Batgirl #1 (of 6)

One-sentence summary: Pick this issue up if, for some reason, you're simultaneously dying for new Batgirl adventures and have absolutely no idea of her origin.

I, to some degree, read comic books for mild escapism. Not all of them, sure, but I go into the ones I'm initially neutral about (like this one) with a relative tabla rasa of opinion and am usually willing to overlook little things like awkward story-telling, which is why I rarely complain about those details. However, this was such a heavy exposition issue it almost physically hurt. It was like reading a wikipedia entry on Batgirl's history for a few pages as Nightwing droned on and on about it.

There's a couple major problems with a solution like that. For one, it's an incredibly inelegant solution to the problem of explaining what a reader needs to know about a character. There should be about a dozen alternative solutions you could just come up with off the fly (gradual introduction? Writing the story so you don't need to know all the background? Making portions of the background into elements in the story so the explanation of them is fluid?) which take care of this issue without brazenly drawing the reader's attention to what you're doing. The other problem is, like many comic characters, her history is ridiculous when you sit there and just spell it out like that. There's a certain suspension of disbelief when you read comics, sure, but there's only so much it can handle.

The story itself seems fine so far. It doesn't seem like it required all that background, but whatever. Unless you're a Batgirl fan, this seems like a pretty throwaway title to me so far, and a bizarrely plotted one at that. Escapism is far less enjoyable if you're made aware of it.