Birds of Prey: Dead of Winter - Gail Simone, Nicola Scott et al.
"At one time I ran this operation like a finely tuned espionage machine," Oracle muses at one point in this last collection of Gail Simone's issues for Birds of Prey, "now the cast is much bigger, and a lot harder to control." Which kind of says it all.
Although the series has once again found stability in its artwork with the fine pencils of Nicola Scott, what was once a tightly focused story about a handful of second-tier Gotham superheroes (as well as not-quite heroes Creote and Savant) has expanded into the kind of Galaxy-sized, obscurely grounded and ridiculously framed story that is what so many people (including me) dislike about superhero comics.
I can kind of see why Simone took the chance to move to another series at this point, but for her Birds of Prey swansong she makes sure to try bring back a couple of her best characters, including (yay!) Creote, and her skill at characterisation and dialogue makes sure I'm never really bothered by the fact I don't know what's going on half the time.
Still, reading these books has helped me to feel like less of a complete philistine when it comes to what is obviously a very important part of western comics culture, and I'll probably make a half-arsed effort to read the further adventures of Oracle, Huntress and the rest when I can.
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