From the tale woven to the art to delve you into their world, Birds Of Prey #1 is wondrous. I am not sure I expected any less from such a team – of both heroes, and creative talents – but they blew away any expectations I had for this issue. They've laid the groundwork for any stories to come, now we just need patience to see what that may be. For this reader, that's definitely a hard ask. Birds Of Prey #1 is an excellent example of a new take on the team, and I hope to see more one day. Read Full Review

The art is expressive and well paced. This book is a great package overall and I personally would like to see more of this iteration of the Birds of Prey. Read Full Review

Emanuela Lupacchino does some beautiful art in this story. The city looks vibrant and full of detail. The characters look fantastic and the action is rendered beautifully. My favorite aspect of the art is Lupacchino's decision to keep a certain character bathed in shadow and not showing his face to increase his menace in the mind of the reader. Read Full Review

I enjoyed this book a lot. Azzarello's dialogue is strong and he creates a fun team dynamic. I love the artwork throughout; the book looks amazing. I wish it had more of a unique identity and didn't feel the need to be like recent movies and television. But I had a lot of fun reading the book. Read Full Review

The Birds of Prey say f*** the Patriarchy and mean it, mostly, in this 'graphic novel-length' one-shot; heads literally roll, sure, but this Black Label book could have hit a bit harder. Read Full Review

It's a beautiful comic, but the story isn't worthy for the Birds of Prey. Read Full Review

Birds of Prey isn't perfect, but I didn't expect it to be considering the constant changes it endured behind the scenes. There are plenty of strong moments found here though, and that makes me wonder what we would've gotten had DC stuck with their original plan of making this an on-going series. More than likely, the book would've benefited because it was clear that Azzarello had a long-form plan that was character-focused, and he would have been restrained from some of his questionable choices by not having the luxury of a Black Label branding to give him more room to play with "mature themes." Read Full Review

For anyone who was a fan of the New 52 or a fan of the Birds of Prey movie, you'll get aspects of both here as Azzarello tries to put together a world where Black Canary, Huntress and Harley Quinn are the heroes of Gotham.  Yeah, it doesn't come together as well as I would have liked because of how the story had to be condensed for this one-shot, but overall it was still fun and the art was amazing throughout. Read Full Review

Ultimately this one-shot is for the most dedicated Harley Quinn or Black Canary fan. Its not terrible, but theres nothing that exciting to make it worth tracking down. Read Full Review

Do yourself a favor and just skip Birds of Prey(Azzarello, Lupacchino). A very pretty book with no imagination and a high price tag. Read Full Review

Birds of Prey #1 doesn't take flight and instead plays off like an 80s B-movie mixed with really outdated views of Mexicans and just incorrect real world information. It's hard to overlook the bad here. Take out the Birds of Prey, and you have a bad crime story that's forgettable in every way. DC had an opportunity to deliver a comic that'd entice movie audiences to discover more but this comic's end result might be the opposite. Read Full Review

Overall, if Birds of Prey #1 was going for a grindhouse action-movie vibe, it achieved it. Its story is competent and the art is excellent. But as a Birds of Prey team, it doesn't remotely live up to the Palmiotti/Conner miniseries it's competing with. The Birds always had some fun energy, and this take just feels like a dirge. Read Full Review

A lackluster, trying-too-hard script is partially made up for with excellent artwork and colors. Read Full Review

Stellar art lifts a fairly dreary story into the light. Read Full Review

Although the plot has many enjoyable moments, this Birds of Prey one-shot still reads as what some fans had feared from the beginning"the general concept of the Birds of Prey movie filtered through a superficial, male voice. Read Full Review

With a hefty $10 price-tag, the story is at best hit-and-miss as even the villains (who get a prominent role on the cover) are largely forgettable. Read Full Review

Other than some swearing and beheading, I have no idea why this is a Black Label book. The writing is inconsistent with the need to add the Joker into the mix…..again. The art is equally inconsistent with poor finishing in the quality department adding to the half arsed feel to proceedings. Considering how expensive this book is I expected more, much more. Read Full Review

Drawn out but never really fleshed out, Birds of Prey #1 feels even more disappointing given its lengthy delays. Far missing the mark to tie into the long out-of-theaters Birds of Prey film, Azzarello and Lupacchino's styles feel like a poor match for one another, compounding the issues this threadbare story already brought to the table. Unless you're a diehard fan of the property or one of the creators involved, save your money and stream the movie instead. Read Full Review

