Review: Batgirl, Vol. 1: Silent Running
Title: Batgirl, Vol. 1: Silent Running
Author: Kelley Puckett, Scott Peterson
Illustrator: Damion Scott, Robert Campanella
Publication Date: March 1, 2001
Publisher: DC Comics
Genre: Comics/Graphic Novels
Find It: Goodreads, Amazon, B&N
Source: Library
Rating: 3 stars – stick to your bedtime
Exploding out from no man’s land — the all-new batgirl! In the midst of No Man’s Land, Batman gave a nameless girl with a violent past the costume and title of Batgirl. Exceeding his expectations, the new, silent Batgirl quickly made the role her own, earning the trust of the Dark Knight’s allies, including the first Batgirl, Oracle. Now, in post-No Man’s Land Gotham, Batgirl struggles to learn the lessons of how to live a normal life, lessons she never learned from her mentor, the deadly assassin known as Cain. And when a mercenary from her past resurfaces, bent on revenge, can Batgirl bury her own violent tendencies and break the cycle of death and destruction that has dogged her since childhood?
Cassandra Cain is not your average teenager. Raised at a young age by the assassin David Cain, Cassie is a unique killer, one who was trained to read boy movement as language. As such, she can predict her opponents’ moves as they think them, making her almost unbeatable in a fight. Unfortunately this training stunted her verbal language skills. She can barely speak and only understands what others are saying by reading their body language.
In Silent Running, Cassie has been taken away from Cain and is living with Barbara Gordon (the original Batgirl). This arc focuses and Cassie’s struggle to come to terms with her past and her transition as the new Batgirl. I did not know much about Cassie Cain before going into this and I found Silent Running to be a good primer on her origin story. It gives you a good look at Cassie’s character and her struggle on how to live life now that she is no longer under her father’s thumb. Gordon plays a mother figure and she and Cassie have to figure out how to relate to each other.
Batman plays a big part of the story as well. He’s grooming Cassie as the new Batgirl and it is interesting to see how similar the two are. I did think Batman’s reaction to a video of what could be a very young Cassie assassinating a bad guy to be a little odd. I might be wrong but I thought that he knew that Cassie had been trained to kill from a young age. While he might be shocked by the video, his outright denial that it could be real seems naive.
Cassie is non-verbal for most of the book, which did not bother me. It was pretty clear what was going on in the story and with her character, even without her verbalization. There was a point in the story where a psychic “helps” Cassie with her problem, which I thought felt out place. It was really quite sudden and seemed too much like a quick fix. I would have rather seen Cassie work through the language barrier instead of getting a magic cure-all. It was interesting to see though what happened to her fighting style once she had linguistic skills.
The artwork in this wasn’t really my cup of tea. This was the early 2000s and the popular style was very exaggerated and overdrawn. Everything felt a bit too cartoon-y for me and, was it me, or did everyone have huge chins in this?
While I wasn’t in love with the plot in this volume, I did enjoy learning more about Cassie Cain. She is definitely a fascinating character that I want to learn more about. As a relative Batgirl newbie, this volume gave me an intriguing look into the new Batgirl. I definitely want to read more about her and see where her character goes from here.
