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Great Hera!

A Batgirl Returns, in Batman Inc. #6

by Susana Polo | 10:25 am, May 13th

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For almost nine months now, I’ve had a couple of strict rules regarding my consumption of Batman comics. Before instituting them I simply consumed every title that I thought would keep me abreast of current Batman continuity, but when it was announced that there were going to be two Batmans, I found myself so simultaneously disgusted and apathetic about the state of said continuity that I had to implement some drastic measures.

Thenceforth, I would read Batman comics only if they featured a Batman who was actually Bruce Wayne and if they were not written by Grant Morrison. Truthfully, the former rule has been difficult to maintain, since I always forget which comics actually feature Bruce and not Dick Grayson these days. The Dark Knight? Bruce. Batman? That’s Dick Grayson. Detective Comics? Dick. Streets of Gotham? Bruce… I think. Batman and Robin? Dick. Batman, Inc.? Well, that’s written by Grant Morrison, so I don’t have to worry about that one.

But this week, I picked up a copy of Batman Inc. #6. Touché, Mr. Morrison. You knew exactly how to get me back on board, at least for one issue: You brought Cassandra Cain back.

Cassandra Cain is the second Batgirl, instituted as a character in 1999, as an almost completely mute street urchin of mysterious origin. Mysterious, because she probably didn’t learn to be one of the world’s greatest martial artists just running around Gotham alleys.

(Sometimes I think Gotham is nothing but alleys. They really should have hired better city planners.)

I liked Cassandra because her origin was distinctly different from the other members of the Bat-family. Both of her parents were still alive (they were assassins, but they were still alive), and she didn’t spend too much time angsting over her significantly abnormal past. She’d seen what Batman did, and wanted to do it too, that was enough motivation for her. Her costume, also unusually for a female superhero, covered every inch of her body, including her face, the prominent stitches around lower half of her mask lending it a distinctly creepy vibe.

(And it looked much more like a “female Batman” costume than a “female bat-themed costume.” To quote a joking Catwoman, “Batman, I didn’t know you had… transitioned.”)

She was Batgirl for a good long while, and I always loved it when she’d show in my Batman comics. There were a lot of really interesting things that writers did with the kind of strange but stable personality that might grow out of her origins, and I liked watching them experiment. And then, right around the end of 2004, she dropped off the face of Batman comics. Someone decided to make her a villain for a while, and decided that it would be paradoxically characteristic for the rest of the Batman family to just let her, and she was just sort of abandoned as a character. Despite that, Cass has a significant cult following that’s been waiting and asking for a long time for her to be brought back to the stories that they read.

Last year, when DC’s Blackest Night and Brightest Day arcs brought back a whole length of dead heroes and promised to change up a lot of rosters, replacing modern inheritors of various costumes and personas with their classic originals, there was some, I think justified, outcry, that DC hadn’t quite thought through the overall impact of these changes on the diversity of the DC universe. Many of the characters who would be giving up their current superhero identity to let the classic character back into the role where characters who were Black, Asian, Hispanic, multiracial or female, and the classic characters were almost exclusively white and male. It became clear that DC intended to reintroduce a Batgirl character to Gotham, and instead of using Cassandra Cain, a woman of Asian and European descent, they would be using Stephanie Brown who, while a female character with a significant following in her Spoiler identity, was still as white as every other member of the Batfamily. This only fueled the fire, for fans of Cassandra.

But lately writers and editors have been dropping hints that we’d see Cass taking a larger role in the Batfamily somewhere, and Grant Morrison’s Batman, Inc. is all about Batman (Bruce Wayne Batman, that is) building an “army” or global network of Batman proxies to combat a mysterious but imminent threat and also to obscure his true identity. It seems like the feelings of Cass fans and the feelings of writers and editors finally aligned to make her a part of Batman, Inc.

So, editors at the Big Two. You give a lot of lip service to wanting to capture the “female market.” Well, here’s how you got me to buy an issue of a comic even though I despise what its writer has done to my favorite hero’s continuity, and even though the art was terrible and pretty much every shot of Bruce Wayne’s full face looked like… well, you know that scene where the villain appears for the first time to the heroes and they’re about to die and it’s the last cliffhanger panel, and the villian is just standing there drinking in their doom with a crazy, crazy, happy look on his face?

Yeah, it was really weird art. He looked like a happy alien psychopath.

But I bought it anyway. And I read it. You got me to buy it because it had Cassandra Cain in it, and I’ll probably buy anything else you put Cassandra Cain in, as long as her character seems interesting, because I’d like to support the obscure characters I like and try to convince you to do more of them. So: you’ve got a significantly female cult following for a character. Try… putting that character in a comic. I admit it! I’ll buy anything with Cassandra Cain, Renée Montoya (The Question), or Kate Kane (Batwoman) in it. It’s why I’m reading Birds of Prey, the only consistently written by a woman title that DC puts out. It’s why I’m salivating over Batwoman‘s eventual release, and hoping against hope that it can be good even though its writer jumped ship because he felt creatively stifled at DC.

Come on DC. You’ve already accomplished one miracle. You got me to buy a Grant Morrison Batman comic again.

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  • http://profiles.google.com/ashleysue Ashley Sue

    I love that they brought Cassandra Cain back AND got rid of that gimp mask.  But, yeah, Batman looked a little too “To Catch a Predator” while he was trolling Facebook.  Please give me back my brooding Bruce Wayne.

    (and not to be a noodge, but you mean Kate Kane).

  • http://www.extremelydissatisfied.wordpress.com Adam R. Charpentier

    I’m glad you mentioned the most likely scenario, which is that DC just didn’t think it through when they started reintroducing old heroes. I agree that white-washing the DCU is a shame but it has never seemed likely that it was done deliberately. Companies are generally much more aware of political correctness, even to extremes, so it seems more likely that they just dropped the ball.

