The Movement #10

Written by Gail Simone
Drawn by Freddie Williams II
Published by DC Comics

And here we get the second half of the Batgirl/Movement crossover (although I guess technically it’s not a crossover, but a guest-appearance). Picking up from the last issue, the unconscious Batgirl has been taken to the Sweatshop. Virtue’s plan is to unmask Batgirl and take a picture of her face, so they can use that to basically blackmail Batgirl into leaving them alone. But Batgirl regains consciousness just as Virtue is taking off her mask and she snaps, having flashbacks of the events of The Killing Joke, and in flurry of martial arts moves proceeds to quickly, and quit brutally, beat the crap out of Virtue, Tremor, and Mouse.

After the dust settles, Batgirl and Virtue have a serious talk about Horizon, debating over the best way to handle this situation. Meanwhile, Katharsis has gone off on her own to track Horizon down. And, with the help of one of The Movement’s street contacts, she finds him. And the sparks fly between the two of them, and they end up having sex on the top of a building. This, of course makes her even more determined to not hand him over to Batgirl, who still wants to take him back to Gotham to be arrested. So, in the big final confrontation between Kartharsis and Batgirl, with the rest of the Movement standing by…well, obviously, I’m not going to spoil what happens, but Gail Simone wraps this story up in a way that is both exciting, dramatic, and thought-provoking. Once again I’m impressed with the way she’s able to mix in social commentary in the context of these stories, without sounding forced or preachy.

Other developments include Tremor revealing that she’s Asexual, Burden is apparently homosexual, and we get another appearance of James Cannon, who is angered by the fact that the Graveyard Faction failed at their assigned mission to kill The Movement and have now quit, but he is not giving up yet. So we get hints of future conflicts.

As I said in my review of the previous issue, another selling point is that no prior knowledge of the Batgirl series is needed in order to follow this story, making it completely self-contained. This is the proper way to do guest-appearances.