Oracle's Tenure with the JLA, Part 1: Recruitment

[glprime]

By request from thebigapricot, the time when Oracle was inducted into the JLA



The newly re-united JLA has just thwarted several major-scale villains from taking over the Earth and basically destroying all civilization (the Know Man, the Hyperclan and the renegade angelic Bull Host), but there are still more ominous events on the horizon that the "Big Seven" feel need a larger, more diverse group to handle.




Sooo, yeah. Less recruiting and more telling to be an electronic mole within the League's new digs. This is Oracle just off her tenure with the Suicide Squad, setting up her own organization as the head of Birds of Prey and still adjusting to taking orders from her old "boss," Batman. Not at all the polished mastermind we'd see in latter years. But we'll get there.

Also, take note of the "tech lingo" and art choices made here. This was published in 1998. It'll get harder to stomach certain things as we go along.



John and Martha are pleasant as always, while Bruce is in full "BatGod, Supreme Dick" mode. Oracle and Plas are voted in sheerly on Batman's word. Neither Aquaman nor Supes question these. Also, nice to see the King of the Seas getting a strong nod as a founder and thus let in on lots of the League-building decisions.



I like reading all these little asides about the current status of characters in the DCU.



The unwelcome visitor is Guy "Yes, I Still Go By Warrior" Gardner showing up on the moon and naming himself new chairman of the League.

The tension between Oracle and Bruce is very evident in this series and Batman, etc. Why Barbara's not snapping back so much is probably because she still has some respect for Bruce, despite him cramping her style.

Incidentally, the layout of her clock tower computers will change constantly with each artist, but the seemingly LCD/projection world map is a constant. And yet she's surrounded by CRT monitors? Have to assume the artists were going with what they all had at their houses.



Yes, relative newbie Huntress was given a spot on the "best-of-the-best" team. Why? Largely Bruce trying to mentor her into being a "better" hero, i.e. not becoming a killer anti-hero. It's not a wholly bad idea; if you work around folks like Superman and Wonder Woman, you're going to alter your attitude a bit.



Batman wordlessly strides in and stares down Gardner who leaves in a huff.

Is Barbara still pining for her "hero" days? It's not something that'll come up again for awhile, but this is right in the period when she's trying to fully realize her Oracle identity and become an operator in her own right. Something she won't get with the JLA right out of the gate.



So right now Barbara just acts as a Data Dog, fetching info for Bruce and giving him eyes-on when he requests. That'll change with the new League's public premiere and their first case of infiltration (a recurring theme with the Watchtower) in Part 2.



7 pages from JLA Secret Files Vol. 2: "Heroes", a 22-page story.

Comments

[icon_uk]

Aside from being a first class pain in the arse to Babs (She's not doing it fast enough, offer to help, or send a Robin over), Batman doesn't win any points for...

"Neither Nightwing nor Black Canary would consent to join the League"

For heavens sake Bruce, just say "They said no when I asked", the way you phrased it makes it sound like they turned up their noses and made "Ewwww, not the JLA" noises.

And frankly, fun though he is, I will never like Plastic Man in the JLA as much as I like Ralph, especially when Batman doesn't want to be a full time member (IIRC) and he then whines about not having enough thinkers on the team; Ralph IS a detective.

[aaron_bourque]

So's Eel.

More because he needs to be . . .

[retro_nouveau]

Agreed on Ralph. I like Plas, but Ralph > Plas.

[yaseen101]

IA. Not a fan of Bat-Dick or Bat-God.

[aaron_bourque]

Yes, relative newbie Huntress was given a spot on the "best-of-the-best" team. Why? Largely Bruce trying to mentor her into being a "better" hero, i.e. not becoming a killer anti-hero. It's not a wholly bad idea; if you work around folks like Superman and Wonder Woman, you're going to alter your attitude a bit.

And then editorial mandated she be kicked out to prime her for her role and possible death in No Man's Land . . .

[iskander]

God, I had forgotten how bad the blue and white Superman was...

[tacobob]

Hey! We had a Blue and Red Superman! That's two Supermans for the price of one!

[jaybee3]

Electric Superman Blue dates this story more than any outdated tech jargon IMO. It's almost hard to look at now he just seems so out of place.

[yaseen101]

The costume design was kind of cool but not really Superman-ish.

[autumn_lily]

I always thought the long hair and beard combo on Aquaman made him look homeless...

[darkknightjrk]

Yeah, I was never a fan of the "bearded with a hook" look on Aquaman. I'm a fan of the water hand, myself. :)

[rhythmbandit]

That league discussion in the kitchen is great, and Bats eating an apple is the icing in the cake. Fun Stuff.

[tornadotwin.blogspot.com]

Those are some radical suspenders, Aquaman! Just absolutely RAD! Rad!..... giraffe, rad!
honestly that's all i noticed from this post

[sistermagpie]

From the back I kept mistaking him for a woman in a jumper.

[jarodrussell]

Rewrite her operating system?

*sigh*

Was I on crack back in 2004? I must have been, because I really remember this character being...not this...dumb.

[sistermagpie]

You should write a fic about some heroic tech support person who deals with her on the helpline.:-)

[jaybee3]

Looking at it from an in-story POV (i.e. trying to relate to the Bat-Dick version of Bruce so prevalent in the last 2 decades) - It's stories like these that remind me that there must be truly something special in Bruce Wayne that so many people (even his fellow JLA members who voted him out) keep coming back for more of his toolish-ness. This is especially the case with his "Family". Alfred and Dick I can understand, but Babs, not so much. She isn't related to him in any way, heck she even though he may have been guilty of killing Vesper Fairchild when the rest of the Bat-Crew were scurrying around pretty sure of his innocence. Helena stopped taking his crap pretty quickly when she figured she would never get "in" with him, but Babs even at her angriest is (almost) always the good soldier even when he treated Cass like crap etc.

