Let me start this… I guess you’d call it an essay, by saying a couple things:
First, I really like Barbara Gordon. She’s my second-favorite DC character after Batman, and sometimes I like to call her my “other favorite.”
Second, I really like Gail Simone. She’s one of my favorite DC writers and her Birds of Prey run (a series which was largely about Babs back when it had an actual premise) is one of my all-time favorites.
For those reasons, I was hoping that New 52 Batgirl would read like a good writer trying to make the best of a bad editorial decision and avoid alienating fans of the character as she was a few months earlier before Flashpoint.
That was not what it read like.
I’ve learned not to assume too much knowledge of continuity when I do things like this. On that basis, here’s a hopefully fairly abridged history lesson for context.
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1961: The first Bat-Girl, Betty Kane, is introduced. She wasn’t used much and was mainly a sidekick to the Batwoman of the time, Kathy Kane.
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1967: Barbara Gordon is introduced as the new Batgirl in anticipation of her being adapted into the Batman TV show. She has a moderately successful run as a backup feature up through the ‘70s but starts to fall out of use by the ‘80s.
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1986: Crisis on Infinite Earths causes the DC Universe’s second reboot. Batman: Year One seems to suggest that Babs no longer exists, giving Jim Gordon an infant son instead of an adult daughter.
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1988: Alan Moore writes Batman: The Killing Joke. It wasn’t originally intended to be canon, so part of the plot involves Babs. The Joker shoots her, paralyzing her from the waist down, and tortures her. This is so he can take pictures to show to Jim to try to drive him insane so he can in turn make a point to Batman. Babs is basically a prop here, and yet the decision to make this story canon is the reason she exists at all Post-Crisis.
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Still 1988: John Ostrander and Kim Yale, writers on the Suicide Squad title, was having none of this. They introduce Oracle, an information broker, spymaster, and hacker who assists the titular government black ops team. Oracle turns out to be Barbara Gordon, dealing with what happened to her by becoming a new kind of hero. It’s really cool. After Suicide Squad ended, she appeared a bit more sporadically until she started working more with the Bat-Family starting circa Knightfall in 1993. This grows into a sort of “mission control for all the superheroes” role.
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1996: Ostrander and Yale also write a story for the anthology book The Batman Chronicles – Oracle: Year One. It’s really good.
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Also 1996: They don’t get a proper series for a couple more years, but we get the first appearance of the Birds of Prey. A similarly mistreated character, Black Canary, teams up with Oracle as her personal field operative. Basically, Oracle’s role in other books is to help other superheroes when they need information, but in Birds of Prey, she sets the agenda. Other characters get involved over time and the Birds become less a duo and more a team, especially when Gail Simone takes over the title in 2003 and adds Huntress to the main cast, but it’s essentially an Oracle series.
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1999: Huntress briefly attempts to be a new Batgirl. Not exactly being friends with her yet, Babs is not amused.
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Still 1999: Huntress’s Batgirl costume sure looked cool, though, so Cassandra Cain is created as an actual, non-fakeout new Batgirl who can wear it. She’s pretty awesome, and Babs is heavily involved in her title as sort of a surrogate mother to her. Books about legacy characters are so much more polite when the previous holder of the name doesn’t have to be shunted out of the way for the new one to exist.
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2009: Speaking of which, Stephanie Brown’s run as Batgirl shunts Cass out of the way so Steph (who had a perfectly serviceable identity as Spoiler already) can take over. I don’t like this book, but it has fans and at least stands out tonally from the extremely edgy Batbooks that were running contemporary to it.
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2011: Flashpoint nukes the whole timeline. Suddenly, Cass and Steph don’t exist at all and Babs has been magically healed by an inexplicable spinal implant and is Batgirl again.
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2014-2015: Steph and then Cass are at least reintroduced to continuity, though Cass’s new name (“Orphan”) is still dumb.
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2021: We’re supposedly getting Oracle back. I don’t super trust DC to stick to this, but I’m hopeful.
The editorial decision to revert Babs from Oracle to Batgirl has always left a very sour taste in my mouth. I’ve expounded on this in numerous places on here, so let me just quote one of my more recent formulations of my arguments for this:
So, coming back around to what I said to begin with: This is a bad editorial decision. But Gail Simone had that great Birds of Prey run. Before @HubCityQuestion fact-checked me below, I said “She’s in the holy trinity of Oracle writers with Ostrander and Chuck Dixon (the writer of the early part of Birds of Prey which everyone ignores but I actually like almost as much or more than Simone’s stuff – it’s got some tremendously silly arcs, but it also has really emotionally powerful moments like #8 or #16-17),” but the “holy trinity” comment doesn’t work because Kim Yale was co-writer on the Ostrander stuff I was talking about and she makes four. But anyway, you’d think that Simone would handle the transition with some tact and respect for the character’s previous incarnation.
