Rarely do I come across a comic I am forced to denounce as complete and utter crap. Okay, that’s not true. But it makes me sad when that happens. Especially when it involves one of my favorite characters being written badly.

Batgirl #3, I am distressed to say, is such a comic. In fact, the entire miniseries has been like this. It’s not like I really expected otherwise. When DC made it’s stupid editorial mandate to turn Cassandra Cain into a villain, Adam Beechen wrote it and made it even stupider.

Not only did he make her eeeeevvvil, he made her suddenly able to talk eloquently, get punched by Tim Drake and gave her random siblings. But hey, it was a stupid mandate, so really, why should he have done it well?

The thing is, he didn’t treat her any better in the Titans East arc of Teen Titans, where DC reversed it’s stupid mandate and retconned Cass’s evvvvviiiilll into mind control by Slade in some nonsensical plan. Beechen wrote Cassandra post mind control, where she randomly tried to choke Deathstroke out, got smacked in the head by Rose and got knocked out by Nightwing after tripping over herself trying to get to Deathstroke again.
Needless to say, I went into the mini, which Beechen is writing for some unfathomable reason (he wants to redeem himself or something though it’s not working), with low expectations. They were met.

The first issue gave us Cassandra on a mission to kill her father and Slade, Nightwing raging at her in an overblown and out of character way and a giant information dump that revealed to us Cassandra had overcome her lifelong, thought-incurable dyslexia through the magic of ESL classes and Alfred, wiping away one of the most interesting things about the character.

The second issue was more of the same, only Cass also is teaming up with some murderous “sibling” of hers and everything is VERY ANGRY. Also, Cassandra forgets she can tell people are lying by their body language.

And VERY ANGRY is pretty much how the third issue can be summed up. Ravager is VERY ANGRY when she captures Batgirl and Marque (murderous sibling) through some weird electrocution device. Beechen loves Cassandra being owned by random people, doesn’t he? Rose is tracking down her father and no way does she need help from two expert martial artists to do so! Or maybe she does. Well, time for a team up! A very ANGRY team up between three ANGRY ladies!

They fight some more of Cain’s ninja assassin daughters, who are dressed very oddly, but I’m not a ninja fashion designer, so. Does anyone find it disturbing that Cain only seems to train girls? Primarily small Asian girls? In Batgirl’s series, which Beechen may or may not have read, he tried to train children of both sexes, but they all died from the exertion, until he…you know, when a man meets a woman and kills her sister and gets her pregnant…and then Cass! End of story. Where did all these chicks come from? When did Cain get time to do all this babymaking?

But moving on, Cass whines in her head about how it’s not FAIR. Marque kills two of the girls right in front of Cass and Rose…ANGRILY. And for some reason Cass does not beat the everloving crap out of her and put her in jail for this. She does get mildly peeved. Is this OOC? Of course it is. But this is Beechen we’re talking about.

I should mention that while all this anger is going on, Nightwing is off being angry. See, for some reason Nightwing has decided he is the suspicious, bad tempered one in the Bat Family, so he is after Cassandra because SHE USED TO BE EVIL. Because he, or none of his friends, have ever been mind controlled, obviously. So he breaks into his ex girlfriends lair, manhandling the plucky sixteen year old girl Misfit to do so. That doesn’t seem nice. I thought Dick Grayson was the nice one! He yells at Babs some, he noticed she was messing around with the computer and deleted something of Cass’s, which is stupid, because she’s freaking Oracle and shouldn’t leave a sign she’s been messing around on the computer for Dick to notice. That’s kind of her thing.

Dick makes sure to whine about how he has it JUST as bad as Cass because HIS PARENTS ARE DEAD before stomping off. Maybe he’s a Skrull. Or Everyman. I don’t know.

So we end our fine story with Deathstroke looming over the girls while they plan to break into Cain’s harem gym or whatever. None of the girls notice his looming, because they are all idiots in this series.

So that’s it. I’m done. No more of this series for me. And I advise the same for you. Even the art isn’t that great. It isn’t terrible, but it’s really blocky and everyone looks a bit like a disgruntled construction worker.

Poor Cassandra. Hopefully DC will stop misusing you soon. If not, there’s always the back issues.