    Then again, they have no problem at all being sexist. …so, maybe it was done deliberately.

    Anyway, yes, Cassandra is back and hopefully we’ve seen an end of her Hulk-like dialog.I’d be happier with her in a full Bat costume but I suppose the retro mask is alright.

  • http://www.extremelydissatisfied.wordpress.com Adam R. Charpentier

    I’m glad you mentioned the most likely scenario, which is that DC just didn’t think it through when they started reintroducing old heroes. I agree that white-washing the DCU is a shame but it has never seemed likely that it was done deliberately. Companies are generally much more aware of political correctness, even to extremes, so it seems more likely that they just dropped the ball.

    Then again, they have no problem at all being sexist. …so, maybe it was done deliberately.

    Anyway, yes, Cassandra is back and hopefully we’ve seen an end of her Hulk-like dialog.I’d be happier with her in a full Bat costume but I suppose the retro mask is alright.

  • Anonymous

    Must have been all the Cains, throwing me off. Alliteration, will we ever get tired of it in the DCU? 

  • Anonymous

    Must have been all the Cains, throwing me off. Alliteration, will we ever get tired of it in the DCU? 

  • Anonymous

    Hulk-like is one thing, but I’ve always been partial to the the Cass who says only one or two sentences per conversation, or uses hand signals instead of speech, but those sentences are tight and efficient and all she needs to say to get her message across.  and all she needs to say to get her message across. 

  • Anonymous

    Hulk-like is one thing, but I’ve always been partial to the the Cass who says only one or two sentences per conversation, or uses hand signals instead of speech, but those sentences are tight and efficient and all she needs to say to get her message across.  and all she needs to say to get her message across. 

  • Kaitie Kudara

    Gail Simone also writes Secret Six, so there’s two titles (albeit by one woman).

  • http://www.extremelydissatisfied.wordpress.com Adam R. Charpentier

     True, she did start to sound a bit more like a normal human being at the end there.

  • Anonymous

    1. Grant Morrison has put the Bat-Universe back on top and revitalized the mythology with, admittedly, piece-meal mythology. It brought a new dynamism and action to a continuity that thrived on just introducing new kids into the psycho-vigilante meat grinder to stay relevant.

    2. Dick Grayson is the greatest Batman, and, as far as I’m concerned, the true Batman at the moment since he occupies both the Det. Comics and Batman books.

    3. I’m glad they finally dealt with the Cass gap. They put her in Hong Kong and then declared Batman was global and then… we waited to hear from her. 

    4. What I’m trying to say is that your personal opinion is wrong. Sorry. Sometimes it happens. ;)

  • Anonymous

    Grant Morrison likes superheroes best when they are gods. I like them best when they are people. This fundamentally where we (meaning he and I) differ, I think. 

  • Anonymous

    Which is why I like him at DC, versus his stints at Marvel (though I liked New X-Men). DC characters haven’t been written as “people” since… ever. They’re iconic. They strut like a pantheon. And that includes Batman. Whenever the Marvel-touch personal problem stories are laid on their shoulders, things get too messy and the stories lose the DC feel (I’m looking at you, Roy Harper). DC!Morrison4Life.

  • http://twitter.com/AbelUndercity Abel Undercity

     ”(Sometimes I think Gotham is nothing but alleys. They really should have hired better city planners.)”

    “Old as New York, founded on the East Coast and designed by English Masons on opium… exacerbated by absinthe-fiend local architects in the Twenties, basically not suitable for human habitation… Gotham City.” – Elijah Snow, Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth 

  • Maddy

    Great post!

    (Small note, though: technically, I think it was in 2006 that Cass dropped off the face of the Earth, though. Her solo series ran for 73 issues, so that’s about a 6 year run.)

  • Maddy

     AGREED!

    The way some people write dialogue for her it’s either like they think she’s Commander Data, in possession of a full vocabulary but not used to slang or contractions, or as the commenter above said, “Hulk-like” speech, which can be kind of offensive.

    She’s concise, and if words aren’t necessary and a gesture or expression will effectively communicate what she wants, that’s what she uses.

  • Anonymous

    The costume was created to be a male Bat, kinda. Helena Bertinelli, the Huntress, designed it as a way to put the fear of the Bat in Gotham when it was declared “No Man’s Land” following an earthquake and Bruce hightailed out of town. Bruce, being Bruce, took it from Helena after she decided to go back to being Huntress and then handed it to Cass. I’ve always been torn on the costume. On one hand it was utilitarian and simple, so very like Cass. But on the other hand it made her look like a character from “Pulp Fiction”. I’m glad Morrison gave her a new costume. 

  • http://www.thechildhealthsite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1 Edcedc8

    I liked her old suit much more.but yay! the best bat is back. 

  • Anonymous

    If you’d like some DC people as people, I recommend Gotham Central… or actually just read anything by Greg Rucka. Like, even his novelizations of No Man’s Land or Knightfall.  

  • http://twitter.com/IM_SH IMSH

    I think that female super heroes are great; however, I think there is a way to give the ladies an identity and presence without giving into the easy way out by just adding woman or girl into the suffix. Example, Dick Grayson started out as Robin and became Nightwing instead of Bat-spinoff and still retained a connection to Batman through the name synonymously. At this point it would be hard to imagine anything other than Batgirl, but another name could have been created for a super heroine  with a tie-in to the Batman family (imho).. At this point it would be hard to imagine anything other than Batgirl, but another name could have been created for a super heroine  with a tie-in to the Batman family (imho).

  • Guest

    Funny how the ones complaining about sexism in comics are also the ones who’ll buy anything written by a woman…

  • Anonymous

    Are they? Where’d you get that info? Buried in there next to your belly button lint?