Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero's current run on Birds of Prey has really won us over (so much so that we listed it at number four in our best of 2023 list). This week's #6 brings the current arc, 'Megadeath' to a conclusion which looks like it will have wide-ranging implications for the rest of the run.
To recap: Team BOP have infiltrated Themyscira to try and rescue Sin, who has been imprisoned by the Amazons. Unfortunately, in the process of rescuing her, she's become possessed by the malevolent entity Megaera who is now fighting back against our heroes.
Spoilers for Birds of Prey #6 ahead
The first half of the issue concerns itself with the issue of saving Sin. Unfortunately, it seems like the only way to stop Megaera from ascending to its full power is to kill her. And, for a while, it looks like most of the team - especially Barda and Harley - are kind of OK with that.
As it turns out, however, that's just a ploy to try and make the creature leave her body, but it doesn't work. Instead, it seems that Sin and Megaera are fully bonded. "We live together, or we die together," as the creature says when they come under attack.
That's not as bad as it might sound. Sin is able to gain control of the situation and uses it to force Megaera into a binding agreement: they will share her body, but Sin will have overall control. The upshot of this is that Sin effectively now has superpowers.
While the rest of the team rally around Sin to show her some love and support, Black Canary meets with original Batgirl Barbara Gordon, who is feeling hurt because she wasn't recruited to be part of the team. Dinah doesn't explain her thinking, but we find out more when she meets with time traveller Meridian - AKA the grown up "Maps" Mizoguchi.
It turns out that this is not the first time that the team have attempted to save Sin. They tried with Barbara as part of the team, failed, and both Sin and Batgirl were killed. So they went back in time and tried again. And again. And again. In all, it took the team 11 attempts to successfully save Sin - and in each of those loops Barbara died, until Dinah made the call to cut her out of the team completely.
Why is it Barbara specifically who dies each time? Maps has an answer for that. She believes that someone in the future, with similar time travel tech to her own, is trying to assassinate Batgirl.
So now there's a new mission for the Birds of Prey: protect Barbara Gordon at all costs, because a world without Batgirl is not one that Dinah wants to live in. And protecting her is going to mean recruiting some new team members...
Who will be joining the Birds of Prey?
It's unclear how many new members there will be, but we already know at least one of them. Thanks to DC's April 2024 solicitations, it seems like Mari McCabe AKA Vixen will be joining the team. Of course, we still have next month's issue to go, so there's still time for a few more twists and turns before then.
Birds of Prey #6 is out now from DC
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