Trehern Reads: Birds of Prey #93

The pipe actually came with the comics...

Welcome to another installment of TREHERN READS!!  This week, we dig further into the muddy swamp muck of DC with a pull from the One Year Later series.  After Infinite Crisis, a new series called 52 was well on its way, which would reveal the "lost year" between Infinite Crisis and the stories being told One Year Later.  It was ground-breaking and interesting to see develop, but DC soon abandoned all hope and took to the reboot hell of recent years.  But before all that, there was Birds of Prey #93!!

Let's just start with the cover.  A character, not named in this particular issue, is carrying a bloody surgeon who, from all accounts, is Elton John.  Do the riots get that bad at his concerts?  I never knew!  Anyway, SPOILER ALERT, this never happens in the issue.  And is she running at super-speed?  No, she's becoming invisible or something, I don't know.  This is part 2 of a story arc, so I'm completely lost.

What I did manage to understand was Black Canary is somewhere in Asia training to be a bad-ass; so a bunch of dudes who answer to "Mother" start try to beat the sh*t out of Canary, but Bruce Lee's spirit lives within her and she defeats them all, much to the chagrin of old lady Mother.  Her time here isn't well explained in this issue, but from what I gathered, she traded lives with a woman named Shiva, who's tough as nails.  Canary, wanting also to be tough as the nails, trains at the same dojo as Shiva.  But who knew this would be the sh*ttiest dojo in the world?  Surrounded by sexist men, barely literate children and homicidal warlords, Canary's future is looking pretty...black?

**ignores hisses, boos and the closing of browsers**

Meanwhile, in the "big city" (I don't know...Gotham?), the rest of the Birds of Prey team are kidnapping a kid from school and are attacked by what look to be Parademons but are actually baddies called "HIVE guys."  This is kind of a lackluster event; at one point, one of the HIVE guys falls to coffee in the face!  Huntress, whose superpower is coffee-throwing, is protecting a hospital patient by the name of Thorne (the Crime Doctor...heh heh he "doctors" "crimes"...get it?); while being attacked by the HIVE, the semi-unconcious Dr. Crime is kidnapped by none other than Prometheus, from that JLA run back in 1998.  End of issue.

As out of context as this issue was for me, I thought it was still pretty bad.  There is almost no transitions like "meanwhile" or "later that day..." or anything.  You just have to be aware of character and setting with A LOT going on.  Barbara Gordon is the motherboard of the team, in constant contact with everyone, so I assume she's the one writing the story; or perhaps all the issues read this way, as if from the perspective of Gordon.  If that's the case, a tip of the hat, cause that is good storytelling.

At one point, Canary SKYPES Shiva (the team member she switched lives with), but when we cut back to Shiva, she's talking with her cell-phone up to her ear!  Who's holding the computer so Canary can see Shiva on SKYPE!?!  And why is Shiva such a jerk?  She for no reason silently throws a kid's doll out the car window because, yeah, she's tough.  At least when Dirty Harry tries to be tough he screams "f*ck off" at the doll before throwing it out.

At the end of the day, it was an action-packed issue written by Gail Simone with artwork by Siqueira.  Next time though, give me a cover with more blood and more to do with the issue.

My final rating of Birds of Prey #93 (2006):

6 out of 10 Coffees to the Face!!