Favourite Female Character: Cassandra Cain

[espanolbot]

Yeah, big shock. Thing is though, the thing that got me into reading the regular continuity Batman stuff (besides some BTAS tie-in books I'd read as a kid) was the Batman: No Man's Land trades. Out of all the characters in the book, Cass Cain was the one that I got the most invested in, so her solo series were among the first trades that I got when I started collected comics in earnest.

Naturally this lead to my getting bugged when DC decided to make her a disposable villainous love interest for Tim Drake... but that's a subject already covered elsewhere.

For an example for why I like her so much, here are some bits from one of the Secret Files comics that I feel sum up the character pretty well.

The story begins with Cass finding a bunch of mobsters attempting to gun down a teenage boy, under the justification that the kid started it by shooting at them first. Cass manages to disarm everyone without anyone getting hurt, though the kid still gets arrested and sent to juvie due to the whole attempted murder thing.

Cass goes to talk to Barbara about why the kid tried something so stupid.



Ironically Cass was probably the only member of the Bat Family in the pre-Damian days that had both parents alive at the time...

Anyway, Cass goes to talk to the gangster, pondering about her own violent past as she goes. She was raised by her father to be an assassin, an act that resulted in her killing a man when she was only six years old... only due to her body language-reading ability, she could experience her one and only victim's death from his perspective. Evidently David Cain didn't think that this would be an issue, but it still obviously traumatised Cass to the extent that she ran away from home and spent roughly the next decade wandering the world as a homeless person.

Cass was then plagued with guilt over her victim's murder (even though she didn't understand what she was doing at the time) and her angst over whether her father being a bad person automatically meant that she was too by default.

She tracks down the gangster, and tells him to not seek any reprisals against the kid, saying that he's already killed the kid's parents and he should just leave him alone. When the guy gives Cass lip about how the boy has to die to set an example, Cass takes the criminals gun and unloads it into the wall by his head at close range as a warning to back off.

This settled, Cass goes to see the kid himself.






For the record, my second favourite female character is Catwoman (specifically post-Selina's Big Score), and my third is Stephanie Brown.

Comments

[zechs80]

Great moment and great character. It's kind of sad really DC is all, "We like to push our minority characters." And here they have one of the longest lasting ones and just decide to bury then pretend she doesn't exist. What the hell the character do to deserve that?

[q99]

Fall afoul a poor 'new direction plan' that blew back to the point the boss got regular questions about it for years.

[zechs80]

Yeah, but why? Oh to be a fly the wall. I'm surprised Andersen Gabrych hasn't opened up about it like Dylan Horrocks did of the behind the scenes of DC.

[q99]

I think it was a, "Oh, let's do a new direction to push Tim. Cass isn't that popular, right? Let's use her as a villain, that should be big," that spiralled out of control. The wrong choice of writer to do so, the wrong responses to the backlash, general lack of knowledge of Cass among those who made the decisions, etc..

[zechs80]

And yet they view her fans as the bad influence. LOL.

[q99]

They lack self-awareness ^^

Heck, they are the only comic editorial I know who considers "has a cult following" to be a bad thing!

[jaybee3]

I think its the clearest sign that there is someone in the company with a clear personal reason against the character. Sales-wise she is the most successful Asian hero in the company's history. To date she has still held a solo Batgirl title longer than anyone else. Then she's turned into a villain in a story that made no sesne, then she disappears, then she's given a mini-series by the guy who turned her into a villain (unsurprisingly it failed) and then she's replaced as Batgirl by a blue-eyed blond and then she disappears again (despite public promises by Didio to the counterwise) for almost two years and then she pops up again and then BAM...reboot and almost THREE years into said reboot the most successful Asian heroine in the company's history has only been seen in a couple of panels in a possible future issue.

Yeah. Inexplicable.

[espanolbot]

From what I've read, it seems that they originally were planning to have Cass replaced by Barbara, who they were planning to heal-up during 52 somehow, only to decide to go with creating Kathy Kane instead. This lead to a brief time when they were considering the possibility of Misfit (urgh) becoming Batgirl, only for Gail Simone to point out that Charlie's powers don't really fit that well in the role.

Best I can figure for making her a villain? Tim at the time didn't really have a set rogues gallery, particularly when trying to establish himself as a seperate hero to Batman (previous attempts lead to weirdness like Bill Willingham's jingoistic nationalist Captain America homage), so they figured that making a fellow hero and friend of Tim's into a "well-intentioned extremist" would be good plot fuel...

...Except for the fact that the writers involved didn't really give a crap of the characters outside of Tim himself, leading to Cass' envillaining making no sense (even in the context of the story all Tim can do is call Cass crazy due to how messed up her rationale is), and any potential drama that could be drawn from the situation ignored for more angst left over from Identity Crisis with Tim deciding that Captain Boomerang's son must be evil because his dad was a supervillain... even though the guy was dating Supergirl at the time and hadn't infact committed any crimes.

Seriously, Cass going rogue and taking control of the League of Assassins should have been serious Bad News. She knows what their secret identities are, she knows their methods, and is physically a match for even Batman himself... yet they just flat out ignore that she existed for the most part. Beside's Bruce just dismissing his adopted daughter as "unstable" and not bothering to investigate her disappearance himself.

