just trace pictures of porn stars or whatever's been doing for the last ten years.

Next Tuesday I'll review the last and "least Birds of Prey" of the Birds of Prey one-shots: The Ravens.

Birds of Prey: Wolves (Oct 1997)

Four months after the publication of the one-shot Birds of Prey: Revolution, the continuing, albeit sporadic-at-the-time, partnership of Black Canary and Oracle returned for another one-off story that looked like it would kill the series before it really started.

Series creator Chuck Dixon scripts Birds of Prey: Wolves with the fourth interior artist in as many stories.  The only commonality between the original BoP special, the "Manhunt" miniseries, "Revolution" and now "Wolves" is the sweet cover art by Gary Frank. The artist proving interiors this time was no fresh-faced kid but rather longtime comics veteran and one-time vice president of DC, Dick Giordano.  Giordano, of course, had a pretty familiar history with Black Canary over the years as both an inker and penciler--and I'm sure I'll get to most or all of those renderings eventually.

The last time we saw Black Canary and Oracle at the end of their mission to Santa Prisca, the ladies weren't doing too well in their professional relationship.  Oracle has a serious problem with Canary's

freestyle form of operation, which frequently leads her into greater danger.  Dinah's improvisational approach to her missions, on the other hand, resulted in greater gains for the good guys and more damage to the bad guys.  They have a legitimate philosophical difference, exacerbated by the fact that Oracle thinks of Canary as her agent--that Canary works for her.

This grievance spills over into the current mission, where Black Canary is fighting for her life against some reprogrammed construction robots in a Kozuitu automotive factory.  A Japanese terrorist group has taken over the plant.  Canary is dodging the deadly robots, asking Oracle to shut them down via her mastery of all things electronic.  Oracle chastises her for her stubborn refusal to comprehend basic computer systems.

At the last second, Oracle takes control of the engineering robots and turns them against Hodo, the leader of the terror group.  Black Canary keeps her down and then oversees the police mopping up the terrorists.

But while Canary's fight with deadly arc-welders is over, her fight with Oracle is just heating up.

Oracle criticizes Black Canary's lack of preparation before going into battle as a result of her time spent with Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow.  Canary defends Ollie's staunch liberalism and suggests that if she and Oracle are at such ideological odds, maybe they should take a break from each other.

Yep.  They break up.

Dinah takes her earrings and necklace comms devices and Barbara loses her appetite.

Later, Dinah Lance goes to a video store, flirts with the store clerk just enough to make him uncomfortable, and rents a classic movie that promptly puts her to sleep as soon as she gets home.  She's woken by a knock at the door... and the last man she expected to see.

Er, what?  Dinah was married?!!  To a guy named Windrow?

Meanwhile, Barbara Gordon goes shopping at a bookstore and lashes out at the clerk who offers to help, because being in a wheelchair doesn't make Babs helpless.  Her response to the woman is a little more than defensive; it's harsh.  As Babs goes to her car, she's accosted by a trio of muggers who want to take her ride.  And not the wheelchair.

Back in Dinah's apartment, we learn a little about Craig Windrow, Dinah's ex-husband.  They were married very briefly in college, and he was pretty much a loser then.  But it looks like getting dumped by Dinah was the kick in the butt Craig needed to get some focus.  Now he runs an accounting firm and his life seems to be on track.

Except for that the Ukrainian mafia wants to kill him.

Meanwhile, Babs puts the beatdown on her would-be assailants, until one of them hits her with a trashcan, pushing her chair into the street in the way of oncoming traffic.  A speeding car slams on the brakes but still hits her chair, sending Babs sprawling onto the street.

The driver gets out of the car and helps her while cops pursue the muggers.  Babs is shaken and embarrassed, but the driver who struck her is a beautiful adonis named Drew Fahrnum, so that kind of makes up for almost dying.  He offers to take her to lunch and she accepts.  He seems way too clean and handsome to be true.

Back at Dinah's place, she has changed out of her bathrobe but into civilian clothes.  She and Craig race out of her apartment as the Ukranian hoods throw grenades, shoot guns, and drive cars at them.

During her lunch date with Drew, Babs admits to having a fight with her friend/coworker, and that it's kind of spoiled her mood all day.  But she's starting to reassess her view on the working relationship she has with Dinah.  She even refers to Dinah as "labor" and herself as "management."  Meanwhile, Drew listens to all of this attentively and says the appropriately charming things at the right times.

