Title: A Candy Full of Spiders

Writer: Gail Simone

Art by: Ardian Syaf & Vincente Cifuentes

Cover by: Adam Hughes

Release Date: January 11, 2012

Official DC Comics Synopsis: Still reeling from the shocking return of a major figure with secrets from her past, Batgirl goes on the hunt for the terrifying killer Gretel, whose eerie and violent power over the men of Gotham City leaves no one safe – not even guest star Bruce Wayne!

Review by: Brendan S.

So issue 5, a new arc and a new villain; it would be very difficult to top Mirror in my humble opinion and Simone did not pull it off here.  There were a lot of things wrong with this issue especially Barbara Gordon, Sr.  So, Barbara, Jr. and Sr. go for a walk immediately after issue 4 and we see Barbara not wanting to tell her mom that Jim never remarried, HELLO SARAH ESSEN-GORDON!!, obviously I took great issue with this one because if Jim never remarried after Barbara left him than those last three issues of no man’s land are thrown to the curb along with Scott Snyder’s James Gordon, Jr. arc because, at least how I understood it was he started to go insane because of her death.  Granted I understand why Simone would do this, dramatic effect that no one has really gotten over her abandoning them but it is very difficult then to understand past stories, which are supposed to be in cannon for Batman.  Anyway I have one other problem, both Barbaras looked exactly the same and I was slightly annoyed with Syaf for not making somewhat noticeable differences in their faces but they are drawn exactly the same and Barbara Sr’s hair looks exactly like Babs’s hair, yup not a single grey hair.

Onto the villain, more problems with hair in one scene she has lime green hair and then we cut away from her and she has pink???  I don’t get it but at least we know it wasn’t a mistake up at DC because Babs does question it.  Anyway apparently she is able to control people buy this 338 phrase, I don’t get it.  This does seem a lot like the binary code that was used on machines in the DCU of yesteryear to turn them malicious, it also seems a lot like Zur-En-Arrh was for Bruce Wayne.  So there are a lot of questions left wide open for this Gretel character despite it appears that she is only going to be around for one more issue.  Bruce guest-starring in this issue was supposed to be a huge deal, no really wasn’t but hopefully he will be in this issue and hopefully Gretel will be more flushed out and explained because we got nothin’ at all this issue.  One last thing before I conclude, Gail Simone this is directed at you, stop breaking the fourth wall with Babs’ dialogue it is getting very tiresome and it is getting very difficult to take Barbara seriously because she is not written like this anywhere else other than in her internal monologue.  Other than that there was not much good that came from this issue except for some pretty good action and some very good art by Ardian Syaf.