Barbara Gordon: Breakout #4: I Think We’ve Seen This Already

Barbara’s torture seems to never end. As she talks with a former beat cop, Shelton, who was arrested for a combination of brutality and standing up against Vandal Savage’s task force, she also bonds with her over Jim Gordon, her father.  It seems Die was the one plying Barbara with drugs through Sparrow. Gotham City Councilwoman Vanessa Woods is the next citizen to be hunted down by Savage.

Barbara is beaten on by one of the guards yet again who taunts her for being knocked down again and again. She gets up every time, and this has been emphasised throughout the book as her greatest strength. While she may be bandaged up even more, she sits resolute in her cell. As the issue wraps up, the inmates speculate on who could have been calling for help the previous night, as it seems no one came for them. The closing pages show us the dead body of Sparrow, and the idea that this is not Vandal Savage’s doing, but an enemy of Barbara’s all her own.

While a fairly solid issue, there is an element of wheel-spinning here. Almost every issue has had Barbara getting in a fight, losing, and then obtaining some small sliver of information. The mystery is unfolding very slowly, and this hasn’t bothered me much until now. When very little of consequence has happened, or at least nothing we haven’t seen before. This issue not having any drug-induced nightmares, or glimpses of the outside world also doesn’t help with the tone, keeping it very un-superheroic. I think soon we may be past the point of Barbara’s torture is build-up for a gratifying heroic breakout, and just falls into the realm of seeing a woman beaten every month, which is really unenjoyable.

I hope that next issue has a bit more momentum, allows the characters to make some real progress and not feel so totally outmatched every single time. Barbara is off the drugs now, which should mean she has her full mental faculties again, but she wasn’t able to learn a thing this time. The issue ends with “I’m nowhere near to understanding what this is” and I can’t help but feel a little frustrated. I suppose this is only issue 4, but it’s becoming difficult to understand the stakes without a clear target to work towards. I suppose the next goal is to get a guard on side, like the characters said. It doesn’t help that there are very few larger-than-life personalities in this book so far, no one colorful to latch on to. That might just be personal preference, but if we’re locked in with a group of characters, I’d hope they’d be a little more motley and a little less bland. I can’t say Shelton is much of a stand-out yet.