He's definitely bad.

Dinah and Craig race across the subway platform and jump into a train just as its leaving the station.  For now, they seem to have eluded the hoods chasing them.  Dinah asks once again what Craig did to earn a death mark.  He insists that they were a client until he found out what they really represented and when he tried to sever the deal, they started threatening him.

Craig apologizes for getting Dinah mixed up in his dangerous life, but she accepts it.  She has a weakness for dangerous men and/or fools, and she's happy he turned to her for help after all these years.  They kiss and it seems like they will be rekindling their relationship.

Babs and Mr. Too-Good-To-Be-Drew continue their date as he walks her home, then invites himself up to her apartment.  When they get there, however, the three muggers who tried to take her van earlier that day are waiting.  They work for Drew as part of his way too elaborate plan that makes absolutely not goddamn sense.

On the subway, the Ukrainian hoods catches Dinah and Craig and they reveal that Craig actually stole a computer file with the mob's bank codes and accounts and access to billions of their untraceable money.  Dinah doesn't appreciate being used.

She pounds the hoods into unconsciousness, and then confronts Craig.  He admits to taking the mob's money and then using her for protection, but offers to split the blood money with her.  She throws a pistol that knocks him out.

Meanwhile, Babs shuts the lights down in her apartment and proceeds to take down all four of her intruders in the dark using night vision goggles and some handy little weapons (and misdirection).  When the Gotham City Police show up to investigate how the four criminals ended up captured, Babs says it must have been Batman.

Later, Dinah puts her comms devices back on and reunites with Oracle.

For Black Canary fans, the biggest thing to come out of this issue is the revelation that Dinah Lance was married ever-so briefly when she was in college.  And that her husband was not a member of the costumed community.  He was just a young loser who grew up to become a slightly older loser.  He'd never been mentioned before, nor will he be shown again until a decade later in Black Canary's second miniseries.

Besides that, the story was flimsy.  This was basically Chuck Dixon spending some downtime with the ladies whilst showing that these women never have any true downtime.  The men they're attracted to--the men they fall for--are bad for them, so the safest most compatible relationship is actually with each other and their crime fighting partnership.  They had better settle their philosophical differences and learn to work together because everyone else will let them down.

That's kind of the message Dixon is presenting here, but I don't think I buy it.  I have no idea why Barbara would be so trusting of this Drew guy right away, but what's beyond that is the absurdity that is his real criminal nature.  The three hoods work for him?  So he arranged for them to rob the wheelchair woman's special van?  Did he know that she would kick their asses?  How did he know she would end up in the street in front of his car, and how did he know he wouldn't drive over her and kill her?  Why would he bother taking her out to dinner to rob her apartment later?  How would he know what kind of valuable stuff is there that it would be worth the time and preparation for this ridiculous plot?

Dinah, likewise, comes off as equally naive by trusting her loser ex-husband yet again.  I get that she has a soft spot for a certain kind of man, and that some people have blinders on when it comes to exes, but she should have spotted his lies a mile away.  It also feels too contrived that she just happened to have an ex-husband we've never seen or heard of before.

The art is decent but nothing spectacular.  Dick Giordano drew some freakin' gorgeous Black Canary stories.  At this later stage of his career, his work wasn't as impressive.  On the other hand, he didn't have much to work with.  Dinah is only in her Black Canary costume (even though I don't like that version of her costume) for the first couple pages and the action beats are pretty pedestrian.

Birds of Prey: Wolves isn't a bad comic, but it's by far the weakest entry in the series up to this point.

Come back next Tuesday for the next one-shot in the series, featuring the team-up of Black Canary and... Batgirl?!!

Birds of Prey: Revolution (June 1997)

The girls are back in town!

Forget the New 52; I'm talking about the original, the classic Birds of Prey!  Black Canary and Oracle, kicking ass with style, sexiness, and intelligence, three things sorely lacking in the current volume.

Black Canary partnered with the mysterious information broker, Oracle, in the Birds of Prey one-shot special in the summer of 1996.  Later that year, they worked with Huntress and Catwoman in the four-part miniseries, Birds of Prey: Manhunt.  Either DC needed more evidence that the series could sustain itself as an ongoing or Chuck Dixon's work schedule didn't allow for another ongoing at that particular time, but DC went and green lit four more Birds of Prey specials to be published over the next two years to grow the fan base.

