Why couldn't we just have a good Barbara as Batgirl flashback story? Brave and the Bold #33 was previewed as a team-up of Wonder Woman, Zatanna, and Batgirl for a girl's night out. It looked fun and at least the cover seemed to suggest that some hero business would be in the story. Instead, it went thus: brief heroics in the opening, girl's night clubbing, then...dialogue hinting at Barbara's fate and once again, the famous scene from The Killing Joke. Then Barbara wakes up and wheels over to her computer screens.
For fans of Barbara as Batgirl or fans of Barbara Gordon at all, this story just seemed to raise the issue of how incoherent it is that she is still in a wheelchair. In the start of the issue, Zatanna contacts Wonder Woman about a girl's night, then they go to Gotham and convince Barbara to take the night off. Well, by the end of the story we see that this is a "it is going to happen anyway, but let's give Barbara a great memory of dancing" event. Then there are tearful lines between them about not knowing when or where it will happen but wishing they could prevent it.
They don't know when or where, but the reader does. And in a DCU where time travel is a frequent plot device across story lines, we are left asking why no one can ever go back and stop Barbara from being shot. After it happens, everyone knows exactly when and exactly where. So why can't anyone stop it? And why does DC do a story like this that only makes readers ask these questions? Especially when Batman is currently traveling through time...
And yes, time travel may be a over the top solution. But let's consider some others. When Batman has a spinal cord injury, he is healed and soon back to beating up bad guys and jumping across rooftops. But Barbara is instead treated as "so sad, but nothing anyone can do." And that sentiment just gets repeated over and over. Despite the use of Lazarus pits in so many story lines, despite Damien's spine replacement, despite advanced science. The tech in the DCU is supposed to be beyond that in the real world, so a breakthrough in stem cell research would certainly not be out of place here. Readers have been listing these options for years, but DC instead continues with these "nothing anyone can do" story lines. Why? With all these ways to heal her, it is incoherent that Barbara is still in that wheelchair. It insults the intelligence of the reader when the options are so obvious, yet the world's greatest detective and the smartest woman in the world somehow can't figure this out.
And in a story that a lot of female readers were interested in reading, why does DC remind us again that they love to refrigerate women characters?
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Ummm... it kind of continues because Oracle is fantastic exactly as she is.
ReplyDeleteNow don't get me wrong, I totally agree that in terms of comic logic, it's utterly non-sensical that Barb is still in that chair. Comic characters regularly come back from the dead, regrow lost appendages (patience Roy, patience) and recover from seemingly incurable conditions. A simple spinal chord injury would seem to be a minor inconvenience. Batman bloody well did it, so why not Barb?!
And you know what? Were this argument being made 12 months or so after Killing Joke, I'd be completely 'on-side' as it were. I'd be positivley demanding the resurection of Barb's career as Batgirl (though I would be cringing in advance at the inevitably contrived nature in which the story would be tackled were the story ever to be written ;).
Now, Killing joke is an amazing piece of work, and I often hold it up as an example of what the medium is capable of to non-comics fans. However, even a gushing fan of the book like myself can see that Barbara is treated appallingly - her plight is purely used to provoke a reaction out of Bruce and her father, and the fact that it costs us Batgirl in the regular DCU is almost an afterthought.
But, thanks to the ground work put in by Kim Yale and John Ostrander, Alan Moore's casual act of mysogyny was turned into something quite brilliant. Barbara's place in the DCU was reaffirmed, redefined, and - following the launch of Birds of Prey - utterly consolidated.
I say this as a huge fan of the Barbara Gordon Batgirl: I don't want to see her get out of that chair. Oracle is AWESOME. She's a kick-ass character who has overcome a disability to become so much more than when she was abled, and she's avoided falling victim to the 'Super-Crip' trope in the process. I'm very sorry that her origin is tainted by the blatant fridging which took place, but I would strongly protest any editorial decisions which led to Barbara returning to her original role, even when written by Paul Dini.
Oh, I should say, I've not read the story you speak of and, whilst I'd actually get a kick out of a 'girls night out' story, it sounds like that one fails on a number of accounts. It would probably frustrate me for many of the reasons it frustrated you.
Thanks for the comment! But healing Barbara would not equal her becoming Batgirl again, which seems to be the default position of both fans and editors. A walking, kick ass Oracle would be a great character to read. And that will probably be the topic of our next post...
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