scans_daily

Oh, there was a girl from Gotham...

That walked the hero's road,

For the sake of her old father...

It's to her I sing this ode.

With ra-zor sharp intellect...

She struck down every foe.

Joy and inspiration,

It's these to her we owe...

Gray and blue...

Gray and blue...

The girl from Gotham wore the gray and blue...

The Adam West show might've been the first to bring Batgirl to non-comics audiences, but let's face it: it was the DCAU take that sowed the seeds for a whole new generation. Batgirl's two-part debut on Batman: The Animated Series was a fairly inoffensive update of her classic comics origin that I mostly remember for being a perfectly good waste of Two-Face, but let's not dwell on such things for now.

Rather, let us look at this little...prequel, I guess... that regular tie-in comics writer Kelley Puckett brought to the table. It doesn't play that fast and loose with canon (IIRC, "Shadow of the Bat" never said where Barbara got the costume or even if it was the first time she wore it), but it seems a touch odd that Puckett didn't do a sequel to SotB instead if he wanted to write a BG story that badly and-

Aw, who am I kidding? Most geeks probably remember it better for introducing this little lady to the world of dead trees and ink.

Mint copies of this comic, by the way, go for upwards of $1200 on eBay. Shhh, no-one tell the buyers that you can get it for about a buck on Comixology right now.

(Well, some pedants might say it doesn't count since they see this comic more as an extension of the TV show than a comic in its own right - whatever the hell that might mean. Just to stir things up even more, Harley's first appearance in a "grown-up" comic would be in an Elseworlds.)

Oh, and context if you're curious: Babs is at a friend's costume party. Said friend happens to be filthy rich because her dad mows down forests for a living. Do the math.

Adorably enough, this is also where Batgirl gets her first fan. Just, uh, ignore how she seems to be a BEK.

(Don't Google it if you feel like sleeping tonight. Seriously.)

Further shenanigans ensue, but I sadly don't have the space to post them here. All the girls then get taken out by the security guards, who turn out to be working for none other than...

So, yeah. In a lot of ways, it feels like a dry run for TNBA's "Girls' Night Out": a story that's deliberately light on plot beyond "throw all the female characters in the same room, watch what happens".

(By the way, I don't mean to rag on Mike Parobeck - another giant in the superhero field taken before his time - but what the heck is with the way he draws women's hair? They look like giant blankets fused to their heads!)

Anyways, Babs eventually talks Ivy into freeing her, and repays Ivy by calling the cops down on the whole joint. Then, it's up to the roof for the big showdown:

Kinda anticlimactic for Batgirl's (technical) debut in the DCAU, but the low stakes are fairly charming and logical. Awesome as she is, Babs singlehandedly foiling the Joker's latest scheme to bomb city hall on her first night out would've been a little hard to swallow, and I find it fitting that she won through trickery instead of a slugfest like Batman & Robin surely would've.

I suppose this story is now non-canon, what with the events of "Batgirl Returns", but ehhh. Canon is what you make of it, I say.

Kelley Puckett (by the way, I suppose there's something vaguely symbolic about how he's the same guy who created Cassandra Cain) would go on to write a couple more Babsgirl stories for the "adult" Batman books, but they're not really worth posting. Well, except maybe for this part.

By the way, I'll be going through a lot of Babsgirl stuff this week, so if there's anything you want me to keep my grubby little hands off of, speak up now. Thank you.