It’s that time again, Batgirl fans! Okay, technically “that time” was yesterday, but we relaunched with Autumn Gothic, and my life took a hectic turn known as Running Errands For Almost Three Hours, so. The Batgirl recap is coming to you today–and there’s a lot that happens in this issue, so let’s get right down to it.
We open in media res (which is a fancy English major term for in the middle of the action, for anyone who isn’t sure), with Batgirl on her motorbike and remembering a conversation she (as Babs) had with Alysia about Jo’s disappearance. Flashback time! Alysia sums up the text message Jo sent her, and Babs offers to call her dad, saying the GCPD can take care of it, but Alysia cuts her off. Her group, she tells Babs, doesn’t always act within the scope of the law, even if they have the right intentions and are, ultimately, doing the right thing. She suggests trying to contact Batgirl instead. Alysia, my dear, you have no idea how easy that is…
Batgirl arrived at the warehouse where Jo disappeared and finds Jo’s phone on the ground, screen cracked. She crouches down to pick up the phone–and someone steps on her hand. She looks up to spot the woman who kidnapped Jo at the end of issue #43. She’s been waiting for Batgirl–or, more accurately, she’s been waiting for someone to come and rescue Joe; she knew they were in cahoots with someone, but she wasn’t sure who. She introduces herself as the Velvet Tiger (seriously?) and kicks Batgirl in the chin, pontificating about how she thought they’d been in league with the cops, but lucky for her, it’s only Batgirl.
Batgirl laughs at her. “Lucky you? Treat my head like a soccer ball again, lady…and you’ll be lucky if I deliver you to the cops in one piece.” That’s our girl! She tosses a batarang attached to a rope, and it wraps around the Velvet Tiger (okay, really, it just sounds like the name of a nightclub). Batgirl tells her to reveal where Jo and the tigers are being hidden, but the Velvet Tiger has a trump card–she has a device that can somehow turn Batgirl’s gadgets against her. She aims the device and pulls the trigger, and all of Batgirl’s things–smoke powder, flashbang pellets, the works–go off in her belt. Whoever this Velvet Tiger is, she’d been prepared for Batgirl.
Batgirl makes her way over to FoxTek, where she sneaks in a window to find Qadir on the computer. She asks what he’s doing there–he’s been suspended, remember–and Qadir is confused. He points to a box sitting in the corner of the room. “You didn’t know?” he asks. “I figured your partner sent it.”
Obviousy, Batgirl is a touch confused. She doesn’t have a partner. Does she? She checks the return address on the package. It says “Delphi,” and then it hits her. Frankie. (“I’m gonna wring her neck…” she mutters to herself.) Inside the box is an SD card that contains GPS data from Qadir’s phone, corroborated by transaction records and CCTV footage–it all proves that he was nowhere near the FoxTek building during the break in and subsequent tiger attack. Just then, Luke appears–looking more than a little confused when he takes in her battered appearance.
“You look like you’ve been in a war zone,” he says. Batgirl is less than amused.
She hands over a gadget to Qadir and tells them both what the Velvet Tiger was able to do to her gear. Qadir promises to get to the bottom of it, and Luke says that now they know who was behind the attacks–it’s too much of a coincidence otherwise. At the computer, Qadir says that basically Batgirl’s foam bomb malfunctioned because the Velvet Tiger rewrote time. (Here we pause for a minute for you to be appropriately awed and also to consider the implications of the Velvet Tiger becoming the next Doctor on Doctor Who.) Batgirl looks at the lines of code for her tech and notices something funny; when she points it out to Qadir, he says that that bit of code isn’t native and was injected into the foam bomb. The Velvet Tiger’s device must have been some kind of remote attacker that infected Babs’s gadgets with the wonky line of code and caused the detonation.
Luke recognizes it as Ralph Dean’s signature–the guy from FoxTek who was eaten by the tiger. But Dean didn’t write that code for FoxTek; before he worked for Luke, Dean was a freelancer for Gilcom, and Batgirl does the mental equivalent of slapping a hand to her forehead in realization. That’s the link between the attacks–freelance employees! She has Qadir look up Gilcom, and what do you know–their CEO is the one and only Velvet Tiger (it really doesn’t get any less ridiculous-sounding the more I type it, it still sounds like a nightclub). Her name is Lani Gilbert.
Uh oh. Wasn’t Lani the name of Jeremy’s life-ruining ex-girlfriend? That can’t be good.
Batgirl rushes off to Jeremy’s apartment, where he’s sitting in an armchair like every Dejected Ex-Boyfriend trope you’ve ever seen. Even his usually perfectly rolled shirtsleeves are suffering. She accuses him of helping Lani; to his credit, he doesn’t deny it. She gave him a device to collect data from students–retinal scans, fingerprints, that sort of thing. Batgirl is angry–both as Batgirl and as Babs–Lani used that data to frame people for murder, for God’s sake. But Jeremy says he had no choice–Lani flies into a rage when she doesn’t get what she wants, and after they broke up, Lani had kept one of Jeremy’s old hard drives. On the hard drive is his master’s thesis…which he plagiarized. She threatened to expose him, and he would lose everything; he swears he didn’t know what she would use the data for.
