Hey kids, it's the Nu52: Birds of Prey 8 and 9

[knight_moves]

You know what's never going to get old? The Court of Owls!



Issue 8 is spy stuff with Dinah and the team fighting a group of metahumans for nebulous reasons. It's whatever.



I can't help but think that if you shot someone in the head, they wouldn't be able to stab you in the dick. You're not going to be standing there like Khan quoting Melville at the end of Star Trek 2. Your brains are on the wall!



Buckle up, gents--we're getting Black Canary backstory.

But first, a tie-in.





This seem a little much to anyone else? I kinda had BOP pegged as "fun Batman-adjacent adventures with a reasonable amount of violence and angst," not "here's a dude's intestines." (Don't worry, mods, I already put a trigger warning for gore in the tags.)

Anyway, this whole issue is the Birds fighting a Talon, who is being sold as an unstoppable menace.



Isn't Dinah's Canary Cry enough to get some blood out of Superman on full power? Aren't the Talons basically zombies? The Canary Cry takes apart tanks--I don't care how tough he is, he's gonna be a bunch of very tough molecules...



I didn't edit anything, that's the next page, and we just... randomly get the Talon's inner monologue for a bit. It comes across as awkward to me, but what do I know?



"The mythical Batman"? Are we implying that the Birds haven't met Batman before just now? Oh man, the Nu52 was a MESS.

They end up fighting on a moving train--Gotham's infrastructure may be shit, but they are NEVER not providing public transit if it makes for a good fight scene.



Conveniently, the train has a refrigerated car and if they get him in there, he's down and out.





Oh good, an Ivy story. Time for the weirdness of her being one of the good guys to pay off.

Comments

[thanekos]

It's true that the majority of The New 52 were comics you'd grade roughly 1.5 to 3.5 out of 5, and it's also true that that was the case with DC's pre-Flashpoint output.

[knight_moves]

True enough, but the pre-Nu52 2/5 comics still felt like my comics, while the Nu52 2/5 comics feel like they're for Robert Downey Jr. fans or Law & Order fans or who even knows?

[beyondthefringe]

They threw a lot of stuff at the walls in the first few years of the New 52, and very little actually stuck. So much was retconned or just plain forgotten almost as quickly as it happened.

[cainofdreaming]

Good news everyone! Since everything is in continuity this too is.

Even the bits that don't fit with everything else?
Especially the bits that don't fit with everything else! /Garak

[scorntx]

So apparently the answer of who would win in a fight between the super-tough unkillable zombie assassin and Starling, who... has no apparent superpowers (besides maybe being able to squeeze into leather trousers?) is that it's a draw.

... wait, Starling has a tag?

(As Talon established, Gotham's railway system is part of the Court's fiendish master plan.
So, kind of backfired on them here a little.)