Scans_Daily

I like the scan you've labeled 09 the best. Very nice.

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God knows what they'll do to the poor woman next. :/

Vanhook and Kreisberg will collaborate on a story about Batgirl's first few adventures, where she sort-of-accidentally kills/maims/permanently injures an innocent bystander or crook-who-wasn't-all-that-evil. Batman saves her a couple times, and gives hypocritical lectures, tells her she doesn't have enough training, but leaves her in charge of Gotham while he's away taking Robin on a whirlwind martial arts training trip. While he's away, her accidental victim (or said victim's closest vengeful friend/relative) sets up an elaborate plan to destroy her.

Ever resourceful, she outsources her detective work to cops or other people she encounters instead of figuring things out herself, and she has trouble remembering things like street names and obscure cultural references that she would've memorized by the age of twelve. In the end, she nearly gets killed, Batman and Robin come back just in time and save her. Batman lectures her again, but also gives a little condescendingly and indulgently pat-on-the-head speech (after all, she's only a girl). Then she and Dick declare their undying love for each other.

I could go on, but I don't want to depress you any further. =(

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And more in need of Batman's approval, (even though he never! approves!) plus good cop/bad copping of Batman and Robin re: Babs. And Babs Year One. Look! Teamwork!

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I do think she has a weaker origin than Bruce and Dick

I don't.

Pre-Crisis perhaps. Post-Crisis, no. What's weak about "inspired by my cop father and my own sense of right and wrong, I decided to risk my life to protect my home and neighbors"? I think the fact that, originally, she did this because it was right (and fun - the enjoyment of it is another key reason I love her so much) makes her much more compelling than Dick or Bruce. (See also, why Tim is was my favorite Robin.) She's not Grimdark McSufferpants trying to resolve her own tragedy - she's a genuinely selfless individual who wants Gotham to be a safer place. How is that weak? What kind of depressing-ass worldview says that only someone who's suffered horribly can want to protect others from pain and loss? Isn't the point of Batman's crusade that *Gotham* is worth protecting, that her citizens, if offered a line, will grab it, and join in? That hope spreads? That one good man can make a difference by making his symbol larger than human, something that might not only terrify evil men, but inspire good ones?

I can't quite figure out the reasoning

No one had written her in a while; she didn't have an active backup or storyline, she wasn't on any teams, her profile in the comics had been falling off. I have no idea (and it's probably impossible to verify the truth at this point anyway) how much of that was due to a decline in reader interest and how much was simply that the writers' stable at DC didn't have anything to say about her, but there was a strong sentiment at DC at the time that the character had basically run her course. It wasn't about Bruce at all, just a sense that there wasn't any point to Babs anymore. TKJ was sort of a side effect; DC tossed Babs on the refuse pile, and Moore said "hey there's some parts I could scavenge here," and DC was like "well we're done with it, knock yourself out." (Except the actual words were "cripple the bitch." Sexism? In my TKJ? The devil you say.)

Which, to be honest... were it not for the Oracle persona, Babs probably *would* have pretty much gone the way of Man-Bat. Guess you can't grow the best flowers without a little fertilizer.

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I don't think it was a decline in reader interest. Look at how many times she was on the cover of Detective. Look at how Batman Family got absorbed into Detective to *save* Detective.

I'm very familiar with Wein's comment on crippling. The bitch.

I'm so glad she got to become Oracle.

But I'm still really interested in how she went from a saving figure of Detective Comics (Just had 70th? I think? anniversary? Hooray!) to crippled bitch not worth starring in the comic in which she got crippled.

About the rest, I will craft a response, but I'm smiling. Because you've got a point about one person and saving a city...

Wait. How is her saving Gotham better post than pre-crisis?

Oh. And I'm aware no one had written her in a few years. I don't know what was up with that, but her retirement and killing came one on the heels of the other.

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And hmm. I'm still thinking her removal from the BatStory had a lot to do with Batman. Divorce him from his team, make him a loner, get rid of the gimmicky helpers. He's dark! No helpers!

Certainly her desire to save Gotham was based on both her father and Batman's examples. In any origin.

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ashtoreth.insanejournal.com

Hunh. That sounds like the difference between Spider-man and Spidergirl.

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scottyquick.insanejournal.com

I think it's a different inker. It looks very nice, motto.

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ashtoreth.insanejournal.com

I believe Babs and her girlfriend were making up pretend superheroes, based on the ones extant at the time.

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I think it was two years. That she hadn't been written. Her second to last story *may* have been in 1984 or '86, then her *last* last story was in 88? (Where she retired.)Then her *really last* story: The Killing Joke was also in 1988, too. So she had a year or two off from crimesolving, then officially retired (badly) then got ~~killed~~ crippled both within months of each other. I need spreadsheets. Also, it's kind of amazing she didn't just die, versus survive. Except that injured survivor is more of a ... something to the real heroes of TKJ. Who are not her, even though... you know. She's the one who suffered.

And she was the last of Batman's partners to relinquish the role as Batman's partner.

Seriously need spreadsheets.