And just to be clear, this is only how I try to reconcile the in-story relationships among the Bat-Crew, I personally hate how he's been written until lately and I hope Morrison brings Bruce back a much different man than the Bat-God.

[bluefall]

I usually reconcile it with "she loved him before he was crazy."

I mean, all that Bronze Age stuff is still basically in continuity, neh? He became her brother/mentor/uncle/friend back when he was still a kind, friendly, caring guy, and it's hard to get more tightly-knit of a family than one that risks their lives together. So even after Jason died and she got shot and Bruce went subsequently nuts, she still had all that devotion from back when he was worthy of it. That doesn't just go away overnight, especially because Babs prolly feels that what happened to her was a part of it (and would probably be right even on an in-universe level).

Plus, I tend to think she gets him better than any of the other Bats, simply because her personality, post-shooting, is closest to his; she's more liable to give him a pass for his assholery and pride and controlling tendencies because she's a prideful controlling asshole too and she knows where he's coming from with that and why.

[bluefall]

I always find Hippolyta on the League so weird. All the standing by and sitting back and totally failing to contribute, it's bizarre. She's just kind of... there. I mean, of all the Wonder-cast, she's second only to Cheetah for having the most schizophrenic characterization, which is saying something, but JLA!Polly is still OOC even on those terms. Too passive. Polly's personality is always quite strong, whether it's the peacemaker or the warrior or the JSA stalwart or the psycho Circe impersonator. The one thing she never is is "just sort of there."

[blakeyrat]

Re-WRITING the operating system? Backups, woman, backups!!!

The fastest typist in the world who has a perfect memory might be able to write DOS in a month... maybe.

[bluefall]

Might be simple linguistic shorthand. If the new hookups require an upgrade from OracleOS 2.4 to OracleOS 2.5 because a few bits of code will have to be rewritten around insane Martian programming logic, that could be done in a short time and plausibly qualify as "rewriting the OS" in a loose and imprecise sense.

Obviously that's still something she should have had prepared beforehand, but I'm perfectly willing to believe that Bruce is an idiot and sprung this on her last-minute, so she's having to adapt to the new systems as she cracks them.

[jelly_ace]

It's kinda hard to see Bats in Batgod mode when he's a) eating an apple that he obviously filched from the Kents' refrigerator and b) he's using the kitchen as a JLA meeting room, with a rose-covered kitchen table serving as conference table.

[yaseen101]

It would be more appropriate if it was the non BatDick/BatGod Batman.

[zordboy]

There were a couple of moments that really sold me with this issue.

1. Batman arrives at the Kent farmhouse, and just helps himself to the food and has a late snack. Of course he would.
2. Batman makes Guy turn around and leave just by showing up and looking at him. Hah!
3. The inclusion of Zauriel. I loved him on the JLA.
4. I stand by Bruce's call on Plastic Man. Given the kinds of crap Plastic Man eventually ends up doing, it stands to reason, while he's not a detective, as a shape-shifter, he's ridiculously more powerful than Ralph. And I like the ideal of the JLA as the Big Guns of the DCU. Plas deserves that spot.
5. I like that the final panels indicate that Oracle has realised that Bruce wanted her as a Leaguer for the first reason that she's damn good and deserves to be there, but also to keep an eye on the rest of them.

Even Huntress being there, back when she was wearing a decent, sensible costume. At least this volume of JLA was readable.

[zordboy]

Oh, and something I've always wondered... obviously Flash is Hermes. IIRC Huntress was meant to be Artemis, and Plas was meant to be the trickster Dionysis (sp?). Hades, Zeus, Hera and Poseidon are all a given. Hephaestos would be Steel, fair enough. But where do J'Onn and Kyle fit in? And Zauriel (which was the real head-scratcher)? And Aphrodite and Ares were part of the Olympian-12, weren't they? So who are the equivalents there?

[arbre_rieur]

Why's Oracle tinkering around with her computer? To make it up to snuff for the task of hacking into JLA HQ?

[glprime]

Apparently. We'd assume that getting into the next-gen tech based on the moon (what'd they develop Delay-Tolerant Networking early in the DCU?) requires her to "boost" her system specs, but the writer's choice of her words make it seem like he expects every different network interface requires modular re-arrangement of hardware.

[thehefner]

Guy's "BITE ME, CRAB-FACE" never fails to amuse and delight me, even after all these years.

[thebigapricot]

Thanks! Bats really is quite the dick here. I had forgotten how ugly some of those costumes were. But you have to love it when Aquaman is showing more belly than Huntress. I love Huntress' body language in the second to last panel -- very cocky and "I can take this or leave it."

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

That tech jargon is really just a list of random compter-related words, isn't it? "Reroute the jumpers?" "Reconfigure the dll files?" That's the problem with using technobabble with real technologies. At least if she'd said "adjust the phase variance of the positronic transmitters and disperse the dilithium crystals," no one would have read it and thought "that's ridiculous."

And "update the drivers?" At least that's a real thing, though it still has a few ridiculous implications.

[jarodrussell]

Combine "update the drivers" and "dll files" and you start to realize Oracle doesn't keep her Windows machines properly patched. I bet she still uses IE6 too.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I'm tired of new JLA rosters. Can we just get to the JLU already?

--LBD "Nytetrayn"