Birds of Prey: Revolution came out circa June, 1997, one year after the original one-shot launched the title.  Like the previous entries, Revolution is written by Chuck Dixon and sports a stunning cover by Gary Frank, who drew the first special and provided covers for Manhunt.  The interior art, however is by by Stefano Raffaele with inks by Bob McLeod.  The comic clocked in at 38 story pages for a cover price of $2.95, a whole four cents cheaper than the cheapest 20-page DC comic on shelves today.

The story opens with a trio of dangerous-looking men ganging up on a brunette woman backstage in an otherwise empty theater.  The woman shouts she thought this was an audition and the men taunt her while one reaches for a spray can of some sort of knockout drug.

This wannabe singer is no ingenue, though.  She delivers a crushing punch to one of her attackers and throws her brunette wig at the other.  That's right, it's a wig, for this would-be kidnapping victim is none other than the Black Canary!

Canary shows the men the newspaper ad they took out looking for attractive men and women for a musical revue, knowing full well that the "audition" was just a front for their kidnapping and slavery racket.

Dinah finds the gang's other victims bound in the trailer of a semi truck parked behind the theater.  "Those creeps have their 'talent' stacked like cordwood and ready to ship," she tells Oracle over the radio-tranceiver built into her costume.  The head of the kidnapping gang gave up the name of the cargo ship they were delivering their slaves to; the ship was bound for the island of Santa Prisca.

Oracle advises Black Canary to slip onboard the cargo ship and track this slave ring to its source.  But Dinah has another idea that doesn't include spending a week skulking around a dirty cargo ship at sea.  Given that they know the ship's destination, Dinah utilizes her expense account from Oracle to charter a first class ticket on a commercial flight to Santa Prisca.  In the relative luxury of the plane, Dinah drinks some champagne and watches an informational video about the island.

The dictator of Santa Prisca declared himself Master of the World?  I thought only the North Koreans did that.

Anyway, Oracle tells Dinah that El Jefe, whose real name is Juan Paolo Sebastian, was an army general who took control of the island with the help of a secret benefactor.  Since then, Santa Prisca has been a closed, heavily militarized state.

On the island, a Mr. Galiant meets with the corrupt Minister of Agriculture about a planned takeover of the island.  Galiant represents an unnamed organization that wants a particular crop grown on Santa Prisca.  (Narcotics? Venom?)  But the Minister wants nothing to do with Galiant or his people, a dismissal that proves costly.

At the airport, Dinah Lance is stopped by a customs agent looking to check her luggage.  On a tip from Oracle, Dinah tells the agent he needs only check one of her bags, which includes cartons of cigarettes and bottles of whiskey.  Satisfied with the bribe, customs lets Dinah pass through without more trouble.

Dinah notes that she's the only passenger stopped by customs; all the other visitors who Dinah identifies as terrorists and mercenaries are treated like royalty.  She's approached by a young boy named Tico who offers her a taxi ride to her hotel.  Although Oracle protests and this Tico is far, far too young to have a drivers license, Dinah accepts his offer.

At the hotel, Dinah makes fun of Tico but accepts his business card with his pager number.  A pair of thuggish-looking gentlemen in Hawaiian shirts have followed her from the airport.

Inside the hotel, the concierge gives her some grief about her lack of reservation until Mr. Galiant intervenes on her behalf.

Later that night, when Dinah has left to investigate the human trafficking connection that is the reason for her visit, the two men who followed her break into her hotel room.  Their surprise in not finding Dinah in her room is dwarfed by the shock that Galiant is there.  He guns them down quietly.

Dinah, now equipped in her Black Canary costume, sneaks across the island through the jungle until she's overlooking the docks at Puerto Buitre where the cargo ship has docked.  Oracle warns her to stay on guard as she makes her way closer to the ship.  Black Canary chides her overcautiousness, thinking the slavers won't be on high alert in their own territory.

That's when she's surrounded by a paramilitary unit wearing masks and carrying machine guns.  She engages the nearest soldier until she's tackled by Galiant.

Black Canary uses Galiant's gun to drive off his forces, then she throws it away and slips under the cover of the dense jungle foliage.

Oracle tells Black Canary that the island is too volatile with conflicting armies and agendas.  She orders Canary to abort the mission and get out of there immediately.  She warns her that Galiant is a shadowy operator with a global reputation for trouble.

