Birds of Prey #92

"Progeny Part One: Inseperable"
Story by Gail Simone, art by Paulo Siquera and Robin Riggs

Cool plot idea: the Crime Doctor (sadistic medical-torture expert) wants to defect from the Society of Super-Villains, and Oracle and her team of sexy operatives have to give him cover. Dumb execution (i): the story doesn't get any further than bad guys pursuing the fleeing turncoat and our heroines fighting them off. Dumb execution (ii): that story, dull as it is, is intercut with scenes of the former Black Canary undergoing martial-arts training in some southeast Asian village, and the intercutting is so clumsy as to make both stories almost incomprehensible. (I had to reread and skip the Canary pages, then go back and read them separately.)

Douglas Wolk wrote a great piece about Birds of Prey as a series that "revolves around a handful of characters whose back stories are unbelievably tangled up." Wolk's "super-reader" might recognize the new team member who appears in sillhouette on the penultimate page, but I had to check Wikipedia to learn that it's Gypsy, of all people. I was reading JLA during the much-maligned "Detroit" era, when Gypsy was around, and I wouldn't have identified her in a million years.