Helena Bertinelli is the daughter of a mobster, the last Bertinelli after seeing her whole family slaughtered when she was a child. This is the first post-Crisis Huntress story I've read and I liked it quite a bit. I've long found the peripheral members of the Batman family to be more interesting than Batman and the Earth-2 Huntress is one of my favorites. When a mobster winds up dead with a crossbow bolt in his chest, all signs point to The Huntress! Can The Huntress clear her name and answer some Questions about her past before Batman and GCPD bring her to justice? Rick Burchett’s art was essentially DC house style at the time (2000) and it looks dated and unremarkable now.īatman/Huntress: Cry for Blood is a hackneyed mafia story with capes - another Greg Rucka stinka! Was it good that Huntress, rather than taking the high road, basically continued the Cosa Nostra bloodthirsty culture? Eh, I was just glad when this nonsense was over. like a bad ‘80s movie.īatman and The Question are side-characters and don’t really add anything to the story. The one exception being at one point when Helena leaves for the countryside to train in Eastern martial arts for contrived reasons so we get a cliched training montage of she and her sensei doing moves outside, etc. I’m guessing Rucka is a huge Mario Puzo fan because this book reads like Godfather fan-fic with mafia cliches everywhere. Greg Rucka is in full-on hack mode right from page one of this book which opens with a corpse floating in a swimming pool like every other noir. Helena Bertinelli/Huntress’ gangster pop got smoked by another gangster - Helena wants revenge, blood for blood. Gail Simone did not pen this volume, as roughly during the same era she churned out several editions of consistently absorbing Birds of Prey action-drama adventures for DC with what seemed like relative ease. It was not bad, but it's dialogue-heavy instead of having enough action scenes, and at times leans a little too much on the aura of The Godfather film trilogy in its depiction of organized crime. Also, although Batman is listed front and center in the title he is strictly a minor supporting player here (hell, Nightwing and Robin get more page time), and this storyline takes place well before Huntress officially teamed with Black Canary and Barbara 'Oracle' Gordon in the formidable 'Birds of Prey' crimefighting trio. Graphic novel origin tale - and don't be fooled by a recent re-release version boasting the cinematic Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)-themed cover artwork, as this story is unrelated to that film and was originally issued in 2002 - featuring that purple-clad acerbic, acrobatic and crossbow-wielding Gotham City vigilante who, much unlike that burg's Dark Knight, has no issue with killing in her pursuit of justice. and you answer it alone.' - Helena 'The Huntress' Bertinelli, in the opening pages with her mission statement of sorts

That's 'omertà.' When blood cries for blood, you answer the call. 'You want justice served? You want vengeance taken? You want honor restored? Then do it yourself.

Birds of prey comic huntress