Batgirl Week - Barbara Gordon
Sunday, August 8, 2010 at 7:00PM | Travis Something mysterious this way comes.
Three women have held the mantle of Batgirl. Each wore the mantle very differently, each have brought something new and different to the role, each were most assuredly Batgirl. This week we’ll highlight each of the three.
Barbara Gordon
Back in the 1960’s, concerns were voiced about the close relationship between Batman and Robin, Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. To quell such rumblings, DC introduced Batgirl and Batwoman as female counterpoints to the dynamic duo. Their alter egos, Barbara Gordon and Kathy Kane[^1], became romantic interests for Dick and Bruce.
Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl was filled with vigor and spunk as was befitting a freckled faced red head college student. She was witty, adventurous and precocious. Unfortunately, very little of the original Barbara Gordon Batgirl stories are available to read, except for Chuck Dixon’s excellent modern day interpretation Batgirl: Year One, which is also harder to find. It is definitely one of the comics that You Should Read. Dixon obviously has a great respect for the character and provides great motivation for the character’s actions. The interactions between Robin and Batgirl are endearing and establish the core of the deep and convoluted Dick-Babs love story.
[^1]: More on Kathy Kane later.
After college, Barbara became a librarian, continuing to portray herself as meek, bookish, and awkward while putting behind her the saucy Batgirl. Unfortunately, Babs became victim to a movement in in the late 80s and early 90s which belittled and disregarded women in comics, colloquial known as the time of Women In Refrigerators[^2]. Alan Moore’s classic A Killing Joke was supposed to be an out of continuity “else worlds” story, but ultimately it - and it’s crippling of Barbara Gordon - was made part of the main DC Universe. Thus ends the story of the first Batgirl, but Babs will rise again.
[^2]: Named so for the brutal murder of Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend who was killed and shoved in a refrigerator, where she was left for him to find when he went looking for last night’s Chinese take out.
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