Whatever it is Birds of Prey has been missing since Chuck Dixon left, with Gail Simone's issue, it's officially back. A great central relationship between Black Canary and Oracle, an adventure-oriented writing style and an interesting plot have drawn me in. I expected no less from Simone of course, but I was a little wary of the cheesecake-heavy artwork of Ed Benes. While Benes can't completely forego his T&A tendencies for this issue, though, the art in general is pretty solid and tells the story well. With the fast death of the TV series and the departure of its original creator, Birds of Prey could easily have become de facto D.O.A., but Simone, Benes and company seem intent on proving there's still life in the old girl (and the young hot girls) after all.
If you were to ask me what the appeal of Birds of Prey is to me, the first thing I'd say would be the globe-trotting espionage feel. However, close behind is the relationship between Black Canary and Oracle, specifically the banter they share and the way Oracle plays both Jiminy Cricket and Big Brother for Black Canary when she's in the field. Simone absolutely nails this dynamic, first in the field and then at home, and to me it is a strong indication that she "gets" the core of this book. The teasing about Black Canary's big scary persona, the gossipy talk about Huntress (which serves as subtle foreshadowing as well), the believable banter about the food and the worry that Oracle feels when Canary is out of her league all tell the story of their relationship beautifully, for new readers and old hands alike.
Dixon always tended to include some thinly-veiled real world stuff in Birds of Prey, and Simone does that as well in this issue. The greedy and selfish corporate tycoon is an old 80s villain, but they're back in style thanks to real-world events involving Enron, Haliburton and other skeevy corporate abuse of power stories. So it's sort of cathartic to see Black Canary scaring the hell out of one of them, even a fictional representative, and it also makes for an interesting lead-in to the actual villain of this first story. Savant, the new villain, is an interesting villain so far, a combat-effective and smart blackmailer whose actions are chilling.
Which does bring me to one of my concerns about the book as it stands. Birds of Prey works best when its more about empowerment and less about exploitation, and there were a few touches in this book that worried me. Savant's brutality with Black Canary seemed unnecessary, given that he's already been established as a very dangerous man, and it seemed odd from a writer who once ran the insightful "Women in Refrigerators" website noting the unbalanced amount of violence that sometimes befalls women in comics. The bigger concern, though, is this... I have never seen this much of Black Canary's ass or crotch in 55 previous issues of Birds of Prey as I saw in this issue. It seems to be one of Benes's favorite perspectives.
However, aside from that bit of occasional cheesecake and what I think is a fairly ugly cover, Benes does a pretty solid job here. He captures the mixture of spooky and sexy that Black Canary needs in the opening sequence, does a nice job of keeping the story framed tight and moving fast and does a nice (if brief) martial arts sequence as well. His work wouldn't have been my first choice for this book (that would have been Dave Ross, whose work on Dixon's swansong was exactly what the book needed on a regular basis) but it's not going to make me run screaming from it, which is what I had feared.
