Batgirl and the Birds of Prey #11 Review and *SPOILERS*

Miscalculation 

Written By: Julie Benson, Shawna Benson

Art By: Roge Antonio, Allen Passalaqua, Josh Reed

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: June 14, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Batgirl and the Birds of Prey has been picking up in my mind and I couldn't be happier about that because with so many team books in this Rebirth era of DC that don't act like a team, I'm happy to just get one at this point.  In our previous issue, we saw the Birds, Nightwing and Green Arrow take out Blackbird and get Black Canary out of her mind control whammy that she was under and at the end of the issue we saw that the new Oracle Gus planned on betraying our team to his mysterious cohort.  Let's jump into this issue and see what's up with Gus and if he'll continue being a part of the team after all of this is said and done.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!;

Our issue begins with Black Canary and Huntress holding Gus out of the Watchtower window all Suge Knight style because even though it seemed that the Birds of Prey were in the dark about Gus' betrayal, it turns out that Batgirl's been monitoring his chats this whole time and when he asked them to meet him in the park at the end of the last issue to turn them over to whoever is blackmailing him, Batgirl saw this as the perfect opportunity to start asking Gus some fist questions.  

Once Gus gets pulled back in from the window, we run down his whole past....... some of which we've seen already, but we dive deeper into it, learning that when he was acting as Oracle before contacting the Birds of Prey, Calculator came a callin' and after finding out that Gus wasn't the Oracle he was looking for, he started blackmailing Gus and making him work for him so that he didn't call the police and even pin some of his crimes on the young hacker.  This part is the most interesting of the book, where Gus has himself a moral dilemma in which he isn't sure how to feel about Calculator because while yes, he's brokering information to bad people, he's also running a eco friendly company that looks out for its employees and makes sure that they have health insurance and all that....... yeah, this book starts getting a little preachy through and even drives me crazy when everything Gus did was washed away once the Birds found out that he was Bi-Polar....... It was odd and just seemed like everything was okay with them once they started feeling sorry for him because of his disorder.  

In the end, Gus has a chance to redeem himself by going with the Birds to take out Calculator once he shows up to the meet, but things get crazy when Calculator shows up and desperately needs our team's help.  Yeah, it seems that he brokered some information about a place that his client stole some pretty expensive gems from and after tracing the leak back to Calculator and kidnapping his family, they want to make an exchange.  Too bad that it seems that Catwoman was the one who was doing the thieving because we all know how she feels about giving things back.

That's it for this issue of Batgirl and the Birds of Prey and while I initially didn't mind the continued backstory of Gus, I have to say that as the issue went on and became all about how terrible mental illness is, I was thrown out and then double-y thrown out when out of nowhere the story became about something completely different than Gus' betrayal.  It doesn't help the fact that we're supposed to get a cool cliffhanger with Catwoman, but the coolness is taken away because of what Catwoman is up to in the Batman book and how this version of the character and what she's dealing with right now doesn't add up.  The art in this book is great and Roge's style is the real draw for me to this series at this point because while Batgirl doesn't act like a complete goober like she does in her own book, in this series we never really have anything that feels all that big.  

Bits and Pieces:

While I wanted to really like this issue because of how I thought the series had been getting better, overall it turned out to be pretty weak sauce that gave us some more backstory to one of our characters until completely switching gears to become something else that doesn't jive with what's going on in other DC books right now.  The art in this book is still great, but the story came off kind of boring and even tried to force a mental health PSA into the middle of it that just felt odd as hell. 

5.5/10