But Dick was Nightwing by then, right? After a big old break-up with Batman. And Jason was dead and it was pre-Tim. Batgirl was the last one to get rid of. To make Batman alone. Dun Dun DUNN!!! He's such a loner. So personally, I do believe it was about Batman.

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Last thing I'll say:) is I think the de-aging of Babs was even worse, even with everything we know about the decision to cripple, the de-aging rewrite of Babs is even more of a fridging. The de-powering of an adult woman. Who needs Batman's approval. Versus an adult librarian turned Congresswoman.

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Wait. How is her saving Gotham better post than pre-crisis?

Pre-Crisis, she had been a perfectly content, unambitious if perhaps vaguely bored librarian her entire life, and then she just happens, sheer random chance, to be in the right place in the right costume at the right time, and BOOM this is fun she's a crimefighter now. Post-Crisis, we got this here Secret Origins story, which retcons that total accident into a lifelong ambition - young!Babs sees her new father and his spooky Bat friend making a difference, and decides she wants to do that too, so she spends years studying and training. She's no longer Batgirl by accident, she's Batgirl by design. Well, rather, she's hero by design - the actual "becoming Batgirl" bit is still a spur-of-the-moment piece of serendipity, but now it's the unpredictable first raindrop on an overcast day (it was gonna be wet somewhere eventually) rather than a spit out of nowhere under a clear blue sky.

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Reasonably sure that Babs was shot before Jason was blown up, as she's in a chair at his funeral.

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Oh:) So seeing Batman and her dad changed it.

Yes. Fits entirely with my opinion and also with pre-crisis Babs here: http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/138438.html#cutid1, which I've already made part of my own personal understanding of her motivation.

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When the hell did Jason die, then?

Oh. 1988. A bad year for the BatFamily.

So they killed her at the same time as they axed Jason.

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mysteryfangirl.insanejournal.com

Freudian slip. I mean shot.

Shot her, not killed.

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That is an unwholesomely plausible story summary. I feel for you, and the reason, sanity and basic human intelligence you had to suppress or sacrifice to put yourself in such an unerringly accurate DC mindset.

ghetto edit: Though... as I think on it, the undying love between Dick and Babs doesn't seem quite right. One of them would have to die immediately after, and this being a flashback about two living characters, that's off the table. Some kind of cheating or betrayal would seem more appropriate, or at least a bizarre, OOC suspicion or divisive personality shift..

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B:TAS did something similar. She wore the costume to pose as Batman, so people would think her (framed) father had the support of Batman. Her purpose for putting on the costume in the first place was to help her father, and she was drawn into action shortly after, and decided she was pretty good at it.

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batcookies.insanejournal.com

I honestly don't think you can get around looking up to Batman.

If you don't look up to Batman, then why the hell are you dressing like him?

That said, I think it bears noting in the first one she loved superheroes when she was younger, and made up superheroines, but the one she gravitated to was "Supergirl". She ended up studying more about Batman because she was moving to Gotham, but initially her thoughts were "what heroine would I like to be? Who else? Supergirl!"

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Okay, how about they just sleep together, and then Dick skips off to the Titans (because he's so flighty!), while Babs stays at home in Gotham and swears she'll wait for him to return to her (because theirloveissotrue)?

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That's very much how I interpret it as well.

She's very passionate about seeing right triumph over wrong, and she sees her father, all the Gotham cops, and Batman all fighting to make that happen, so she wants to participate. She wants to join in, and do her part, not only because she'd like to see the results of it, but because she knows she'd be good at it.

But it is a struggle for her to establish herself in the role, because she has to get around her father's protectiveness, and Batman's uneasiness (partly considering his friendship with Jim) about accepting a partner who he has not personally trained and raised the way Dick was as Robin.

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I think it can work in that she admires what he does from afar, what he's come to represent for the city, and how much he's helped her father, but when she actually meets him and he's all "Go home, little girl", she kind of re-asses in the moment based on his condescension.

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Which goes to show you that it's all cyclical. War Games (which was in 2004, I think) resulted in Babs and the Birds hitting the road, Steph dying, Leslie exhiled in Africa, Tim and Cass re-locating to Bludhaven, Dick to New York, and writers eventually forgetting about Onyx.

They wanted to make Batman a loner again.

I'm currently reading the first volume of Under the Hood, where Jason Todd comes back. It takes place not long after War Games, and there's one bit where Dick and Bruce are in the Batmobile and having difficulty following a radiation trail, and Dick starts to say "it would be better if we could satellite/triangulate/whatever, we should get..." and then Bruce says something like "You were going to say we should call Oracle. We came to rely on her too much, we can't do that anymore."

On the one hand, it's acknowledging how much of a difference Oracle working with them made, how much easier she made it when working on a case.

But then it's also a little like "yeah, she's so helpful she made us incompetent, it's good she's gone, now we can work alone like real men" which is, just, uhg. That's not how teamwork works, you guys. That's not how a family works.

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I was thinking, Babs kept files on Dick's private life! Because Bruce asked her to! But he can't be with someone he can't trust, who hurts and distracts and undercuts him! So he goes and resurrects Terra.

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