But… her Batgirl run seems to be structured around thumbing her nose at anyone who misses Oracle. It opens on a villain who is motivated by a hatred of people who have experienced “miracles.” It really comes across as a strawman of those of us who preferred Babs as Oracle – “You monster, why do you want her to be disabled?” Not only does that ignore a lot of the actual reasons it upset people, it’s still demeaning for any number of reasons. It’s equating preferring a strong, positive protagonist with a disability with being a serial killer.
And then this happens in Batgirl (2011) #6:
Aw, that’s sweet, right?
Yeah, if you haven’t done your homework. And there’s no way Simone hasn’t done her homework.
Let me show you something else. This is from Oracle: Year One by Ostrander and Yale:
What you just read is Ostrander and Yale tearing The Killing Joke apart in a single page. But it also manages to say a lot about both of these two characters and inform characterization for the following fifteen years.
The arc was simple, believable for both characters, and effective. Fairly or not, both Babs and Bruce would process what happened to her as Bruce’s fault – her because she resents being his collateral damage and him because he has this whole guilt complex about seeing people get hurt around him. This turns the previous dynamic where she clearly admired him enough to imitate him very tense.
There are a lot of later stories where Bruce is kind of overprotective of Babs, doing things like surveilling her house just to make sure she’s all right early in Birds of Prey – again, he feels guilty about the whole thing. But she (and Simone gets this part and specifically brings it up in the issue with Nightwing) doesn’t want to be pitied or coddled. (This, by the way, makes more sense when she has a disability that keeps reminding all parties of all of this baggage. She doesn’t want to and doesn’t let what happened define her, but she has to deal with people being weird about it, and has trouble accepting that they just want to help. Again, Batgirl #3 actually expresses this pretty eloquently even while the rest of the series is shooting all of this to hell.)
There was some unnecessary squabbling at various points, but their dynamic is about their having to work to be friends again. And neither of them wants to not be friends, so it’s not like the whole thing is bitterness and angst, it’s just difficult, dramatic, and most importantly interesting. In fact, something that was really satisfying about the 2010 volume of Birds of Prey (written by Simone, and clearly very shortly before this Batgirl run) was that they finally did start to reconnect as less tense, complicated colleagues and more genuine friends.
All of that is what Simone blows up in two pages. The character in Ostrander and Yale’s story has agency. She was used and hurt and tossed aside and disregarded… and that makes her mad, so over the course of O:YO and the (earlier by publication) Suicide Squad run, she uses that anger to move forward. She’s strong, motivated, and has agency.
Simone turned it backwards, though. We have this stubborn insistence that Batgirl is totes independent and not a sidekick and didn’t like or want to work with Batman when, um, what part of “you decided to dress like him” don’t you understand? When New 52 Babs gets shot, she’s left broken and afraid and needing to be comforted by, frankly, a big, strong man. Instead of having motivation and agency, she’s just grateful that someone (who arguably helped put her in this position in the first place) is deigning to be nice to her. (An odd point to miss for the writer who literally created the term “women in refrigerators,” incidentally.)
And it’s not that I have any problem with Batman being nice. I like that, and that’s what he’s there to do even in Ostrander and Yale’s version. He was being kind of a jerk in terms of apparently sharing the Joker’s dismissive attitude towards Babs, but that was part of what Moore did, which is still canon in the New 52 while Ostrander and Yale’s much more interesting and thoughtful character work is getting deliberately retconned out.
This sort of thing is exactly why becoming Batgirl again was unbelievably toxic to this character. People who seem to genuinely care about the character seem to get defensive when some of these points are raised, so to be clear, I am not spending my day pounding out two thousand words about Babs because I dislike her or have some sadistic desire to see stories where she’s suffering. I’m doing it because I want to see the character treated with respect and the things that are cool and interesting about her preserved.
I have numerous other gripes with the series, but aside from a few other small but recurring points like references to “the real Batgirl,” the rest is more about these particular stories being silly than the long-term damage to the character I’m talking about here.
