Given how much I enjoyed Robin: Year One by this team, I expected this to be good. It wasn't. It was great. Beatty and Dixon have folded everything that folks like about Oracle, the animated version of Batgirl and the comics version of Batgirl into one character here, a determined and smart Barbara Gordon who is believable as a hero who created herself without a driving tragedy or intense training by dozens of masters from around the world. Marcos Martin and Alvaro Lopez complete the picture with artwork that is reminiscent of Tim Sale's work on Batman: Long Halloween, giving the reader a subtle connection to the early days of Batman and Robin.
I'm one of those people who actually thinks Barbara Gordon got a lot more interesting when she became Oracle. However, I've come to enjoy flashback tales to her days as Batgirl, thanks in no small part to Paul Dini's take on the character in the animated series. Beatty and Dixon have really captured the energy and youth of that character while incorporating the intelligence and determination of the modern-day Babs into the mix as well. Having Barbara narrate the series, so that we can see her frustration with the system, and more importantly that her frustration doesn't overwhelm her enthusiasm, is a very nice touch. And I very much enjoyed the explanation for why Barbara would wear two-inch heels into combat, which also served to illustrate the difficulties that a young (and short) girl had being taken seriously in the boys club of law-enforcement (and later, vigilante justice.)
Leaving aside the strong characterization of Barbara, Beatty and Dixon also have created an interesting plot for this first issue, and I'm intrigued to see where they go from here. Because Dixon has introduced so much of Barbara's modern-day character, he knows exactly where to lay the groundwork in her backstory. The appearance of Officer Bard was a terrific bit, a nice nod to fans of Birds of Prey, and having Barbara seek out the original Black Canary for training is also a clever nod to the relationship she will eventually share with the Canary. Mind you, it's better not to think about the time period, when the JSA is still operating but the Internet apparently is as well, but that's more due to the vagaries of DC "continuity" than anything else.
Marcos Martin and Alvaro Lopez are the art team for this one, and their art is fantastic. There's an almost sketched and thin quality to some of their long shots of Batgirl in combat, but the result is that she looks more lithe and acrobatic, and the combats really seem to move. There's plenty to like in their more stylized work on Barbara and the various people she knows in her "plainclothes" sequences, and the staging and design of backgrounds really reminds me of nothing so much as Tim Sale's Batman work. The result is that though this has a style all its own, it looks like a companion piece to Robin: Year One, Batman: Long Halloween and other pieces of that early time period of Batman and his partners.
While there have been plenty of stories exploring the early days of Batman, not all that much has been said about Barbara Gordon and her early career, especially in the post-Crisis era where so much of her comic-book appearances are questionable in continuity terms anyway. Beatty and Dixon have taken a modern approach to an old school story, and in so doing have piqued my interest. My only complaint, aside from the bizarre timelessness required by DC continuity, is that I would rather read it all as one graphic novel, but hopefully that time will come.
