A Powerful DC Hero Just Completely Transformed

The Birds of Prey are in hot water, and their strongest member might just be the person who pushes them under. In the newest few issues of the Birds of Prey ongoing, a new team composed of some of the Birds’ greatest villains has formed, all with the goal of taking down Gotham City’s all superheroine team. In issue #20 they started their assault by targeting the team’s heavy hitter, Big Barda, launching her into space and then blowing up the rocket. After she crash landed the ninety miles back to earth, instead of killing her, Barda became the unwilling host of one of the DCAU’s best villains: Inque.

Barda’s Transformation is Really, Really Bad News

Big Barda is without a doubt the strongest member of the Birds of Prey, and also one of the strongest heroes in DC in general. Barda is a New God, a race of divine beings who were granted immeasurable strength and power due to their planet’s proximity to the Source, which is the DC Universe’s origin for all life and creation, effectively their version of God. Big Barda is far stronger than even the average New God, having been originally raised and trained in the arts of war on Darkseid’s planet Apokolips. She was the leader of Granny Goodness’s Female Furies, before she eventually escaped to earth with her love Scott Free, Mister Miracle.

Barda’s strength speaks for itself. Beyond the obvious feat of surviving an explosion and following fall from outer space with just some bruises, Barda has strutted her stuff plenty of times before. She’s served as a heavy hitter of the Justice League before, with her raw power being comparable to that of Superman’s or Wonder Woman’s. Alongside her off the charts strength, Barda packs some truly terrifying Apokolyptian tech. She sports her nigh unshatterable battle armor, and her Mega-Rob, a weapon which grants her powers such as flight, teleportation, energy blasts, and gravity manipulation. And even all of that weaponry pales in comparison to Barda’s Mother Box, which can realistically do just about anything in the right hands. 

RELATED: Batgirl’s The Book of Shiva Takes a Riveting Step into the Past (Review)

All of the other core members of the Birds of Prey are street-level fighters. Sure, they boast the two best hand-to-hand combatants in the entire world with Black Canary and Batgirl, but neither one of them could hope to do more than momentarily distract Big Barda in anything resembling a fair fight. And now all of Barda’s indomitable power is in some truly disastrous hands. 

How Inque Possessed Big Barda

After turning her into a divine meteor, Inque’s job from the mysterious Daemon Prime was to use some kind of injection gun on Big Barda. When that failed to pierce Barda’s skin, Inque resorted to using her own abilities to transform her arm into a blade and slash a wound onto Barda. Since Inque’s entire body is made of an ink-like substance, hence her name, she was able to liquify herself and enter Barda’s bloodstream. Now, she’s piloting her body like the world’s most dangerous sports car. She rejoined her allies at their shadowy military base, and they set their sights on bringing down the rest of the Birds of Prey.

While we don’t know anything about Daemon Prime yet, definitely the character we have most questions about is Inque. Before her appearance here, Inque has only ever showed up in the potential future within the Batman Beyond comics, originally being a character made for the Batman Beyond tv show. There’s no indication of how or why she could have come to the present day, but this could imply that Daemon Prime has some connection to the future. No matter why she’s here, the team is going to need to find a way to deal with one of Terry McGinnis’s most deadly villains if they want any chance of saving Big Barda, or getting out alive. All the power of Big Barda with the complete lack of value of life the assassin Inque brings to the table is a match made in the fiery pits of Apokolips, and that’s bad news for everybody. Especially for our overwhelmed, outnumbered, and now very outgunned heroines.