Birds of Prey 1998 - The Ravens - Girlfrenzy

SIMON says Armageddon.

In many ways, this is an interim booklet.

The girls' one-shot adventures are ending with this and those will continue in an ongoing series. Simultaneously the age of the double sized booklets is ending too and those will have only 22 pages, and even now it is it. Moreover, just like it turns out from the cover, it is not actually an adventure of birds prey but another team, the girls' future opponents. It is a mercenary team of four girls, they are called Ravens (a bird name too). It is very original. We immediately open up in the middle of an exciting (but not action) scene.

A soldier prepares to activate a nuclear weapon.

But it's discontinued, and we know in a very, very long flashbacks that the Ravens how came here, and who they are. They are led by Cheshire, it's some reference to her past, The others are Vicious, Termina and Pistolera (Gunbunny). They are all great warriors, but only Termina has super power when she touch a living it dies. It is pretty though. She is covered with some protective armor for preventing the accidents what I figured at first a weird nonfigurative tattoo covering the whole body. Deep in a jungle they are prepare to destroy a base of crime syndicate named SIMON. Along the way Pistolera and Vicious constantly quip each other, doubt the killing abilities of each other, and prepare to present these on each other. In this case, Cheshire always intervenes. It is main source of humor in the story. Of course they are killing too. It's almost a complete success, they're in the headquarters, but a soldier cans the comptroller of the neutron generator, and he prepares to start it. So you are back to the beginning of the story.

(They explain at length, I mean length for comics, that the neutron generator is different from neutron bomb that it kills only the living but doesn't damage the goods as not doing harm.)

Finally Termina kills the soldier, but that she starts the generator. Only the neutron ray cans destroy her saprogenic virus, which makes her super abilities. In the healing, however, she is dying. The others are fleeing the blast. Practically the failure is complete (they wanted to get the generator). Furthermore they have lost unique member possessing super abilities. (Termina's death it's only plausible in the story, but she no more appears in the pages of DC Comics, and the linked database writes her dead too.)

So Chuck Dixon's story is simple, linear with a lot of action, a few jokes, and one twist. Dinah and Oracle appear in only two panels when they point out that big nuclear energy has released somewhere. The artist is NelsonDecastro, he is the least good, but it's obliterated by the strong coloring.
The original hungarian blogpost is here.