I would call Tate Brombal’s DC All In Batgirl Vol. 1: Mother slight but auspicious. As it suggests on the tin, Batgirl Cassandra Cain and her mother Lady Shiva go on the run and … well basically that’s it. It’s a heavy action book, Batgirl and Shiva and their allies against hordes of nondescript ninjas, which is not my preference but which I recognize has some appeal and precedent; by the end, Brombal’s Batgirl places itself within a very specific DC canon.

Of greater interest to me — and perhaps others who are light on action but big on history — is how Brombal posits this series as a catch-all for Cassandra Cain’s 26-year mythos. Like Joshua Williamson’s recent Green Arrow run and others, Brombal seemingly effortlessly reaches across incarnations, even across continuities, to make all of Cassandra’s depictions fair game. Moreover, Mother makes much of one of this Batgirl’s most controversial eras, proving that even the most contentious of comics is eventually just fodder for some other writer’s storylines.

[Review contains spoilers]

I clock a two-page action spread in almost all six of artist Takeshi Miyazawa’s issues here. They are all nicely rendered; for an action book, I had no feeling of the creative team taking up space with one- or two-page splashes, but rather it all contributes nicely to Mother’s action movie feel. And I’m not opposed to a good action movie, though I’m considerably more tolerant of an action movie as opposed to an action comic, something about what I want out of two hours of popcorn versus what I want when I sit down with a book in my lap.

The general aesthetic is similar to Joshua Williamson’s recent Damian Wayne Robin book, essentially a fighting game set to comics. Both Robin and Batgirl hearken back to such comics as Dennis O’Neil’s 1970s Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter, and here, that’s more than just homage. Lady Shiva, nee Sandra Woosan, was a supporting character in the pre-Crisis Richard Dragon series, and no small amount of what Batgirl learns and where Shiva sends Batgirl at the end of the book seem to speak to a specific Richard Dragon storyline. This starts as a Batgirl book, but it rather seems like Brombal is headed toward reestablishing some of the history of Dragon, Shiva, and Bronze Tiger that’s been muddled and changed over time.

Speaking of muddled and changed history over time, Brombal packs a lot into four words of dialogue when Shiva recounts Batgirl’s former identities: “Kasumi. Black Bat. Orphan.” For those keeping track at home, “Kasumi” was Cassandra’s secret identity when she infiltrated the Justice League Elite for Batman back in 2004; “Black Bat” was the identity she took while Stephanie Brown was Batgirl, roundabouts the original Batman, Incorporated and the end of Grant Morrison’s Batman run in the early 2010s; and “Orphan” was Cassandra’s name in the New 52 when Barbara Gordon was Batgirl, debuting in the 2015 Batman and Robin Eternal. At least one of those doesn’t exist any more and the other two are iffy; it’s not as though Brombal offers to tie it all together cohesively, but the mere suggestion that it all “happened” is more than good enough for me.

Brombal doesn’t stop there. Spirit World, in which Batgirl co-starred, referenced some of Cassandra’s deaths and resurrections, suggesting certain events returning to continuity; Mother makes that explicit, name-checking Batgirl #25 of her original series, when indeed Shiva killed Cassandra and brought her back. But also Nyssa al Ghul is here, whom Cassandra seemingly killed in Adam Beechen’s Robin, part of a much-maligned villain turn for Batgirl after Infinite Crisis (I interviewed Adam Beechen about it in 2011).

That’s not something I’d ever have expected DC to go near again; remembering Batgirl was Kasumi is one thing, but evoking how DC “ruined” Batgirl (as the complaints went at the time) is quite another. I could say here too that it’s not as though Mother pivots on these events — you could still enjoy this book without familiarity — but the art even flashes back to Cassandra snapping Shiva’s neck and impaling her on a hook; it’s not shying away, either. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone their upset over the treatment of their favorite character, but seeing the storyline presented so matter-of-factly after 15 years feels like a nice bow put on what was, in the moment, heady times.

I don’t feel much, I have to say, for the mother-daughter relationship between Shiva and Cassandra. Shiva is untrustworthy, we know, and the tension in the story is Batgirl’s ability to read people by their movements versus whether Shiva can fool Cassandra due to Cassandra’s love for her. But therein is where I get bored. Batgirl is the good guy and so she loves her mother despite her mother’s villainy, or else Batgirl will realize she’s greater than her mother and love her chosen family instead. Shiva either honestly loves Cassandra and is trying to do what’s best for her, whether well considered or not, or Shiva is running a scheme and is only being motherly to reach her own ends. It’s some combination of these, as it always is, and so far I don’t see much that Brombal is adding that’s new and/or that we haven’t seen in Batgirl series previous.

One exception I’ll mention comes at the beginning of their journey, when Shiva has whisked Batgirl away on her private train full of acolytes. Furious, Cassandra’s already tenuous language skills fail her completely, and all she can say is “No”; momentarily embodying a typical parent, Shiva’s response is, “Use your words.” Even as I find this conflict trite, I grant that Brombal establishes that Shiva is perhaps the only person who understands what it’s truly like to be Cassandra — to be able to read people by their bodies — and also who understands Cassandra’s true potential (or at least Brombal is convincing in depicting Shiva as convincing Cassandra of that).

There have been instances where writers simply cannot use Batgirl Cassandra Cain without putting more words in her mouth than what the early presentations showed she could use — a talky Cassandra, that is, who’s hardly Cassandra at all. Tate Brombal’s Batgirl is not that; rather, Brombal’s Cassandra is excellent, and there’s nary a false note in Takeshi Miyazawa’s art. I’ll read the next volume of this Batgirl, certainly; it’s simply that in Batgirl Vol. 1: Mother, not much happens besides moving from here to there and fighting a lot.

[Includes original and variant covers]