I hadn’t originally planned on picking this title up, but when I saw that Adam Beechen was writing this book, I immediately added it to my pile.  I loved his work on Robin and had high hopes for this title.  Sadly, it didn’t quite measure up.

I’ll be honest when I say that I don’t know much about this character.  In fact, when I bought this, I thought that this was the lesbian Batman character (which, of course, I realized was wrong upon opening the issue.)  And I realized that I had only seen this character on the pages of Batman and the Outsiders, which was fine by me because in that title she was very mysterious.  So, what I was hoping from this title was a little illumination about the character while immersing her in a really good story that will round her out.  I think, somwhere along the line, Adam Beechen didn’t really know what to do with her because this issue was a mess.

What made it a mess, you might ask?  Well, there just isn’t much action nor is there any sort of story development for the character.  As the issue starts off with Batgirl breaking up a weapons shipment, it spends the remainder of the issue with dry dialogue and no character development whatsoever.  In fact, 75% of the issue is Batman, Nightwing, and Robin discussing her past in complete detail while Batgirl stands in the room, and what makes that so frustrating is that they talk about her as if she isn’t even in the room.  Add that to the sheer detail of her past (it could have been summed up in an paragraph), and this issue was just boring.  Beechen had some nice things to work with here and just didn’t capitalize.  There was potential for her and Batman to bond.  There was potential to put a story into motion.  There was potential for this character to show a little bit of herself.  But none of this came to pass, which is really disappointing.

The art was merely average and didn’t add much to the story.  There were some wonky panels with the fights and sometimes people’s faces looked weird.  But overall, the art was servicable.

I’m definitely not going to be picking up this title after this first issue.  With so much other wonderful Batman related titles, there’s no point to this one.  This book is for intense Batgirl fans only.