The Four Color Media Monitor

I found this old post on the Collected Editions forum from last July, where somebody tore down on Barbara Gordon as a fictional character, instead of how she was written when she first debuted:

I've never liked Batgirl. She was one of those female characters who, once she put on a costume, suddenly she was an indomitable crime-fighter. No super-powers. No advanced training. No motivation, other than "What the hell, why not?" (Corinna Stark, of the Challengers, and Marvel Comics' Hellcat are two other examples.)

The Dominoed Daredoll was the unsalted, gluten-free version of the Batman, and I didn't see the point. DC introduced her as a cross-promotion for the character's arrival in the third season of the Batman television series. But, when the show was unceremoniously cancelled thereafter, DC was stuck with her.

As she was, Barbara Gordon/Batgirl was too bland to be anything more than a back-up series or an occasional guest star. So, DC tried to spice her up by making her a Congresswoman.

(Under the timeline at the time, that worked. Barbara had a Ph.D., so if she entered college at eighteen, like most youngsters do, figure four years of undergrad, then three years to get her master's and doctorate, that put her at twenty-four when she became Batgirl. She spent at least a year in her costumed identity, so she'd easily be the minimum age of twenty-five to serve in the House of Representatives. Later, as the timeline was jiggered, and she would've had to be too young to be a Representative, some writer, who obviously knew nothing about the foundation of Federal government, came up with an untenable excuse to put Babs in office.)

Actually, putting Batgirl in Washington had potential. It was a canvas for all sorts of political and espionage intrigue. Not to mention the opportunity to expand her supporting cast. It was a prime chance to distinguish her from either the Batman or Robin.

But, the writers assigned to her never gave those possibilities much more than lip service. I'm no writer, but I can easily draught a re-write of "Wild Week-End in Washington" to make it the kind of Batgirl thriller I'm talking about. That would omit Superman, whom, as our pal Osgood rightly pointed out, rather obviated Batgirl's presence in the tale.

Despite the citation of the writers, the poster still commits the unpardonable error of saying he never liked a fictional character, acting as though it's the character's fault for being created, rather than the writer's fault for not being able to come up with the best storylines to build around her. In Babs' case, her creator was Gardner Fox, IIRC. And there aren't any male characters since the Golden Age, who, once they put a costume, were just as ostensibly indomitable? Why, even a civilian character like Doiby Dickles in the Golden Age Green Lantern tales could be considered what Barbara Gordon's being described as here. Or even the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy. I don't see the point of unintelligible posts like the above. All that's needed to be done to mend goofs is write a special background history for a character, telling they'd practiced combat in some way or other, and I think that was done, later if not sooner, with Barbara Gordon as well.

It does little good to imply you're disappointed with the writers if you keep acting like a fictional character is a real person, and like their very creation was inherently wrong to begin with. That's why the above post has no weight to it, as the poster clearly doesn't have what it takes to complain unambiguously that older generations of scriptwriters let him down. Such people have no place in the industry or fandom.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, history, misogyny and racism, women of dc