What Birds Of Prey Got Wrong From The Comics

Birds of Prey might be the girl gang story of Margot Robbie's dreams, but its star is most definitely Harley Quinn. It's her trauma, frustration, and search for emancipation that fuels the story, her presence that hooks in audience members unfamiliar with the likes of Cassandra Cain and Huntress, and her voice that announced, with the first trailer, that this is a movie for all who are "so freaking over clowns." She is the Birds' manic mistress, as much a den mother as she is a mallet-swinging warrior queen.

In the comics, however, Harley has pretty much nothing to do with the Birds of Prey. This is a striking enough fact on its own, but all the more so when the history of the Birds is taken into account. The Birds of Prey have, over the course of their history as a team, drawn so many characters into their orbit that it's actually more notable to have somehow escaped membership as a DC female than it is to have spent time on the team. Though the Birds lean towards good guys, Harley's moral murkiness isn't an obstacle. Poison Ivy, Lady Shiva, and Catwoman have all been claimed affiliation at some point. By whatever winds of comic book chance, the Clown Princess of crime has never spent much time with DC's premiere girl gang until they made the jump from the printed page to the silver screen.

Renee Montoya is, perhaps, the Birds' unlikeliest member, being a seasoned police officer amidst the law-breaking likes of Harley Quinn and Huntress. She's no innocent, however. Being a cop has made her as intimately familiar with the system's failings as anyone can be, yet just as doggedly dedicated to doing good as the day she joined the force. Moreover, her personal history as a Dominican-American woman from a rough part of town and an out lesbian provides unique story opportunities, resulting in some of the best DC comics of the past few decades.

Surprisingly, though, all those riveting comics had nothing to do with the Birds of Prey. Renee Montoya began life as a character created for Batman: The Animated Series — a distinction she shares with Harley Quinn, who also made the jump from the cartoon to the comics. Gotham Central, an Eisner Award-winning police procedural centered around the Gotham's Major Crimes Unit, made her into the character fans know and love, as it saw her confront disillusionment, corruption, romance, and the inherent strangeness of being a cop on the Batman beat. Later years saw her enter into a romance with Batwoman, take on the mantle of the Question, and operate out of a lighthouse on the North Carolina coast. Though the "Blackest Night" event drew her briefly into Oracle's orbit, she's never actually been part of the Birds. Luckily, she fits right in.

The gulf between Cassandra Cain's Birds of Prey incarnation and her character in the comics is wide indeed. To begin with, she's best known as one of many women to have taken on the mantle of Batgirl, which she operated under for much of the early 2000s. Though she's taken other names as well, most recently Black Bat and Orphan, she's likely still best known as Batgirl and never, as she is in the movie, as an independent figure using her own name.

Beyond that, however, is the enormous change the movie has wrought in her personality. The Cassandra Cain of Birds of Prey is a jorts-sporting kid who asks Harley Quinn if she's "that psycho chick," while the Cassandra Cain of the comics ... well, she's not likely to say anything at all. Raised to be the perfect assassin, Cassandra was never taught to read or write, in the hopes that replacing these language skills with training in how to read the body language of others would make her an unstoppable martial artist. In some ways, this worked. Cassandra's understanding of the human body is almost inhuman in its perfection. Yet this left her mute, illiterate, and utterly cut off from the world, a problem indeed when she escaped her mendacious home to become a hero in Gotham City. She does, eventually, learn to communicate, but she definitely never comes anywhere near the flippant, slang-slinging ragamuffin of the film.

The Birds have always been a female-fronted and female-majority super-team. Though the movie's lineup is different than that of the comics, it continues this history with an all-woman roster of fighters, cops, and misfits. It is, as Margot Robbie has detailed, a concerted choice. Birds was born as a "girl gang" story, in which women get to be friends and take down anyone who says they can't play as hard as the boys in bat ears.

The Birds' nature as a woman-first superhero operation has always been one of the core conceits of the team and likely always will be. Yet men have never been excluded from the team's ranks, and they've even become longstanding members with a hand in some of the team's most legendary stories. Some are characters with deep roots in the DC Universe, as in the case of Hawk and Wildcat, while others, like the brilliant Savant and his right-hand man turned lover Creote, are unique to the Birds book. What unites them, and all the other men who've assisted, collaborated, or outright joined the Birds at some point, is their belief in the team's methods, goals, and track record. Does this mean a second Birds movie might see the team working with, say Captain Boomerang? Only time will tell, but the precedent is there.

The women in the film version of Birds of Prey aren't bad, exactly, but you couldn't comfortably call them the good guys. You've got Harley Quinn, for one thing, who's spent her entire cinematic career as a Batman-fighting, Arkham-escaping, joyride-taking villain. Huntress, Black Canary, and Cassandra Cain's pasts have been shaped by thieving, mob affiliation, and violence, and though they're working towards different ends now, they're not exactly joining the Justice League. The Birds aren't good guys, yet neither are they bad. If anything, they're trying to figure out what "good" even means to them anymore and how they might achieve it, even if it's through their less-than-squeaky-clean skills.

The Birds of the comics, in contrast, are firmly aligned with the DC universe's forces of good. Of the team's core members, Huntress is probably the one most comfortable with law-breaking, but even then, she's hardly a hellion. The Birds are good guys in the Batman mold, doing good by night, largely through subterfuge and science. That approach might come with darker costumes, more contact with organized crime, and a tad more espionage than the likes of the Super Friends, but it's still very much in line with what it means to be a superhero in the world of Superman and Wonder Woman. Hard-bitten ex-cons looking to claw their way into a better, if not necessarily more law-abiding life, they are not, except in movies led by Harley Quinn.

Birds of Prey has never been a series without darkness. Darkness has, in fact, always been a big part of the formula. Oracle's journeys through cyberspace tend to reveal the insidious sort of crime the Birds set out to stop. Abuse, extortion, slavery — that's all firmly within the Birds wheelhouse and has been from the beginning.

And yet one of the most striking differences between the comic and the movie is the latter's grittier tone. Bones crunch, blood spatters, and noses break in Birds of Prey. When the Birds of the comics get into the various dens of depravity, they disrupt, do their job, and get out, while the Birds of the film revel in those spaces, appealing to an audience that wants theatrical revenge. The movie is a story about grit and grime, clubs and kingpins, blood and baseball bats. So too is it, like the comics, a story about women making the world a better place one fistfight at a time. The difference lies in the fistfights' place in the story. One treats them as a means to an end, while the other glories in their up-close catharsis.