Gabrych started his comic-writing career with Batgirl, doing a fill-in issue a three or four years ago. When DC tried doing a hipster run of Detective Comics, they booted Gabrych (who was doing an amazing job) to Batgirl. The transition wasn’t immediate, but Gabrych quickly turned Batgirl into a good book. He managed to make a shallow character into a good one and, besides the tie-in laden second-to-last story, the series has been a bright spot in my comic reading. And now Batgirl is over (and Gabrych appears to be out of comic books, which is shameful, since he’s the best writer DC had doing any of their Batman line).
For this final story, Blood Matters, Gabrych doesn’t exert much energy on flash. The story starts immediately following the last story and instead of feeling like a continuation of that story, it feels like... the next story. I’m hard pressed to find a good example of a similar situation, but I think Star Trek II and III is probably approximate. This transition isn’t Gabrych’s usual device (it’s no one’s device really), so I have to wonder if he got the news the series was being canceled and wrapped everything up. This story does wrap everything up too. In a handful of frames, Gabrych relates all of his work on the character, all of her hope. Since it’s a comic book, he even got to kill her and bring her back, which was a particularly well-done sequence, bringing in elements from that fill-in issue of the book.
What’s so good about Gabrych’s Batgirl is the depth. He and the artists get the depth across, they get the visual significance across. Visual significance is difficult in comic books, mostly because the image is static (someone said the significant movement in comic books happens between the drawn frames, Dave Gibbons I think), but these issues get some real significant movement across in those frames. That achievement is the combination of Gabrych and his artists, particularly Pop Mhan. It’s something special. (Off hand, the only comic to come to mind as another example is Paul Pope’s 100%).
I’m not sure how perfect a close this story is to the series as a whole (like I said, Batgirl was an incredibly silly, testosterone fantasy I’m shocked she wasn’t created by Chuck Dixon--it was Kelley Puckett, who I’m unfamiliar with), but it’s a perfect close to Gabrych’s excellent work on the character.
