Favorites: Batgirl

Barbara Gordon, accept no substitutes. Don't misunderstand-- Cassandra Kane is perfectly fine on her own merits, but at the end of the day, BATGIRL is Babs. In fact, some of my favorite comics of the recent past were Barbara Gordon Batgirl tales-- Batgirl Year One and Nightwing Year One spring to mind pretty fast.

Sure, I hear ya-- "But, Jeremy-- Babs is ORACLE now, and soooOOOooOooo much better in that role!" Bah, I say. I dig the Oracle angle, I see how well it has helped develop the character, but it's just not the same. When the Joker crippled her in The Killing Joke, many fans applauded-- thought it was a BRILLIANT choice for the story-- and list it in their top comic stories of all time. Hey, for a long time I was among them!

Then I looked around at comics SINCE the Alan Moore Effect (who wrote that story, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Superman's "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?", and Swamp Thing in the biggest one-two punch to the industry's cajones it had ever experienced)...

And comics are worse for it.

Sure, the story was great-- Alan is a freakin' brilliant writer, I own just about every story he's ever written, and just about anything he touches is gold, but... well... it has hurt comics.

There's a place for that kind of story, and we NEED that kind of story in comics, but at the end of the day, when the comic fans go home and bag'n'board their precious tales... THERE ARE TOO MANY OF THEM.

I'm of a mind (and I DARE you to oppose me on this) that there should be a balance in every area of this industry. Too much of one thing will do nothing but kill the industry far quicker than the 90s ever could have. Too many mature-reader books, too many aging readers wanting to justify their fandom, too many cartoony artists, too many tracer-artists, too many mangas on the shelves, too many of ANYTHING just won't make sense. We need to GROW readership, and while it seems most fanboys tend to get pretty jaded and gravitate towards the mature readers genre, it won't help us GROW. It's short-sighted, we already HAVE that genre in comics in abundance. We need more all ages books, and fast.

People say kids never go to comic shops, but honestly? I don't know what shop THEY'RE at-- I see several every time I stop at the comic shop. I see parents coming in to pick up a Spider-Man for their child, I see teachers coming in for new ideas to help kids with reading, I see NEW readers coming into the shop. I've unfortunately seen these same people walk out without ANYTHING. Why? A lack of all-ages material, or it's shuffled to a small corner of the shop, out of the way of REGULAR readers.

Uncripple Barbara-- it's been, what-- 20 years, so you've had your fun with Oracle as she stands (or, um, doesn't), and I've enjoyed many of those stories myself. However, there's a Babs Batgirl in the new cartoon-- there was one in the Dini/Timm version as well. Get her back in the uniform somehow, and prepare for once to target an audience for growth.

Okay, I'm done preachin'.

- jeremy