Birds of Prey #3

Last bonus review for tonight.

Title: Birds of Prey
Issue: 3
Date: January 2012
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Duane Swierczynski
Artist: Jesus Saiz
Colorist: June Chung
Letterer: Carlos M. Mangual
Editor: Janelle Asselin, Bobbie Chase, Katie Kubert
Cover: Jesus Saiz, Nei Ruffino

Canary has invited Poison Ivy to join the team. That goes over about as well as could be expected, complete with all manner of pot-calling-kettle-black as trained assassins Starling and Katana suddenly get uptight because Ivy is "a terrorist and a killer". Which she has the audacity to just flat out deny! The inevitable fight-the-make-up follows, and in all of the grudging acceptance of Ivy by the rest of the team that follows, we don't get a single clue as to why Ivy would actually want any part of this.

We quickly move on to the clue-gathering portion of this issue's activities, which is made easier by the fact that the bad guys happened to leave a slip of paper with the names of their next two living-bomb assassin/victims in their abandoned hideout. Not exactly Batman-level detective skills needed here.

So the team mounts an "operation" on a train, and it very quickly goes badly as we finally get the rather contrived outcome of some odd moments in the main fight scene back in issue #1. At least there is some continuity here, folks, because not much else in this issue made any sense.

Writer Duane Swierczynski had to jump through some fairly ridiculous hoops to get to it, but the ending cliffhanger is really good. Sparrow continues to be entertaining. Otherwise, though, I had a too hard a time getting through the logical flaws to enjoy this one all that much.

Rating: 5.5/10