Favourite Female Character: Cassandra Cain (I know, shocking, right?)

[espanolbot]

In comics Cass Cain is probably my all time favourite character, as her introduction in No Man's Land also happened to be the first actual non-DCAU comic series that I ever bought (I was on a post-apocalyptic bender at the time).

Since that I've come to like a lot of other female characters a bunch too (Stephanie Brown my second favourite overall DC character, Darwyn Cooke/Ed Brubaker's Catwoman is my favourite antiheroine, Matt Wagner's Dian Belmont and Madame Xanadu my favourite Vertigo characters, Revy and Major Kusanagi my favourite anime/manga characters) but I've always been attached to Cass for her overall character arc (yes, even including her fall from grace and climb back to the top), her ethics, personality and history.

Admittedly her skillset isn't exactly THAT unique (looking at you Midnighter, Finesse, Taskmaster and that one Jim Balent Catwoman series that Anne Hathaway said she liked) but I thought that it worked for the character.

As an example of her early series, here is a bit from an issue that isn't posted that often.

The context: Something stranger is happening in Gotham, stranger than usual, I mean. Within the same couple of city blocks over the course of several days, seemingly ordinary people without prior histories of mental illness have started to go on killing sprees. Cass sets out to investigate, and after incapacitating a former veteran who seemed to be a hallucinating he was in a war zone while emptying a machinegun on an open street, she notices a man in scientist gear holding an odd machine up on a nearby rooftop watching the show.

She swings up to catch him, only to be blasted by the machine herself, causing her to blackout. Some time later she comes too, finding Batman standing over her, saying that the Joker has escaped from Arkham and he needs her to track him down... only for the Joker to abruptly shoot him from a safe distance.

Comments

[espanolbot]

I presume he was looking for whatever neurological triggers cause people to commit acts of violence or some such thing, which would be both useful and a valid area of study... if he wasn't using it to turn ordinary people into mass murderers in order to do so.

If he could go one way, it's conceivable from a comics standpoint that someone could make a machine that quashes violent impulses in people who are more usually susceptable to them. Which in Gotham would make him a LOT of money.

But then he ruined it all by using unwilling people as test subjects. *sigh*

[icon_uk]

That rarely ends well though

[filthysize]

That's the absurd part of this for me. The story tried to frame the experiment as a mad invention that he had use on random people, when this actually would've been a legitimate psychological study if a machine like that existed. It's not like the typical Hugo Strange "I'm gonna make a serum that makes people's brains so large they spill out of their mouths and mutate into frogs... FOR SCIENCE!" This is actually for science.