Batgirl #4 // Review
Cassandra Caine has every reason to feel a little apprehensive about her current situation. She is, after all, with her mother. (Things have never gone well with her mother.) What’s more: she’s kind of trapped on a train with her mother. And anyone she’s going to be trapped on a train with in the company of her mother is going to be a rather serious sort of a problem for everyone involved. It’s going to be a dangerous tim on the rails in Batgirl #4. Writer Tate Brombal continues a very tense action story with artist Takeshi Miyazawa, inker Wayne Faucher and colorist Mike Spicer.
She’s not going to trust anyone. She’s in a very tense situation and there could be a lot of problems. Thankfully, she has the training to deal with tense situations. Read the situation. Plan. Work it out as things develop. What would Batman do? Always remember to maintain your guard. Things could get really dark under the wrong circumstances and so there’s no telling WHAT’S going to happen. SO be prepared in any event. It’s the tiny confines of a ery controlled sort of an internal dynamic. It’s all one train moving in one direction. What’s the worst that. could happen?
Brombal does some interesting things with the mother/daughter action drama. There’s a simple and simply moving sort of a dynamic about the action and the drama. Brombal is working with elements that seem to be pretty well defined coming into this issue. And it's difficult to tell exactly what might be coming together based on what he's developed for the series so far. The overall momentum seems to hit kind of an offramp by this point. Cassandra is armed with new knowledge and a possible new direction as things move forward into the next frame with the series. Brombal might have bought his series a bit of new life.
Miyazawa once again fails to completely render the claustrophobic potential of a story like this. All of the movement forward in a single direction. Everything happening on such a tight series of events. The graphic potential of that sort of thing really could be given a solid sense of life that it just isn't being given here. Which is really too bad. The dramatic potential of a woman in a full face mask is actually something that's very, very tricky to bring across. Miyazawa manages a striking array of different subtleties in movement in motion and emotion in the course of the series that really feels like its own kind of accomplishment.
Cassandra Cain IS an interesting person with quite a bit of potential that still feels more or less unrealized as things move forward. There would be so much more that could be done with the overall feel of things that simply isn’t being explored at all. Brombal and company seem to be moving in a direction that might realize some of Cain’s potential, but it’s going to be kind f a long journey as there are many, many obstacles being placed in front of Cass.
