scans_daily | Cringeworthy Comicbook Moments: Disjointed Complaints About Misfit

espanolbot posting in

In the pantheon of comicbook characters, there are some that people can't stand even if other people seem to be big fans. In my case, there are probably three characters that I have an intense dislike of.

One is Kara Zor-El, from when she was introduced by Jeph Loeb up until after the Cass Cain Incident, where she became a lot more likeable. Her behaviour was retconned as it being Kryptonite poisoning, which I guess makes sense in a comicbooky way. Her feeling entitled to the perks of being related to Superman while a) beating up every superhero she met (who then thought she was the best person ever afterwards), and b) repeatedly being incredibly selfish while exhibiting annoyance when people asked her for help, didn't really endear me to her.

People who get given a free ride (unlimited cash from Bruce Wayne and a mentorship with Wonder Woman among other things) and doing horrible things without consequence kind of bug me. I mean, her behaviour is believable, in a spoilt, entitled brat kind of way, but considering I was reading about characters who had terrible backgrounds yet still managed to be good people despite it... yeah, Kara came off as kind of loathsome.

With the character of Misfit they had kind of the same problem, though approached from another angle. With Supergirl she felt entitled to a certain level of treatment because of who her relatives were, while with Misfit she just assumed that she deserved to be the treated like she was the best thing ever because she thought that she was.

Things probably weren't helped by her introduction, which in the midst of the "Where's Cass" business of One Year Later, showed the people of Gotham as being both ungrateful for Cass' service to their city and kind of gross in how they remembered Bab's tenure.

Smooth, but implying that Cass was just a fake proxy of Babs, while at the same time reducing Babsgirl (and Misfit by proxy) to just a "Killer" pair of breasts. Nice.

Considering Cass had vanished at this point after going to Serbia to look for Lady Shiva, Babs sends the Birds of Prey out to see whether this new Batgirl is her protege as no one had seen her during the time 52 was set, beyond a reference to her operating (offpanel) out of Seattle for a time.

After a brief run-in with Dinah and Helena, Charlie desides to teleport into Babs' HQ and declare that she's the new Batgirl. Understandibly Barbara is concerned over some random teenage teleporting into her headquarters and displaying knowledge over things she really shouldn't, but Charlie just interprets this as the standard "superheroes distrust each other when they first meet" trope.

With this in mind, she attempts to use the follow-up cliche to that one, where-in she kicks the wheelchair using Barbara in the face. With it previously being established that Charlie has a degree of superstrength.

Okay, two things: 1. I know that Babs can handle herself, but kicking people out of wheelchairs just isn't something you DO, and 2. considering Steph's death was later shown to be fake and the photos are of some poor anonymous drug addict Leslie swapped out for Steph so she could smuggle her out of the country, Barbara having the photos so ready to hand is kinda gross.

Anyways, the Birds later find out that Charlie is actually homeless, her family having burnt to death in an apartment fire that she wasn't able to save them from (Charlie's teleportation power makes other people explode if she tries to take them with her... don't ask her how she knows this), so Babs caves and sort of adopts her.

As such Charlie is made a member of the team though just whether that's a good thing is up to debate. At one points, in a crossover with the Secret Six, she ended up getting into a fight with Harley Quinn, in which she resorted to her ultimate fighting technique: hurtful namecalling.

At this point Charlie wasn't an official member of the team, as such, which resulted in the older member's plans occasionally being derailed due to her Scrappy Doo-ish need to insert herself into the action all the time. This resulted in her grating the nerves of some of her teammates...

This culminated in Misfit deciding to teleport herself into a mech's cockpit while it was stomping around Metropolis, and making it explode by pressing random buttons. This makes a large area of the city seemingly vanish, and eventually results in the Birds of Prey getting evicted from the city by Superman.

Prior to the eviction though, Barbara suspected that the exploding mecha might have been magical in nature, so she calls in Black Alice to give an assessment. The BoP had previously attempted to hire Alice, but a combination of various reasons made her decline, such as her then untreated mental illness. At this point though, Black Alice is trying to make an effort to be a superhero, has gotten treatment and is trying to help out Bab's with her problem...

...The problem is that Misfit feels that Babs bringing in Lori so soon after the Mech Incident is less Babs wanting an expert to help out, and more Babs wanting to replace her for possibly killing thousands of people by accident. This results in, you've guess it, childish namecalling with a sideorder of bullying the mentally ill person!

Later...

And so, Charlie makes Black Alice relapse into supervillain again. Good job.

Eventually in the lead-up to Final Crisis occurred, with that mess of a storyline where Granny Goodness was apparently kidnapping superpowered teenagers in order to make them fight each other to the death so the survivors could be Darkseid's army... or something. It only tangentially relates to Morrison's story, which really works better as a self-contained work (besides the Batman-related stuff at least).

Anyway, in that arc Charlie and Alice... or Lori as her real name is, turn out to be half-sisters. Which was confusing for so many reasons. Nothing overtly bad happened here from what I remember, besides Livewire having to loose to Charlie in a cagefight (hey, I liked DCU!Livewire, she tried so hard by never got anywhere! :().

Oddly, you'd have thought that after Cass was debrainwashed that she or at least Steph would have met Charlie at some point, despite Babs deciding to fob her off on Huntress to look after instead at the end of the Calculator arc. However, despite a brief cameo in Adam Beechen's Cass Cain mini-series (urggghhh) Charlie's final preboot appearance was when Barbara announced that she was going to make Oracle more secret than she was originally, more of a shadowy figure than the superhero community's IT department.

Urgh, still maintain that Cass isn't there because Babs warned her Charlie had invited herself first.

I guess that I can understand why people would like Misfit, as there's always an audience for "quirky" characters... I just felt it was jarring going from the likes of Steph and Cass to someone who is essentially Scrappy Doo with enforced pathos.

There are characters who are jerks that are also entertaining or have some depth to their personality, such as Revy from Black Lagoon or Haruhi Suzumiya from the franchise of the same name. Even the massive entitlement complex is something that Charlie shared with Selina Kyle, who also grew up homeless in Gotham, and subconsciously stole to overcompensate, but she outrgew it in the end. But I kind of get the impression that Charlie wasn't intended to be as horrible as she ended up, which is actually kind of depressing.