Batgirl asks where Lani is now, and Jeremy tells her that her family has a vacation home on the edge of Gotham. (Why anyone would want to vacation in Gotham with all of the crazy supervillains running loose, I have no idea. Rich people, amirite?) He tells her the address and begs her to stop Lani. Batgirl tells him to turn himself in, make it right. He’ll have to accept the consequences for the part he played, but it’s better than letting Lani go free. And then Batgirl is gone, looking very disappointed.
We next open on Alysia, of all people, who is sitting in her car at the bottom of a very long drive, presumably in front of Lani’s vacation home. Batgirl knocks on the back window of Alysia’s car, effectively scaring the living daylights out of her. When Alysia sees it’s Batgirl, she flies out of the car and gives the superhero a huge hug, bless her. When Batgirl asks what she’s doing out there by herself, Alysia explains that she thinks Jo–her fiancee–is being held prisoner in the house at the top of the drive. She found the address by checking her activist group’s email archives and found receipts for shipping containers full of computer parts from Gilcom. Gilcom, she explains, are going out of business, but she found records about the Gilbert family and got the address from them. Babs tells her she’s done good work, but then instructs Alysia to stay in the car–it’s not safe. She promises to bring Jo back safe and sound, and then she heads up to the house.
Inside the house, Jo is hanging by her wrists from the ceiling above a drained inground swimming pool. Lani (thank God I can call her that now instead of the Velvet Tiger) sits on a lifeguard stand inside the pool, well above where the tigers are circling, waiting for Jo to drop and be their next meal. Just as Lani is telling Jo she’s going to drop her into the pool with the tigers, Batgirl crashes through the domed glass ceiling, delivering a classic superhero line of, “The next meal you’re going to have, Tiger, will be in the mess hall of Blackgate Prison!” Ah, these superheroes. They just love their kitschy lines.
Batgirl gives one of the legs of the lifeguard stand a good whack, and it buckles; Lani leaps from the chair and grabs onto Jo to avoid dropping into the pool with the tigers–where Batgirl is now. The tigers attack her, but she gets clear of them and hits them with tranquilizer darts. They fall down to snooze, and Lani, enraged, leaps down to tangle with Batgirl herself. While they fight, Alysia sneaks in through the hole Batgirl made in the roof and gets Jo to safety. While Batgirl’s distracted exchanging adorable thumbs-up signs with Alysia, Lani chucks something at her that hits her in the face and slices a bit of her mask. Babs sticks the mask back into place, licks the blood off of her glove, and says, “Bring it.” WHAT A BABE.
Batgirl seems to be holding her own just fine, but Lani snags one of the tranquilizer darts out of a tiger and jabs it into Batgirl’s thigh. It looks like it’s over for Batgirl–Lani is brandishing two butcher’s knives–but then something both really cool and really weird happens–Batgirl’s motorbike breaks through the ceiling and basically runs Lani over. Batgirl, woozy from the tranquilizer, watches and says, “…The hell? Am I seeing things?” Honestly, Babs, I’m wondering the same thing because this is some Knight Rider shit. The bike screeches to a halt and turns around. It tells Babs to get on–it’ll get her to safety. Batgirl lurches onto the bike and mumbles about the Velvet Tiger (eurgh)–they can’t leave her. The bike assures her that it’s already called the police.
We open on Babs and Luke Fox getting coffee at a cafe that has a bat skeleton as their logo, which sounds like an awesome place that I wish existed in real life. (It’s called Chiroptera.) Babs is telling Luke about the weirdness with her motorbike, and he says he wishes he could have seen it. After they order their coffee, Babs asks Luke if he can do her a favor and give Frankie a job. Luke says he already knows about Frankie–and he did offer her a job, but she turned it down because she was in the middle of a “career change”. Babs is noticeably frustrated, but Luke points out that telling Frankie she can’t do something will only make her dig in her heels even more. She’s a grown woman, he points out. But Babs is still upset; she’s concerned for Frankie’s safety–the superhero life is definitely not for everyone–and Frankie went behind her back. Luke suggests training her, but Babs shoots that down, too. She’d never be able to live with herself if anything happened to Frankie because of this superhero gig.
Luke says he gets it. “Batgirl works alone.” Then he gives her a sly look. “How about Barbara? Maybe she’d like a partner?”
Apparently he’s applying. They kiss (aw), and Babs invites him to be her date to Alysia’s wedding (acknowledging that she’s probably going kind of fast, but I think exceptions can be made, seeing as how they’ve known each other for a long time).
The last page of the comic leaves us on a cliffhanger. Frankie is sitting on some steps…somewhere (I’m not sure where, some warehouse, it looks like). Little captions in bright green appear in each panel. “Neural link activate!” one reads. The next one says, “Let’s dance!” and shows a bunch of drones flying around Batgirl’s motorbike. We then see that Frankie has something attached to the base of her neck, some kind of gadget that must be broadcasting her neural signals. The drones bring the bike in and it parks. The last panel is Frankie’s determined (slightly sinister?) expression and the caption, “This is gonna be awesome.”
And that’s all she wrote! I wonder what’s in store for next month–and I wonder what Frankie is going to get herself into. The NEXT preview says, “Dearly Beloved,” which can’t mean anything good. Gulp.
Curly Hair Gothic 