Black Canary hears all of it and ignores it.  She won't quit on her mission when the ship might be full of slaves.  Oracle continues to protest until Dinah takes off her radio earpiece and puts it away.  She sneaks aboard the ship, takes out the small security force, and discovers the slave pens in the lower decks.

Luckily for Black Canary and the prisoners, she held onto Tico's card and phone number.  The boy arrives at the docked ship with a truck, but in order to drive them all to safety, Black Canary needs to buy them some time by fighting off El Jefe's forces.

Oracle can't get to Santa Prisca to save Black Canary, but there's one person already there who might be able to save her.  She reaches out and calls Galiant, threatening to ruin his operations unless he rescues Dinah.

At that moment, Dinah is strapped to an operating table about to be tortured by El Jefe and a creepy,  sadistic doctor lady.  El Jefe doesn't want or care about any information Black Canary she might have.  This isn't an interrogation; he just wants her to suffer for rescuing the slaves and blowing the lid off his human trafficking operation.

Just before the doctor shoves bone shears up Dinah's nostrils, Galiant and his troops kick in the door and kill the doctor.  El Jefe slips out under the gunfire and runs from the invading force.

Galiant explains that the valuable crop on Santa Prisca is cola nuts.  He works for the Zesti Cola Corporation, which lost billions of dollars when El Jefe nationalized the island's agribusiness.  When the World Court failed, Zesti brought in Galiant to dethrone El Jefe.  He rescued Black Canary in exchange for Oracle's help in finding El Jefe.

As armies clash in the Royal Palace, Black Canary chases El Jefe, who is trying to escape in a helicopter.  Dinah gets back on the radio with Oracle, who demands a serious conversation about priorities and protocol after Dinah defied her earlier.

Black Canary tackles El Jefe out of the chopper and into the ocean.  She saves him from drowning and they're both picked up by Galiant.  Dinah doesn't show much gratitude to Galiant; she's still not thrilled about her complicity in the Zesti Corporation's coup.

Holy crap have I missed good Birds of Prey!  I swore I would never talk about Duane Swierczynski again, but seriously, f*** that guy!  Birds of Prey is not a difficult concept, and the reason I know that is because Chuck Dixon isn't the most brilliant or nuanced writer.  Dixon does a few things very well, and BoP plays to his strengths.

The plots should be James Bond-ian globetrotting mysteries, heavy on the espionage and sexy ladies. The characters are business friends with individual trust issues but working on believing in each other: a reckless field agent constantly testing the patience of her handler.  The New 52 Birds... I don't even know or care anymore what they were trying to be.  They suck and can all die.

But let's get back to Revolution.  As much as I enjoyed Huntress and Catwoman in the Manhunt miniseries, I am really glad that Dixon went back to basics with this story.  Canary and Oracle are still in the early stages of their partnership.  No need to bring in more characters until these two have each other figured out.

Oracle's frustration in Dinah is natural.  She can't count on an agent who will defy her directives and go rogue whenever she feels compelled.  There may also still be some jaded resentment on Oracle's part that she can no longer go adventuring as Barbara Gordon or Batgirl.  And however mad she might be in Dinah, she still refused to let her twist in the wind.  She made a deal with the devil to ensure Dinah's rescue.

Dixon writes Black Canary a little more cavalier than I think her experience in the Justice League merits.  She's not a rookie.  She doesn't need a learning curve, but Dixon's portrayal of Black Canary is much more prone to heading into battle face-first.  Actually, he writes her like a female Oliver Queen.  Is this her years spent with Green Arrow rubbing off on her, or is this just the kind of character Dixon needed to service the plot and the odd-couple relationship with Oracle.

The art by Stefano Raffaele is pretty solid.  No complaints, but it's not as strong as Gary Frank's or Matt Haley's in previous Birds stories.  There's a few places where the human anatomy looks a little wonky and a few places where the setting is lost in lack of detail, but overall it's enjoyable and easy to follow.

One of my favorite bits in the story is right in the beginning when Black Canary is undercover at the theater.  Dinah dyed her hair blonde in the first BoP special.  Now she's wearing a dark-haired wig as a disguise.  It's a cute little reversal of the classic Black Canary costume, wear the blonde wig covered Dinah's dark hair.

Next Tuesday, I'll review Birds of Prey: Wolves, which at this point I have not yet read, but I know it reveals an important part of Dinah Lance's past.  See you then!

