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In this review of Batgirl #2, Batgirl and Shiva take refuge with friends, unaware that the Unburied are hot on their trails!
BATGIRL #2
Written by TATE BROMBAL
Art by TAKESHI MIYAZAWA
Main Cover by DAVID TALASKI
Variant Covers: JORGE JIMÉNEZ, SKYLAR PATRIDGE
Page Count: 32 page
Release Date: December 4, 2024
This review contains spoilers
Batgirl #2 begins as Cassandra Cain and Lady Shiva, daughter and mother, battle the Unburied in Shiva’s temple. When the dust clears, Shiva urges for the two of them to escape, but Cassandra wants to alert Batman as to what’s going on. Shiva warns her that such an action would only bring about his death, so Cass relents and takes to her to backroom kitchen of a nearby friend, Ba Bao – an elderly woman with grown grandchildren.
While the two women take refuge, members of the Unburied rise from the ground, regrouped with other arriving warriors. One of them is given a blue flower to consume, which gives him a vision of Batgirl and Shiva escaping, tracking down their exact location.
As Ba Bao stitches up Shiva’s wound, she explains that years ago Cassandra would visit as a young girl in search of food, and help her grandkids with their martial arts training in exchange for learning the Voninam – the Vietnamese martial art. She also talks to Shiva about the difficulties in being a mother, explaining why Cass has never mentioned her to her friends before. Soon after, Shiva tells Cass that The Unburied came from a war between monks with a mystical blue flower containing the gift of super-abilities, and the warriors who sought out the flower. Many lives were lost, but the Unburied sprang out from that war, seeking the flower to this very day. Just then, a blind member of The Unburied whom Shiva identifies as Kalden the Unseen arrives, demanding that Shiva come with him. Ba Bao and her children jump in to defend her, and Cass springs into action. Kalden is too fast and strong for her, and begins to overwhelm her before Shiva horse-kicks him into a wall. Fleeing the scene, Cassandra begins to black out as she has thoughts of Ba Bao, Stephanie Brown, Batman and Barbara Gordon, despairing at the thought of abandoning her friends to their deaths while she and Shiva are aboard a train out of Gotham.
Analysis: To reiterate what was screeched about in the previous issue’s review, I am a huge Cassandra Cain fan. I’m beyond grateful to get not only a brand new ongoing series but one that starts the book off with her and Lady Shiva together. Every issue from now until it ends has got my money.
That being said, aspects of issue #2 bugged me quite a bit more than they did in issue #1.
