Believe me when I say that this is the least pervy of the mini-series' three covers.
One of the biggest complaints about comic books, super-heroes comics especially, is that they’re incredibly insular and self-involved, to the point of scaring off new readers. There are many ways to combat this – recap pages at the front of both single issues and trades summarising existing plot threads for new readers. Making sure that every character is named clearly in an issue (which doesn’t have to be as clunky a task as some writers seem to make of it). And, as out of fashion as they are these days, editorial footnotes explaining bits of jargon or side-references to other stories.
Oracle – The Cure doesn’t use any of these, which is just one of the reasons as to why this collection is a complete waste of any reader’s time or money.
The first problem is that it opens with two issues of Birds of Prey. The last two in fact, as the title got culled along with a number of other Bat-Books around the time of Final Crisis and Batman RIP. This isn’t really made a big deal of on the blurb or cover. You’d think it would be, so that Birds of Prey fans would know for certain where the conclusion to that series is, on the off-chance they’re not gong to pick up the Oracle solo series also in here. But given how poor the issues are, I wouldn’t go shouting about it either.
I really like Birds of Prey, but it’s a title I’ve only ever read in trade and, thanks to none of the volumes being numbered, rarely in sequential order. Nevertheless, it’s a fun series and easy enough to get into with the recap pages and character profiles usually at the front of the trades. Gail Simone’s run was really rather good (which is probably why she’s back for the relaunch happening now) but was followed by Sean McKeever, who much like his Teen Titans run after Geoff Johns, didn’t really do anything worthwhile. This conclusion to the series is written by Tony Bedard, who’s a good writer that seems to have the misfortune of being given unenviable tasks with his assignments (“Hey, Tony, rather than leave Exiles after a fun, short run, how about you stick around and tread-water with it for a year or so while Chris Claremont recovers from a stroke?”). Here he wraps up the fairly lame Platinum Flats Syndicate plot threads that McKeever set up, where he moved the team out of Metropolis (after they’d been there for not very long at all) and took them to the aforementioned Platinum Flats and get into spats with a bunch of low-grade Society of Super-Villain wannabes. My opinion on this storyline is deeply affect by the fact that I’ve not got a bloody clue who any of the villains in this story are apart from Calculator. Bedard doesn’t bother to name them, which doesn’t help. But really, it’s the last two issues of a cancelled title – it’s hardly a good place to jump in on, so quite why DC decided to put them at the front of this differently branded collection, rather than at the back of the previous BoP trade, I’ve no idea.
After Birds of Prey rushes to an unsatisfactory conclusion (Barbara disbands the team for no particularly good reason) we go to the Oracle mini-series. Now, between these two stories was Final Crisis, I think. Certainly the Oracle mini references a lot of the events of that and its tie-ins – the Anti-Life Equation being on the internet and Calculator’s kids Marvin and Wendy being attacked… somewhere. None of this is properly explained though and given that I have little to no interest in reading Final Crisis and I can’t see why any Birds of Prey fan would be expected to do given the massive gulf between the style and genre of the two titles, it would have been nice if my hand was held just a little bit.
But no, instead the reader is just presented with an thoroughly ridiculous story where Calculator searches the remains of the internet (which completely went down, somewhere, somehow) for fragments of the Anti-Life Equation, which are for some reason crystals and which he somehow transposes into actual crystals, because he for some reason, which isn’t explained, thinks it’ll bring Wendy out of her coma. Along the way it makes various people’s heads explode, even through them just looking at it on the internet in an MMORPG. My brain exploded as well, trying to make sense of the damn plot.
The entire mini-series smacks of a technological thriller written by someone who hasn’t got a damn clue how technology works. It’s not quite as bad as the film Eagle Eye (which is perhaps the pinnacle), but when you have characters magically able to completely alter the diegesis of a computer game because they’re ‘hackers’, my eyes start revolving at near super-sonic speed.
Also, the depiction of Barbara Gordan, former Batgirl and now wheelchair-bound super-hacker Oracle, feels rather off for the most part. She’s unduly angry for no particularly good reason and writer Kevin VanHook pretty much regresses her right back to past the beginning of Birds of Prey to just after the Killing Joke, where the Joker crippled her. I’m not saying the events of the Killing Joke didn’t affect her incredibly deeply, but she’s grown a lot as a character since and has far more going on in her life. Plus, there’s really no good reason given as to why she’s not reforming the Birds of Prey.
The art’s fairly good for the Oracle mini, but suffers from having too many inkers. The covers are pretty embarrassingly cheesecake though and the third one really feels like being only a stone’s throw away from particularly creepy kinds of Japanese porn. The art for the Birds of Prey issues is fine, but a far cry from the book’s glory days of Nicola Scott and her equals.
Given that Birds of Prey has just been relaunched with Simone writing again, I think it’d be for the best that we all agreed to just forget about all the stuff between her two runs and pretend it didn’t happen. The Cure included. It won’t be a great loss.
