Batgirl (Vol. 4), Issue #6 – “A House Made of Spun Glass”

* Part 6 of 6 of the Darkest Reflection storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batgirl (Vol. 4), Issue #6 – “A House Made of Spun Glass”! It’s kind of like a candy full of spiders, you see. In the previous installment, it’s Christmas Eve and Barbara’s mom shows up out of nowhere to chat. She’s moving back to Gotham. It’s not clear where she was before, but I’m guessing Cameroon. On the bad guy side of things, there’s this mysterious new enemy named Gretel who keeps changing her hair color. It’s unclear what her motivations are, but when she’s nearby people they go into a fugue state where they smile like the Joker, repeat the number 338, and try to kill people close to them. Bruce Wayne is spearheading a Gotham City urban renewal project (which you may remember if you read my Batman Vol. 2 Court of Owls commentary…what do you mean you didn’t?? …yeah, good call), and many people are unhappy (“OCCUPY GOTHAM!”) so he may be a target from disgruntled Gotham civilians. Batgirl follows Wayne downtown to protect him for some reason, but Gretel’s there and Bruce Wayne is possessed and we end the issue with him leaping at Batgirl with a crowbar repeating “338. 338. 338.” It’s all very dumb.

Issue #6 marks the end of the Darkest Reflection story arc, and that means I’ll be moving on from Batgirl for a while! To what I don’t know just yet, but deciding where to go next within the New 52 imprint will be way more thrilling than what may be in store for me here in this particular issue. Let’s get the goddamn thing over with, shall we?

Batgirl (Vol. 4), Issue #6 [April, 2012]
Written by: Gail Simone
“A House Made of Spun Glass”

“Possible last words of a passenger on the Titanic: This isn’t going to end well.” says Batgirl’s inner monologue as Bruce is about to cave her skull in with a crowbar. Personally, I would’ve thought something more like “AAAAUUUGGHHH!! FUCK! FUUUUUCK! WHAT THE FUCK? FUCK FUCK FUCK!”, but even in the tensest of moments Batgirl thinks about 100-year-old ship disasters. “338! 338!” bleats Bruce Wayne as he swings at Batgirl and misses her by about 338 miles. She tries to get through to him, tries to tell him that Gretel is controlling his mind, but he’s not listening at all since, you know, Gretel is controlling his mind and everything. So Batgirl kicks him right in the face, he lets out a pained “UGNGN!”, you know the drill. Wayne’s personal assistant (not the driver that tried to kill him, but a lady who didn’t try to kill him) smashes Batgirl in the head with some sort of square piece of…uh, something hard. Batgirl tries to
explain that she’s not looking to hurt Wayne, but EVERYTHING IS SO CHAOTIC HUBUBUBLUNBUUB!

Bruce Wayne is feral! Oh no! Not again!

Batgirl tries to figure out what could possibly cause Bruce to lose control like this? Is he faking it? The Mighty Bruce Wayne has the mental fortitude of a million Bat-like men! Why would he be susceptible to some skirt holding a saber? Right? Hahahaha!!? Well, sister, it doesn’t look like Bruce Wayne is faking SHIT so get ready to manslaughter a bitch! Meanwhile, Gretel loads up a pistol. “I have only three bullets and there are four of you, altogether. So this will be much more fun.” she says, and I’m left wondering what’s so fun about that when, like, 50 bullets when there are four targets altogether seems much more fun for your usual deranged Gotham lunatic fare. As Batgirl threatens Bruce with her baratang (A BOOMERANG SHAPED LIKE A BAT!), she starts going into some Batman/Batgirl batstory. Uh, I mean, backstory.

“We weren’t always close, Batman and I. Not always.” starts Batgirl. HEY! Isn’t that how the Batgirl/Nightwing relationship backstory started back in Issue #3? Did Batgirl and Batman fuck? Man, Batgirl gets around! “He didn’t want another partner, and I didn’t want to be another partner. Similar name and wardrobe, sure. But I stood apart. I was Batgirl.” BOOOOOOORING! What the hell is with the overdramatic musings, Batgirl? I’ve read five and a half issues of this series and it just seems like there’s no real reason whatsoever that Batgirl even HAS to be Batgirl in the first place! She just shows up and feels bad that she can’t do everything that she wants to do and then she goes home and lives with the guilt. Repeat the next night. Seems weird to me.

“Eat your vegetables, Barbara! Finish your homework, Barbara! Why can’t you be more like your brother, Barbara?! Stop leaving the toilet seat up, Barbara!”

Batgirl remembers Batman showing up at the hospital shortly after getting crippled. Since she was afraid of getting chewed out, and he didn’t chew her out, she feels like she owes him? Perhaps he was chewing her out internally? I would be! But not for misogyny reasons, I promise! A lot of my best friends are friends with women, I swear!

