Gail Simone and Ed Benes take over as the creative team of Birds of Prey with issue #56.  According to the cover, it's a "bold new direction", but since I never read it in the first place, I wouldn't know.

In fact, pretty much all I know about Birds of Prey is that it's a Batman spin-off book about Oracle and Black Canary, and that it had a TV show last year which was rapidly cancelled and reputedly very poor indeed.  Fortunately, you don't need much in the way of background knowledge for this.

It's the closest Gail Simone has come yet to writing a straight, non-comedy story.  In fact, depending on where you draw the line, it's pretty much there - there's some very funny banter between the two leads, but on the same level that you'd find in Peter David's stories.  Basically, it's a straight superhero story, with a neat angle based on raising the characters' doubts about the ethics of their techniques and a cute piece of misdirection towards the end.  Despite the gags, it's a well constructed plot.  It's good to see Simone getting out of the pigeonhole of just being a comedy writer.  She's very good at comedy, of course, but showing some range is always a good move.

I'm less convinced by the art.  Benes' version of Oracle is alright, but I really don't like his take on Black Canary at all.  The proportions are way off; it doesn't even work as cheesecake.  And those inch-wide strands of hair on her face are just really annoying.  The rest of the book looks okay, notwithstanding a tendency to blank expressions during the comedy sequences, but Benes' awkward approach to one of the lead characters is a real problem for me. 

The art drags it down a bit, but it's still pretty decent on the whole

Rating: B

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