TEAM 7 #8 (Final Issue)

Previously...

The last issue either jumped months of time in the series without explanation... or it jumped the logic train.  (I would say it "jumped the shark", but c'mon, that was in issue #1!)  Team 7 has assaulted the palace of Kaizen Gamorra, who is in possession of the dreaded Pandora's Box.  The team's resident Superman, Majestic, creates a massive tidal wave that is sweeping away the entire island.

Team 7 #8: "Mission 2.4: The Doom That Came to Kaizen" is the final issue of this unwanted, ill-conceived and worse-executed comic book series.  Like the previous issue, Tony Bedard wrote the script over Justin Jordan's plot.  Jesus Merino does the pencil and ink art all himself.  Gary Frank and Cam Smith slum for one more month to provide this issue's cover.

Team 7's founder and leader, John Lynch, narrates this issue in another one of his after action reports. This will be...confusing later on.

The wave of death crashes over the island, destroying the city and killing millions of people while Amanda Waller stares out the window in shock.

The Kaizen's palace is destabilized but not flooded.  Lynch orders Steve Trevor to get the chopper so they can exfiltrate before the building collapses on them.  Even though Trevor stayed on the drop ship when the rest of the team entered the palace last issue, he is here with them now.  I would try and explain this continuity gaffe, but I give slightly less a crap about this comic than the creators did.

Anyway, Lynch tells Slade Wilson and Cole Cash to get Trevor to the chopper while the rest of the team hangs back to fight the super-powered Kaizen.  Lynch then says, "Take Higgins with you."  Dean Higgins then appears in the next panel running beside the others.  That's all for Higgins in this issue.  He's presumed to have died but we never see him again and nobody mentions him.

When the Kaizen threatens to use the power of Pandora's Box, Kurt Lance encourages his wife, Dinah Drake-Lance to use her newfound sonic scream against Kaizen Gamorra.  Kurt apparently has the power to boost or amplify Dinah's powers.  If you were reading Birds of Prey, you kind of knew that already, but this is its first mention in Team 7.

Trevor, Slade, and Cash find a Gamorran helicopter to steal.  Then Majestic comes out of the water and starts attacking the Kaizen.  Majestic accuses Kaizen of killing his family, but I thought the Spartan cyborg did that before turning James Bronson into Majestic.  Wait, did Gamorra create the Spartan cyborg?  That sounds kind of familiar... But wait, Lynch says "we created Majestic".  Who is he talking about?  What the hell is happening?

Majestic picks up Pandora's Box, feeling the lure of its power.  Dinah has a dumb blonde moment where she actually needs Amanda Waller to explain why Majestic using Pandora's Box is a bad thing.  Then Kurt talks to Majestic while "leaching" some of his power.  So Kurt doesn't just affect Dinah, but he can boost or siphon anyone's powers?

Dinah - representing the "boob window" in Power Girl's absence.

Okay.  Dinah joins hands with Lynch, who has telekinetic powers, and Waller, who has... I don't know what powers she has, if any, and then Kurt, who boosts all of their powers.  The result is Dinah's Canary Cry turns into a white that swallows up the palace, the Kaizen, Majestic, and Kurt (maybe).  Dinah, Waller and Lynch are left wandering through the rubble, Dinah looking for her husband, Lynch looking for Pandora's Box.

Lynch grabs Pandora's Box, which immediately begins to corrupt him.  Amanda Waller beats him down and throws the box to Dinah, telling her to get on board the chopper with Slade, Cash, and Trevor.  Lynch starts to pull the chopper down with his telekinetic powers, so Amanda Waller shoots him in the head.

That ends Lynch's after action report.  Because he can't continue reporting if he's dead.

But wait!  First of all, it's an after action report.  He would need to have survived and gotten off the island in order to debrief the situation.  Second of all, he does survive somehow.  We know he's alive in the current time period, so this execution isn't shocking or dramatic, it's just confusing and unnecessary.  Why did his report end so abruptly?  Why was he narrating at all?

Anyway, the last page is narrated by Steve Trevor, who says Team 7 was shut down.  Based on the title of this issue, they were only on their second mission.  Some of the dialogue corroborates that number, but most of Lynch's narration over issues #7 and #8 contradicts it.  Trevor's report says that Waller is believed dead, even though we see her there at the end.