Back in the present, Batgirl attempts to jog Bruce’s memory by further traumatizing him. “Don’t you remember where you are? You’re two blocks from Crime Alley, where your parents were murdered!” Ha! Oh my god, his parents were murdered in a place called CRIME ALLEY?! LOL! That’s pretty awful. Bruce Wayne responds to these sentences with a series of 78-IQ facial expressions, but apparently that’s all it took to bring him back to reality. “What…what have I done?” he says as a plothole the size of Kansas opens up around everyone. As Wayne comes back to his senses, Batgirl notices that Gretel took a powder. Flew the coop. Fucked off into the night. But she wonders why didn’t Gretel put her charms on any women? Wayne’s female assistant, Batgirl herself, not even attempted to be under Gretel’s spell? Perhaps women aren’t susceptible to Gretel’s hypnotic charms? I BET BARBARA’S ROOMMATE ALYSIA WOULD BE, HINT HINT. Although, after Batgirl asks Wayne if he was faking it, Wayne says “yeah kinda”. So there you go.

Batgirl, Vol. 4, Issue #6 – “Validation From Men (Part 6 of 9,000,000)”

After the tender little moment shown in the above panel, Batgirl is on top of the world again! The moral of this story, girls, is that apparently your self-worth comes from the validation of men. Good lesson, Gail Simone. Really progressive. This is the pep talk she needed, though, and now she’s going to go after Gretel for realisies.

We’re switching POV now! Interesting! We see Gretel’s internal monologue as she awaits Batgirl. “They’ll come for me, now. They’ll all come for me…like in my dreams. Like they did when I was alive. When I believed in things.” Hell yeah, Gretel, just like that, became the most interesting character in this whole godforsaken series! She used to be Lisly Bonner, fresh out of journalism school, looking to be the next Lois Lane, gonna take down the Whittaker crime family! The penis mightier than the sword!

For two weeks, all my clothes smelled like gin and cigars and blood and piss and hamburgers and cologne and semen.

Bonner went undercover mingling with the gangsters, enjoying the high life, being one of them…until someone found the pocket voice recorder stashed away in her handbag. Whoops! Time to start sleeping with the fishes, Lisly BONER! Haha! Daddy Whittaker kills her dead at the end of a pier, she falls face-first in Gotham’s stinkiest bay, and that’s the end of that!

But not really. She didn’t die. Some kids found her and pulled her out, she woke up in the hospital. Gee, that sounds familiar, a woman gets shot and wakes up in the hospital. Hmmmmm. Bonner is salty because she spent her whole hospital stay without any visitors, no get-well cards, no gift baskets, nothing. Apparently, a bullet to the head scrambled her brain, she found out she can control minds! Whatever.

We jump back to Batgirl and her efforts to figure out Gretel’s motivations. She has a hunch about the meaning behind “338”. Back as Barbara, she stops by the apartment where she discovers her mother has been baking all day and creeping the crap out of Alysia. Barbara thinks her mom is bribing her back into her good graces and she AIN’T HAVING NONE OF IT.

Oh fuck me, there’s math involved? Nuts to this! I’m going home.

But she takes two muffins anyway and sets to work on her laptop in pursuit of cracking the Gretel code. 3 bullets for a .38 revolver. 338. This is also how Bonner died. She phones Bruce Wayne with this info, he tells her that there are some new problems afoot: Daddy Whittaker was killed in his hospital room only 30 minutes ago. What terrible luck! Anyway, Bruce wants to use Barbara as bait to lure Gretel. Capital plan!

We arrive at a Bruce Wayne rally. Make Gotham Great Again! A lot of people in the city think that Wayne is too dumb to know jack-shit about urban renewal, and they’re probably right, but nonetheless Bruce Wayne has a vision and he has money and he’s white so that’s really all that matters (not even the “vision” part is truly important). Wayne stands at the podium and starts blah-blah-blahing, and Batgirl notices that the police in the crowd are acting strange. “338! 338!” they shout as they start opening fire on Wayne, but JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME Batgirl pushes Wayne out of the way. Now she starts cop-killing Body Count-style with her bata-ma-rang, and spots Gretel (blue hair now) with a megaphone on top of a construction site crane. “PEOPLE OF EARTH” she says. Just kidding! “Oh great men of Gotham,” she starts while McKenna appears on the scene to bring down Batgirl, “…COME INTO MY HOUSE OF CANDY AND DELIGHT AND BURN FOREVER!” Gretel sounds like one of those Invader Zim fans I went to high school with.

Batgirl tries to reason with McKenna, and then BATMAN SHOWS UP and tells McKenna to go screw, they have things to do right now. Batgirl and Batman start scaling the crane where Gretel is still jibber-jabbering. They try to reason with her, it doesn’t work, so Batgirl leaps at her and knocks them both down off the crane. Gretel’s wig falls off, revealing the giant-ass bullet wound on her bald dome. Batgirl uses Batgrapple to slow down her and Gretel’s Batfall to near the Batground, where McKenna is waiting. I’m paraphrasing: “Hurrr, dorf durf, uhhhh I guess since you saved Gretel I won’t arrest you this time Batgirl, hurr-de-durr, but watch out for next time!” McKenna arrests Gretel and takes her away.

“Revenge never heals what’s broken. We know about that, don’t we–Batman?” The end?