BARBARA GORDON: BREAKOUT #1  / Script by MARIKO TAMAKI / Art by AMANCAY NAHUELPAN / Colors by TAMRA BONVILLAIN / Letters by ARIANA MAHER/ Published by DC COMICS

The good news is that the opening pages of Barbara Gordon: Breakout immediately countered my chief objection to this miniseries after it was set up in the pages of Matt Fraction’s Batman. The bad news is that everything after that justified my reasons for dreading it after it was originally announced. Yet somehow, despite being built upon a major misunderstanding of Babs’ character, this sort of works.

Initially, it was made to look like Barbara Gordon was arrested as the one member of the Bat-Family unlucky enough to get caught shutting down safehouses in the wake of Vandal Savage’s efforts to destroy Gotham’s vigilantes. The opening pages reveal that this was all part of a larger plan to investigate Savage’s private prison and the sudden deaths of prominent Gothamites arrested for fighting Savage’s regime as GCPD Commissioner.

Logically, it makes sense Batman would investigate this. And apart from himself, Barbara is the most prominent member of the team in their secret identity in Gotham. Making her a target for Savage’s vendetta makes the most sense if you can believe that Bruce wouldn’t take this dangerous mission on himself. However, Barbara Gordon: Breakout is based on a larger break with character history.

In an interview at the issue’s end, Mariko Tamaki says the core idea of this book was based around Barbara operating as a lone agent. “What makes her incredible is that she’s someone who can lead a team to victory. So the question became: What happens when you take someone who’s so good at that and pull her out of that environment?”

As a Barbara Gordon fan, I would like to applaud a story that puts the focus on her outside of her leading the Birds of Prey, helping the Justice League, and everything she does as part of Batman’s team. The problem is that painting her as ineffectual outside of a team does her a disservice. Lest we forget that Babs started out operating on her own without Batman’s approval or support and did well enough to be brought into the fold. Granting that it’s been a few years since she was operating in the field extensively (the timeline is a bit wonky on this point) Babs is not unused to working on her own.

Thankfully, none of Tamaki’s core concept seems to have made it into this first issue. To put it simply, Babs kicks ass and takes names. And Tamaki does a fantastic job capturing Barbara’s analytic mind and how she puts it to work in a fight.

Talking of the fights, the action sequences are well-illustrated. Amancay Nahuelpan splits Western and Eastern influences, with manga-style speed-lines and traditional character designs. The colors by Tamra Bonvillain are relatively muted, but that does fit the prison environment and reflect the aura of despair in the setting. And the letters by Ariana Maher are well-rendered.

I wound up liking Barbara Gordon: Breakout #1 far more than I expected. Granting that I am a bit defensive when it comes to Babs (us librarians have to stick together) I still have issues with the core concept and how it fits into the larger narrative of the Batman books right now. Taken as its own beast, however, this is an enjoyable first issue that leaves me wanting to read more.