Review by Frank Plowright
Being the daughter of the world’s most feared assassin has been a heavy cross for Cassandra Cain to bear, and Tate Brombal opens Bloodlines with Lady Shiva’s own accounting of her life over two chapters. It’s perhaps not ideal fodder for those wanting to see Batgirl in a graphic novel with her name and picture on the cover, but it’s a good story of betrayed idealism forging a threat greater than any previous danger, and adds depth to the previous Mother. If you’re not too hung up on the idea of Cassandra only featuring for a couple of pages it’s compelling. Isaac Goodhart’s decorative art brings out the best moments, and by the end we know what drives Lady Shiva.
Would Brombal really take so much time providing a background only to fortify Cassandra’s? One suspects not, and that this is groundwork for the future with the ending to Mother not as definitive as it seemed. It also reintroduces Richard Dragon and Ben Turner, Bronze Tiger, presumably with the intention of their playing a part in present day events later.
Batgirl herself is back in the spotlight for ‘The Three Swords’, referring to three people armed with swords intending to kill her. As with the previous volume, though, this is not just violence for entertainment’s sake. Brombal’s script features much questioning of purpose and intention, and the volume title proves to have greater meaning than covered in the opening chapters.
Takeshi Miyazawa is back to draw the longer story, and again great with action and personality, although a chapter ending surprise is misjudged, explicit when surely for both dramatic purposes and the age of the intended audience something more subtle would have been better advised.
A surprise toward the end moves Batgirl toward the next stage of her journey in The War of the Shadows, but with one caveat this is another engaging story. The caveat concerns the revelation of a child we never previously knew existed, who’s grown and been trained in isolation. It’s a character with possibilities, so not all bad, but so far Brombal has seemed a writer not needing to drop back into such clichés.