Birds of Preyis undoubtedly the weakest book to come out of DC's Black Label. Azzarello has no grasp of the characters, and the way that women and people of color are treated is borderline offensive. There are much better comics to spend all of your money on. Read Full Review

I have never described a piece of media I've reviewed as racist, but that's all I can say forBird of Prey #1. Read Full Review

I genuinely have nothing positive to say about this book. It's a terrible attempt at synergy with a movie that's remarkably feminist, going all the way in the opposite direction to wind up feeling misogynistic. The dialogue is terrible, the plot is awful, the art does not do its job well, and this doesn't do anything interesting. For the price point, I'd already be hesitant to buy this issue regardless of how good it was. But based on its quality, I don't think anyone should spend even a dollar on it. There are far better things to do with that money than buy this terrible comic. Read Full Review

I thought the artwork was fairly decent. The story was ok, too. The ending kindasucked... but not too many books end on "bang". Overall not nearly as bad as some people are reviewing it. I feel like people are all jazzed up on the racist card right now and they're so quick to jump on any situation they deem as "racist"...what ever happened to good old fashioned sense of acceptance. Not everyone or thing is perfect...get over yourselves.

By the looks of how offended everyone was, I was expecting to be reading some really messed up shit. What I actually read is quite possibly the tamest work Brian Azzarello has ever published. It was exactly what I originally expected. Passable and enjoyable. After reading Hellblazer and Faithless though, this is Sesame Street edge.

I knew what it was going to be the moment I saw Brian Azzarello's name on the cover. But I think once I accepted what it was going to be, I actually kind of enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong, the story really is trash. Yet in a weird way, I enjoyed as a guilty pleasure. I just embraced how cringe some of the moments were and I ran with it. The closest comparison I have to this story is All Star Batman and Robin where the story is abysmal, but enjoyable in an ironic way. Honestly, I'd love to see them continue the series just to see how absurd it could get. The art was really good too, and it did have some decent action scenes, but overall...the story? Not great. But if you simply embrace the cringe, it makes it much easier to swallow and... dare I say? Maybe enjoy it just a little bit. more

Eh. I am a fan of Brian Azzarello, don't get me wrong, but his recent work under the DC Black Label has not been up to par with stuff like Wonder Woman of Joker. In short, this felt like a bunch of separate comic issues slapped together in TPB style, with murky transitions, inconsistent flow, and a very confusing ending. They also slapped in Joker for no reason, and didn't do a great job finishing off the story set up. The art was good, the writing was fine, but the direction was just off.

If this was expanded out into a series, it may have done better. There was alot of inconsistencies that made the story very rocky and confusing/not complete, like the story skipped certain details and jumped to another panel. This could have been better.
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Using this year's "opportunity" to stay at home as much time as I can, I've picked Grant Morrison's Supergods again, and rediscovered something I long forgot about - The Sekhmet Theory. Long story short, for those unfamiliar, it tries to tie subcultural movements and trends to reversing polarity of the sun eyery 11 years or so. I won't comment on that, I'm too much of a rationalist for that. But I can't deny the dualist cycles of grounded and psychodelic youth subcultures and art that pop up every decade or so. Look at Brian Azzarello - once considered to be an amazing, groundbreaking writer who's not afraid to take creative risks and touch very mature subjects. Today he's a silly edgelord hack who made Batman bang Batgirl, Harley attempt to rape him, and oh, he also turned Etrigan into a mumble rapper. What happened? Did he change as a writer and burned out like Frank Miller, or maybe we and our culture changed and we grew tired of adolescent perception of violence and gore as something edgy and "mature"? Who the hell knows, but bottomline, Azzarello feels like a living fossil to me - someone who's stuck in the past and tries so hard to prove he's as hip and rad as ever in a world that contrary to him changed. How do you do, fellow kids?