Why did they fly away and leave her there?  She was obviously still alive?  Why didn't they come back for her?  Why didn't Dinah try to find her husband some more?

The Characters

• Dinah Drake-Lance gets a lot of focus on her powers this issue.  She uses her Canary Cry once to knock down Kaizen Gamorra, and again the put down Majestic, with the unexpected effect of leveling an entire building.  Her powers are affected not only by her husband, but by all of the members of Team 7.

• Slade Wilson gets shot but otherwise doesn't do anything noteworthy.

• Amanda Waller might have a power but it's not clearly established or confirmed.  She has become a much more hard-edged character throughout this series, willing to kill to her boss to save the world.

• Cole Cash doesn't do anything noteworthy.

• Dean Higgins is believed dead but that's never shown.  Why did this character exist?

• Kurt Lance has the power to amplify the powers of others, but it works particularly well with his wife Dinah, because of their love and trust.  He disappears for some reason, believed dead.

• John Lynch uses his telekinetic powers a little.  He gets corrupted by Pandora's Box and then Waller shoots him in the head.  Sadly, that didn't kill him.

• James Bronson/Majestic, after murdering an entire nation, fights Gamorra and takes Pandora's Box.  Note: he has already destroyed an entire nation and killed all those people, the vast majority of them being innocent civilians, but the team is worried about what will happen when he gets possessed by the evil of Pandora's Box.  He disappears.

Impressions/Questions

Lynch is shot in the head by Waller at the end of this issue.  But back in issue #5, we saw that Lynch was very much alive in the present day DC Universe.  Slade went to kill him, but Lynch used his powers to defend himself.  Lynch was searching for Majestic in the ruins of Gamorra at the bottom of the ocean.  And we saw Majestic's hand coming out of the cracked ocean floor.

None of this is every addressed in this issue, and it left unresolved.

Kurt Lance disappeared when Dinah used her scream to create a white hole.  Then Amanda Waller was left stranded on a piece of rubble in the middle of the ocean.  But we know that Amanda Waller makes it back to the states, becomes a very powerful player in the military, and creates both the Suicide Squad and Justice League of America.  In Birds of Prey #0, we saw that as of four years after the end of Team 7, Waller has Kurt Lance preserved in stasis, so at some point she found his body.  Dinah probably could have found it, too, if she hadn't runaway so easily.

And back to Dinah and Birds of Prey.  The first two years of that series were bogged down by this underdeveloped mystery that Dinah killed her husband.  The awful, awful, dreadful writer who shall not be named created the impression that Dinah used her powers to kill her husband, that it was face-to-face and personal.  She was wracked with guilt and emotionally lost.  Here, Kurt's disappearance is almost incidental, and unexplained; she ought to be more curious and desperate than guilty.

Also, at the beginning of Birds of Prey, Black Canary is wanted for murder--the implication being that she's wanted for the murder of her husband, but that's a little vague because the writer did such a shitty job.  But here, Kurt's "death" is an accidental casualty of war.  That only one other living soul witnessed!  So if Dinah was wanted for murdering Kurt, the charge had to come from someone very high up in the military, someone who would have known better and not wanted to expose any information about Team 7.

I'm assuming Tony Bedard never read an issue of Team 7 or Birds of Prey before he wrote issue #7 and this one.  He may not have even read issue #7 before he wrote this one.  The questions and contradictions raised by the stupid and aborted series are too numerous and unfulfilling to spend any more time on.  I hate this.

Grade: F

TEAM 7 #6

Previously...

In the present day, Deathstroke hunts down his former boss, John Lynch.  Five years earlier, Alex Fairchild's daughter Caitlin is interning at the Advanced Prosthetic Research Center under the direction of Dr. Henshaw.  Project: Spartan goes haywire and lots of little cyborg monsters start killing people at the lab and hunting Caitlin.

Team 7 #6: "Mission 2.2: Birth of a Superman" is written by Justin Jordan with art by... hoo-boy, Pascal Alixe (pages 1-5), Cliff Richards (pages 6-15), and Gui Balbi and Juan Castro (pages 16-20).  Once again, Gary Frank and Cam Smith provided a cover for a book that is well below their talent level.  By the time Jordan was scripting this issue he had to have known the series was cancelled, so the text on the cover confirms that this final arc is just cleaning house.

