Batgirl and The Birds of Prey #3 Review and *SPOILERS*

Snake Handlers

Written By: Julie Benson, Shawna Benson
Art By: Claire Roe, Roge Antonio, Allen Passalaqua, Deron Bennett
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: October 12, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

The Birds are back this issue and with the help of their newest teammate: Huntress, they're going to take the fight hopefully to the faux-Oracle herself........ or himself.  We still have no idea who this Oracle is yet.  Hopefully they'll be able to shut this impostor's shit down in time though because in the previous issue we saw that Santo's safe house location was given to the mob boss Fenice and in turn she sent out a shit load of snake people to take him and anyone else there out.  That's right, I'm talking about Barbara's daddy himself Jim Gordon.  Let's jump into this issue and see if our Birds of Prey can juggle this many threats at once.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with a little cameo from Frankie, who is helping our heroes decrypt the information they downloaded at the end of the last issue about what Oracle is up to and who is next on Fenice's hit list.  This leads our heroes on a wild goose chase to a Mexican restaurant, where a mob family is enjoying themselves some awesome food, but besides for that, nothing seems to be going on here.  It seems that all of information our heroes collected was just a distraction to keep our Birds of Prey away from the safe house where they left Santo at and besides for the oddness of our heroes spending what seems like a shit load of time waiting for a a hit that will never happen, the dialog seems really off here.

Eventually though, our heroes get on the trolley and start heading back to the safe house where thankfully, the snake hit men that Fenice has hired have been waiting in the basement for hours....... Yeah, they say they were ordered to wait, but this seems strange as hell and they only go upstairs to take out Santo and Gordon right before our heroes finally show up to stop them.  

In the end, our heroes fight the snake men and woman and at first they seem to have the upper hand, but the villains escape with Santo and the only semi positive thing that happened during this conflict is that Huntress saved Jim Gordon from Cottonmouth, but I say semi-positive because she ends up killing the foe in the process........ even though it initially looks like she misses her target.  This of course leads to Batgirl getting all high and mighty on Huntress until she finds out that her father's life was in jeopardy, which immediately gets her to flip flop on her anti-killing policy, but it's too late because Huntress decides that teamwork isn't for her and leaves our two heroes pondering their next move against Oracle and Fenice.  As our issue closes though, we see Santo tied up at Fenice's location and discover that Fenice appears to be the believed dead wife of Santo himself.

That's it for this issue of Batgirl and The Birds of Prey and this series feels so off to me when I'm reading it.  I mean, we have our heroes standing around just waiting for a hit that is a ruse to throw them off the trail of the actual target and then we have our villains standing around waiting to actually go after the target and even with that, our heroes don't do anything besides lose a team member and come off sounding odd because the dialog just doesn't seem to fit.  On top of that, when we finally do get to the action at the end of the issue, it seems disjointed as hell and feels like we're missing most of what's going on because characters are hit without us seeing it and then they're doing things other than what we just saw them do.  It's just not that exciting or even interesting and while I'd like to say that the art more than makes up for it, I find myself really not digging Claire Roe's take on these characters......... That is, besides for the Snake-Men.  They looked great, but our heroes just come off kind of ugly and just not pleasant to look at.  Overall, I'm not really into this series as of yet and that's a shame because I really wanted to like this book.  Hopefully once we get over this initial arc and Julie and Shawna Benson really get a feel for the characters we'll be able to see what they can really do.

Bits and Pieces:

The action and the dialog in this issue felt really off from the get go and we get really nothing to move this story forward from what's presented here.  With all of that, the art in this issue isn't really to my liking either and ultimately I find myself just being disappointed with this series.

5.5/10