Enter Birds of Prey - the Charlie's Angels of the DC Univeerse, combining fun, upbeat action with loveable street level characters trying to make a change. It's hardly the most famous team of all time, but iconic nonetheless. You say "Birds of Prey" and instantly Batgirl/Oracle, Huntress and Black Canary magically pop in your head. Due to wild shenanigans at Warner Bros, someone though giving them a movie before even introducing Green Arrow, let alone Bat Family, was a good idea, and then it turned out Batgirl wouldn't even be featured in it (lucky gal, this time really dodged a bullet) and Hot Topic Harley would replace her. Sounds like a recipe for success?
Unpredictably the movie bombed, which clearly DC blamed on lack of popularity of the characters as well as no real appeal to comic fans who didn't feel like the name suits this trainwreck of a movie. So what do you think they've done? Learned their lesson and pushed the studio to actually make something comic accurate, like maybe cast these characters right and clean off scribbles from Harley's face... or just quickly rush releases of several books with the new team to lay down the groundwork for any potential sequel that could not possibly be criticized for being poor fan fiction using characters that should not even be in it, while some crucial ones, cough Batgirl cough, are absent. Call me a cynical dick (which I sure am and find some cold pride in that), but sounds to me like they're doing exactly the latter.

The comic really feels like a desperate corporate product planted to make us (mature audiences) familiarize ourselves with the team and accept it as normal, while the other book (by Palmiotti and Conner) target younger readers. It tries so hard to take itself seriously at times, but ultimately what's so serious about two girls in fishnets and one in a purple Assassin's Creed coplay suit fighting an obnoxious Mexican gang with members using scythes in actual combat? Especially when one of the three is a 100% comedic character to her core?
Come on, Azzarello, this boyish vision of a "mature" comic doesn't work here. Same way actual Charlie's Angels modernization and grounding hasn't worked, adult Birds of Prey derailed pretty badly. Bury this failed experiment, it's not early 2000s anymore. Too bad Emanuela Lupacchino's talents were wasted on this abortion, her art is fantastic, but not enough to make me recommend this book alone. more

Man, I was promised racism and misogyny, and what do I get? A boring, clichéd, poorly written book. The dialogue here is really, really trying so hard. It's like if Buffy the Vampire Slayer's dialogue met incompetence. Azzarello seems to think what makes a great team is characters constantly finishing each other's sentences with "clever" double entendres. I was sick of it a few pages in, but fucking strap in because that's going to be repeated the entire time.

The characters aside from Harley seem out of character, but I don't think is a canonical story so screw it. I would say they are pretty much in line with the movie: Harley is trying to get over the Joker again, Huntress is trying so hard to be edgy and cool, Black Canary is pointless and Renee Montoya is a beat down cop with more than questionable morals. So I guess I can commend Azzarello for that...?

There's no good villain however. If you've seen the movie, you know that Black Mask is the highlight. He's the only reason I'd bother with the movie more than once. But unfortunately for us, we're stuck with a stereotypical Muerte cartel gang that can barely support the pages they're in. They felt like an absolute afterthought, including how easily they're dispatched with. And Joker and his gang are in it too. That's just too bad because I guarantee the book would've been better if Joker wasn't sidelined by... Whoever the fuck that was.

I don't even understand their plan. Kill off your consumer base through other distributors so they know to buy from you? Why not just offer "primo" shit that will definitely drive traffic towards you naturally. Why take the time and money to do all of that? Drugs are usually cut with potentially lethal mixtures because the cartel is trying to save money and the risk is worth it. A whole separate operation to intentionally kill your consumers is just stupid. But yeah, I know, just a comic. But what else has this comic given me? Nothing!

The art was good though. That's the most I can say about that. This is not worth buying. more

There are just so many issues here. Lupacchinos work is fantastic though! She deserves better.

Probably the worst written comic I’ve read in awhile. It’s a smaller book in bigger books clothing, the writing seems to even be edited bad on several pages and the art is only passable. I’d probably be less hard on it honestly if it were a $4 floppy at the 16 pages it was actually worth.

I don't get why users are mad that people are voting this issue down.

It's not a good comic, it has bad writing all over it.

1 is even generous for this

Emanuela Lupacchino deserves better writers. It is astonishing how DC put out such an overtly racist and badly written book. Stiff, robotic dialogue, google translated sentences. Harley despite her growth, still being defined by Joker. A boring story that makes no sense and is horribly misogynistic. Azzarello desecrating the characterisation of the protagonists.

This feels like a different book with different protagonists that was chopped and edited into a Birds of Prey book.

This continues a growing trend in DC: Removing her from everything that made readers resonate and care for the character (her relatiosnhip with Poison Ivy is absent and not mentioned in the book and pretty much replaced with Joker) and focusing on bringing in the comicgate crowd (which I suspect will be pleased with the racism and misogyny of the book).

0/10 I'm only putting a 1 because the platform doesn't allow for something less.

It's a shame that Lupacchino's art was used for such a horrible book. But the biggest shame goes to the editors. What where they thinking?
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