The issue opens up with most of Team 7 racing toward the Advanced Prosthetics Research Center in their ridiculous looking ship piloted by Summer Ramos, who we haven't really seen much in this series.  Ramos tells the team they're nearing the APRC, and that no distress calls are emanating from the facility.  Strange... How did Team 7 know there was a problem?

Alex Fairchild is understandably distressed because his daughter is down at the facility, but he doesn't know what kind of situation they're walking into.  Again: how did Team 7 know there was a problem and yet not know anything about the problem?

There's a bit of banter from Cole Cash and Amanda Waller revealing that James Bronson did not come on this mission, but rather went to visit his family.  Cash also mentions rather flippantly that the Lances didn't even get a honeymoon.  Really, Dinah Drake and Kurt Lance got married between issues?  We didn't see or hear anything about it before this mention?

As the stupid drop ship approaches the APRC, uh... $#@% goes down.

Ramos, we hardly knew ye.

As the ship comes under attack from little robot drone monsters, the Team fight back while Ramos pilots the ship to a safe landing before she dies.

Ramos' death might have felt meaningful if we knew here, or even entertaining if it wasn't such a blatant ripoff of this other scene.  (Man, Justin Jordan rips off a lot of movie material for this book.)

After the crash, Slade Wilson takes charge and leads the team through a crowd of cyborg zombie monsters that don't present much of a threat.  Once inside, they find a whole bunch of corpses messed up by the cyborg monsters unleashed by Project: Spartan.  From the carnage, Caitlin Fairchild emerges to the joy of her father.

Uh oh, that ain't a good look...

Slade chases the cyborg monster Caitlin and executes her/it for killing his best friend.  Dinah thinks these cyborgs are too easy to kill and that it must be part of a setup.  Her fears are confirmed when what's left of Hank Henshaw shows up.

Henshaw reveals that this whole chaotic mess was just to lure Team 7 to the Spartan robot or program (again, we don't know how they found out so we don't know how it lured them).  Also, the Spartan robot or program was created by Gamorra, a rogue nation or the name of its leader... maybe.  Also, Gamorra and Spartan wanted Team 7 member James Bronson specifically for reasons unknown.

Cut to James Bronson having dinner with his family at someone's apartment.  His mom is attacked in the kitchen by Spartan, who then... does something... transfers its core programming into Bronson, I suppose.

This causes an explosion.

The final page shows somebody who looks like the WildStorm character Mr. Majestic flying out of the wreckage.  I guess we're to assume that Bronson combined with Spartan creates Majestic.

Last issue involved a frame device with present day Slade/Deathstroke and John Lynch.  That sequence doesn't appear in this issue.

The Characters

• Dinah Drake is apparently Dinah Lance now.  She doesn't do anything noteworthy.

• Slade Wilson is sad that his friend dies and murders the friend's daughter, but she was a cyborg zombie so it's probably okay.

• Amanda Waller has a line about never losing an operative in the field.  Throughout this series she has had the most consistently ironic dialogue, which is only interesting if you know they're ironic because you know the character in other comics.

• Cole Cash doesn't do anything noteworthy.

• Dean Higgins doesn't do anything noteworthy.

• James Bronson becomes Mr. Majestic.

• Kurt Lance doesn't appear in this issue.  I guess married life is too smothering for him, or more likely he was separated from the team since marriage violates all sorts of laws and regulations of the military code.

• John Lynch doesn't appear in this issue.

• Alex Fairchild dies in this issue.

• Summer Ramos dies in this issue.

Impressions/Questions

Given the gleeful death and destruction and the cyborg zombies, this book should have at least felt fun, but it was pretty boring.  Last week I said the new threat of Spartan and the robot monsters was a lot more interesting than the Eclipso zombies from the first arc.  Yeah, I called that one too early because this is just more of the same.  Despite the body count, these things aren't interesting or dangerous; they're just so much cannon fodder.

Also, there are two pages devoted to a building exploding.  Nothing really interesting about this double-page splash, just a building getting blown up--a building full of people we don't know or care much about.  Two pages is a lot of real-estate in a twenty page comic.  Ten percent of the story is just a big anticlimactic boom.

The series is winding down, so you can tell that Justin Jordan is rushing to tie up... just ends.  The deaths feel arbitrary and hollow.  I'm expecting Higgins to die next issue, and maybe we'll see how some of the survivors, like Dinah, got their superpowers.

Grade: C-