Review: Birds of Prey Vol. 5- Soul Crisis

Quick Summary

Pros: The climax of the volume’s main storyline is pretty exciting. Black Canary has moments of decent character development.

Cons: The entire beginning of the book is overfilled with exposition and unnecessary crossovers. The end of the book feels trivial and does not give the series a satisfying conclusion. Characters are portrayed pretty poorly.

Overall: In a comic where the quality has always been rather variable, it is unfortunate that the grand finale occurs at one of the lowest points yet. The storyline is boring from the very start, prioritizing heavy exposition and crossovers over the actual plot. Later parts of the book are not much better and the entire series ends in a way that is sure to disappoint many. There are one or two solid moments in this collection but these are overwhelmed by the many negatives.

Story

Birds of Prey Vol. 5: Soul Crisis is a disappointing volume on its own and a disappointing conclusion for the series as a whole. It starts out heavy on exposition, only pausing once to be interrupted by a crossover. The book then finishes by going from meaningless adventure to meaningless adventure until the series comes to an end that will satisfy few. There is a brief moment, in the middle of the book, where things actually start to get interesting but even this is held back by poor characterization of the heroes. There is simply not much here to draw in any sort of fans

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The book starts with a “Zero Year” crossover issue that sets the mediocre tone that the rest of the book will follow. The story is only moderately interesting and the action is barely thrilling. There are a few good moments here but they are drowned out by the poor ones. It also doesn’t help that this story’s connections to the volume’s greater narrative are forced at best, and don’t help it much.

From here, the volume’s narrative starts to be introduced. It actually begins as a rather unique concept involving two immortals going to battle with each other once every generation. However, the first chapter here is almost entirely exposition and proves to be the most drawn out and boring chapter of the volume. Before things even have a chance to recover, a tie-in to the “Gothtopia” event takes place and distracts from the main storyline. This crossover is intrusive and does almost nothing to better this series at all.

Once this is all over, the battle between the immortals moves into its endgame. This is honestly the best portion of the collection, as it features a few great battles and some solid character development for Black Canary. If this storyline was allowed to develop for a little longer and was kept free from intrusive crossovers, it is possible that this could have been a good or even great storyline. However, as it stands, this only proves to be a decent conclusion to an otherwise poor story.

Once the battle is over, the collection goes on to detail two more random missions and one story from an alternate future. After the emotional and physical toll of the previous battle, these random missions just feel trivial and unimportant. Instead of being a climactic end to the Birds of Prey’s adventures, these seem like filler stories tacked on to pass time before the series concludes.

It is also worth noting how terrible characters are for the majority of this volume. Every character entered Soul Crisis with a unique storyline ripe to be explored; Batgirl was dealing with her brother’s death, Condor was struggling with meeting his old team again, and Strix has problems with everything in her life. However, instead of seeing any of these issues dealt with, character moments are almost entirely lead by the strange love triangle between Black Canary, her husband, and Condor. Condor’s encounter with his team is briefly touched on but his main character development comes from his goal to literally kill Black Canary’s husband, a terrible desire that is never fully addressed. In a series that has been all about the characters from the beginning, it is even more disappointing to see them in such disarray in the final volume.

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Art

While the story has a number of major problems from start to finish, the artwork manages to stay consistently average for the entire collection. The artistic team of Robson Rocha on pencils, Scott McDaniel on breakdowns, Jonathan Glapion on inks, and Chris Sotomayor on colors depicts each character accurately and has a decent level of detail. There are not many places where the art really stands out in an incredibly negative way, however, there are also not many places where the art stands out in an incredibly positive way either. The end result is a book that gets the job done visually and looks decent throughout.

Continuity

Birds of Prey Vol. 5: Soul Crisis continues the story from Birds of Prey Vol. 4: The Cruelest Cut (Review).

The Birds of Prey series ends with this volume. However, Black Canary and Batgirl reunite in Batgirl Vol. 1: Batgirl of Burnside.

This volume also references stories from other comic books, detailed below:

• The first chapter in this volume is a tie-in to the “Zero Year” event, which begins in Batman Vol. 4: Zero Year- Secret City (Review).
• The second chapter is a tie-in to the “Gothtopia” event, which begins in Detective Comics Vol. 5: Gothtopia.
• Commissioner Gordon references Batgirl killing someone. This is a reference to her actions at the end of Batgirl Vol. 3: Death of the Family.
• The last chapter is a tie-in issue to the Futures End storyline