What I Bought 3/26/2025

The local store didn't have any of the things I wanted that came out this week. Or anything from this week at all, that I could tell. Makes it hard to want to support a local business. But there was one book from earlier in the month on the shelves I wanted, and here we are.

Batgirl #5, by Tate Brombal (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (penciler/inker), Wayne Faucher (inker), Mike Spicer (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) -  Batgirl entering her "blue flower" phase.

Cass got a tracer on Shiva before she was carted off, which leads her to the Unburied's base. She slips in, only to eventually encounter the three super-powered soldier types, who found the tracker and were waiting for her. Cass deals with the big guy, but the lady with the giant scissors knocks her out by blowing the flower pollen in her face.

OK, so the flowers give you super-powers if you eat them, heal wounds if you smear it on them, and act as a knockout drug when inhaled? That's ridiculous. And if the stuff was not from the flowers, have Spicer color it a little less blue, especially when they're fighting in a field of the flowers (located in a sunless cave, no less.)

Cass has a dream where she speaks with Stephanie, and lets out all her frustrations and feelings about Shiva. How she hoped Shiva was someone innocent, but found out she's a killer, and that's what Cassandra is afraid of in herself. But she wants to save Shiva - from the Unburied and all the killing, I presume - because it means she can save the little girl she was before she fled David Cain?

And then she wakes up dangling from a ceiling in the same room as Shiva.

The notion Cassandra is both repelled by her mother and wants to save her because of Cassandra's own past is at least a sort of explanation for why she didn't just tell Shiva to piss off and go do her own thing three issues ago but, I don't know. I get it if Brombal decided Cass' relationship with Cain was beaten to death, but I'm not nearly as interested in Shiva as he clearly wants us to be. And she's the closest thing to a supporting cast Cassandra has in this book. No Bat-family, and every new character that gets introduced dies or vanishes shortly after. The Vietnamese family that runs the restaurant in Gotham, Jayesh (the priest that follows Shiva.) I'm assuming since he gave Cass a ride to the cave but didn't follow her in, he's carrying out his own part of some plan right now, but there's no evidence of it. That's just me assuming there's a reason he vanished after the 5th panel of page 1.