An old man zips up a duffel bag. There’s an arm sticking out of it. There’s an eye visibly peering out of the shadows from within. The eye is wide with apparent terror. Meanwhile, there are a few people looking to track him down. In the overwhelming heat of Batgirls #9, writers Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad usher the team into a blisteringly hot summer in Gotham City with the aid of artist Neil Googe. Cloonan and Conrad bring a major subplot to the center of the panel in an issue that also takes time to advance the character development of all the characters in the central ensemble. 

Everyone’s reacting to the heat in a different way. Babs is grabbing coffee with a friend before things get too hot. Cass is hanging out at the neighborhood bookstore. Steph is hanging out on the roof in an inflatable pool. Babs is concerned about her obsession with the neighbor as the potential Hill Ripper. It’s not healthy for her to be that interested in a single theory, is it? The temperature is climbing. Things are getting crazy. The KGBeast is on the loose. This is a good thing: after all they’ve been through lately, the Batgirls need an easy win. Things could get a lot worse before they get better on the other side of summer.

Conrad and Cloonan finally lower the subplot into place as Babs and the girls are given a bit more in the way of a life outside of the masks just in time for a seasonably sweltering issue. The writers chop up the narrative into more than a few tiny pieces that all seem to fit together with impressive precision. Each character is given some kind of time and space alone. A single issue featuring this many tiny moving pieces might have a tendency to feel a bit scattered, but Conrad and Cloonan bring it all together in a way that makes it feel remarkably fluid.

Googe amps up the rubbery cartoonishness of the visual without losing sight of the menace at the heart of a story about a very earthbound serial killer. It’s a dizzyingly segmented script that Conrad and Cloonan have passed along to Googe. He cleverly gives every individual setting its own distinct atmosphere without compromising the overall rhythm of the action. There’s a potential for darkness and grittiness in and around the edges of the central friendship at the heart of the issue. Googe’s time with the Hill Ripper picks up on this darkness with a vivid danger that splashes out of the page at well-timed moments in the narrative.

Nine issues in and the team finally gets something of an extended breather before barreling straight into the jaws of one of its darkest, most earthbound threats. Once again, Conrad, Cloonan, and company manage to balance an unsettling number of plot elements into a single, cohesive narrative that feels every bit as substantial as anything that any Gotham-based hero has managed in the past. The larger-than-normal bat ensemble adds a sense of community that embraces a much more satisfying bigger picture of Gotham City than what often finds its way into a single issue of ANY series.

Grade: A