[jaxjyls]

that's what turned Tim into one of my most hated fictional characters ever while Cassandra will always be my favourite character period.

[espanolbot]

Seriously. Took a long time for me to like Tim again, same with how Supergirl after the Superman/Batman introduction was insufferable for a years.

[jaxjyls]

it tainted all versions of Tim for me, past and present

[zechs80]

52? I thought it was Blackest Night. They were so hinting at Barbara becoming Batgirl again during the preludes to it with Nightwing macking on her in Batgirl outfit and her looking over her old costume in the final BoP issue.

[mrstatham]

Nope. Kate Kane's initial design was put together with Barbara in mind, and then they decided to keep Oracle and make a new Batwoman. That's why Rucka basically had to go lengths to make Kate more visually distinct when Kate's tenure in Detective Comics came around.

[zechs80]

So wait then that Devin Grayson written series was supposed to be about Barbara?

[mrstatham]

As far as I know, yes. They basically shelved the plans to 'fix' Barbara and made Kate, which is why she's somewhat indistinct in 52 and they basically played up the 'lipstick lesbian' aspect. There's probably a few sites out there detailing the ins and outs of it, I believe - I remember reading something about this on CBR.

[zechs80]

Huh so this makes the first of three attempts then that DC then tried to make Barbara, a Bat again. First that, then Blackest Night, and third New 52.

[espanolbot]

For such a successful character, they really seemed to deem Cass' existance to be inconvenient, didn't they? I'm beginning to see why they were so annoyed that their attempts to drive her fanbase away didn't work...

...They wanted her gone so that Babs could slip back into the role, but fans weren't willing to accept Cass going away so readily, leading to DC flumbing about trying to work out what to do with Cass when they legit didn't want to use her any more.

Which is the same lack of foresight that lead to the majority of the New 52 being such a shambles. Attempting to appeal to nostalgia (specifically early to mid-90s nostalgia rather than to the era of Babsgirl) but with an apathetic creative team, no plans for how the stories link together, and no ideas for keeping them going in the long term.

[jaybee3]

I don't say you are wrong. Didio was clearly jonesing to put Babs back as Batgirl (which is what Oracle: The Cure was all about) from the get-go. Actually, I would not be surprised if Didio's only real problem with Cassandra was that she was not Barbara Gordon. So he basically had her dropped off a bridge (in comic terms) I mean, the history of the 4 male Robins survived the reboot but only Batgirl has ever been acknowledged. It's very hard to talk about the replacement of Cass by Stephanie without it coming off bad about Steph (who I like very well - though it was Cass who got me into comics in the first place) but the unfortunate racial implications of replacing an Asian (successful) Batgirl (and the only WoC in the Bat-Family) with another blond blue-eyed white girl (remember Wonder Girl and Supergirl and Stargirl and Power Girl were also blue-eyed blondes) seems to have been entirely lost on DC. Of course, this is also the company that killed off Lian Harper and Ryan Choi within weeks of each other in the most gruesome manner and didn't see any problem with that either.

I still don't see any actual legit reason for making Cass evil just to supply Tim with a super-villain. That reeks of lazy writing. And more unfortunate implications that seem lost on DC - Cass was an entirely original and successful character (particularly in a company of mostly white heroes) - Beechan and his editors talking her in a monologuing Dragonlady stereotype that suddenly knew Najavo, took joy in killing (which is the biggest no-no in my book) and who's ablility was nerfed so Tim could beat her in a fight (something Bruce once said was nigh-impossible). And nobody at the company saw any problem with this (Beechan even said it all made sense and his editors Tomasi and Berganza were veterans).

The clearest example of how little anyone at DC cared about Cass is - she becomes a super-villain and takes over the League of Assassins. She starts killing again. Who's the primary character in that story? Barbara (who basically semi-adopted her), Bruce (who made her Batgirl)? Characters that were major players in Cass's life. No. Tim. Bruce and Barbara had zero role in Cass goes Evil storyline and as far as I know never even commented on it (outside of the Beechan mini). Then Cass goes AWOL again and disappears when Bruce "dies". Who's the primary character in that story? Is it Stephanie (Cass's BFF who inherited the Batgirl moniker)? Is it Barbara (who was Cass's mother subsitute who made Cass her legacy)? No. Once again the only one who seems curious where Cass has gone is Tim. Bryan Miller doesn't even had Barbara comment on Cass's disappearance once in two years of writing Batgirl (even after Fabien Niceza broke what Cass embargo existed). When Bruce came back from the dead he never even shared a panel with Cass and we never saw her reaction to his being alive. Post the cancellation of her title she almost doesn't exist except for stories with Tim Drake in it (even in her mini-series and Gates of Gotham).

And then her absence three years into the DCnU when several writers have openly said they wanted her to use her (Snyder even said he wanted to cameo her in Batman #1). When Harper Row was created to replace her in a storyline and when Julia Pennyworth a character no one wanted back is given a high-profile role just smells rotten to me. And, like many thing with Cass and DC Editorial, unnecessarily petty.

[q99]

Re: Both her parents being alive

Parents can only be alive if either both are evil, or one is evil and the other a hero.