“Maybe ain’t a lot but it’s an honest wage, and what we’ve got is what we’ve made”
It’s the final Birds of Prey volume for now, so we get an extra-big collection brought to you by Kelly Thompson (writer), Sami Basri, Vicente Cifuentes, and Cliff Richards (artists), Adriano Lucas and Hi-Fi (colorists), and Clayton Cowles (letterer), with Jessica Berbey editing. This bad bear costs $19.99, and DC was nice enough to cram 9 issues in here, so it’s 186 pages long (issue #25 is slightly longer because it’s … an issue number divisible by 5?). That’s nice of them!
I’ve enjoyed this iteration of BoP, but it’s always been the tiniest bit frustrating, because it feels like Thompson has a lot more to write with these characters but she knew the cancellation axe was always hovering, so it always felt a bit rushed. I went back and looked at what I wrote about the first three volumes, and I’ve always felt that way … and I find it interesting that in volume 2, I noted that it seemed like the Birds were too busy reacting to things, a point Barbara Gordon makes in this very collection. I know everything, people, everything!!!!!
Ahem. Anyway, as this comic always felt a bit rushed, even this volume, which is so long, feels a bit zippy. I have no idea when the word came down that the book wasn’t continuing, but Thompson had to know at least a few months in advance, right? 
So maybe that’s why it feels rushed — she had a pretty big story to wrap up, and she did, and it works for the most part, and everyone pretty much gets their moments, and it’s enjoyable to read … but it’s still frustrating. We get a group of villains who band together to … well, I won’t say, but it’s sadly kind of lame. I mean, sure, a villain would want what they’re trying to get, but it seems wildly mundane for the lengths they’ll go to get it. Listen, plots are hard, and Thompson has always been a bit better at the characters in her books than putting ridiculously cool plots in them, and this one is fine, but it doesn’t seem worthy of the length of the story, as it takes up all 9 issues (although there are two parts to the story, so there’s that). The BoP run around putting out fires, and most of the set pieces are very cool (the beginning of the book, where the villains figure out a way to not only compromise Barda but turn her — briefly — against the team is brilliant, honestly), and all’s well that ends well, but it feels a bit hollow. Barbara notes this at the end of the book — if everything they’re doing is about protecting themselves, then how are they helping anyone? I don’t know why Thompson wrote the book that way, but it does feel like that’s been the entire point of the series — they’re always getting attacked simply because they exist, and if they don’t exist anymore, the bad guys won’t attack them. I know it’s too simplistic to categorize this series like that, as they did go on missions that helped people, but at the same time, a lot of time was spent on trying to solve problems that were only there because the Birds were a team, and that’s kind of a weird way to create a series. 
Thompson is too good a writer to not make this entertaining, and the way she writes all of these characters, even ones who only show up rarely (with the exception of Constantine, whose new-ish personality sucks, frankly), is excellent. Barda is a highlight, of course, but her work with Sin/Megaera has been terrific, and she knows Babs and Dinah really well, too, so they’re just fascinating to read here. She has always been good at creating interesting, three-dimensional villains, and she does so here, although they’re a bit more stereotypically villainous than some of her others. It just feels like she really wanted to do less plot churn and some more “hang-out” issues, but the Nature of the Beast wouldn’t allow her. Things move fast in this series, and whatever heartwarming moments we do get come and go very quickly, to its detriment, I think.
Anyway, Basri is very good on the art, which surprised me when he first started. As I mentioned when I took a look at his first issue, I didn’t love his art back in the day on the Nu-52, and I hadn’t seen it in some years, but it’s much better than it used to be. He’s inked a lot by Cifuentes (who also gets to draw some pages on his own), and maybe that’s it. Another reasons why inkers are good: Basri pencils almost this entire volume, taking a good amount of issue #25 off and some pages in other issues, but for the most part, it’s him, and the art has a nice, consistent look. 
Richards draws the majority of issue #25, and he’s another artist who has gotten better — he used to be a Bryan Hitch knock-off, but his work has gotten smoother and more precise over the years, and it’s working quite well. The villains are interesting, and Basri does a nice job with the virtual reality that the Birds have to enter to thwart the villains, plus the alternate dimension that has popped up here and there in Thompson’s run. He draws a very cool “Possessed Barda,” too, so that’s nice. I still think it would have been cool if Leonardo Romero could have drawn the entire run, but it was nice that Basri came on board and stabilized the artistic side of the book.
I wish I liked this more, because I love Thompson’s work and want her to be super-duper successful, which she is right now because of Absolute Wonder Woman. While that’s great, I do hope she can be the kind of writer that can make something that doesn’t have such a marketing push behind it successful, because her work is always so interesting and far more humanistic than most superhero comics are. I just didn’t love Birds of Prey. I liked it, but it just always felt like something was holding Thompson back. I don’t know if it was the page counts of issues, poor sales, artistic inconsistency, or her fear that she couldn’t slow down or DC would simply kill the book. She did get to tell a complete story here, and that’s great, and overall, it’s an entertaining book, but it just feels like something was missing. Oh well.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
