InsaneJournal

I really do not know what to make of this issue. It's better than the previous two, and it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but I'm still not too fond of this mini-series.

Anyways, stuff happens, she's in Hong Kong, then realizes she's gotta go back to Gotham, where she goes to the home of the guy who designed the game that the Calculator's high jacked and used to help kill Cheese-Fiend and nearly kill Larry (who recovers, but now has an extremely low white blood cell count and his immune system is almost completely gone, proving that the Anti-Life crystals or whatever-the-hell don't work perfectly to restore life/health).

So, here's the last bit when she's getting help from the game designer:



So she has a sexy new man friend who is actually sort of an old friend! Who hangs out in the shadows! That's nice. (I should clarify that he really didn't hang out in the shadows for the majority of his page time in this comic. I just think it's funny.)

Anywho, she manages to defeat the Calculator by cyber-beating him up, and follows him back to the hospital where he intends to use the Anti-Life crystals to cure his daughter Wendy. Pretty much as soon as he's in the room, Babs is right behind him, telling him how he's a jerk for risking using the crystals on Wendy. She tries to tell him that they're not a cure, but he's still insisting they'll wake Wendy from the coma--when suddenly! Wendy wakes up all on her own.





Okay, so apparently Wendy knew her father was the Calculator? Enough to call him "Daddy"? It's nice that Wendy's not dead, but I have to admit I was shocked at her legs apparently being paralysed. Babs going all "here's how I foiled your evil plan! Also I might kill you!" in front of the cops is rather sloppy, IMO.



And that, my dear scans_dailyians, is that.

If you're like me, you're relieved that Barbara Gordon is not the new Batgirl, but you are also saying "what the hell was that about?" I actually enjoyed bits of this issue, to my surprise. At least it was marginally better than the first two issues, which IMO seem rather useless in retrospect, and I'm still pissed about the way Barbara was written in them. (In issue #1, she's apparently ignorant of a popular Second Life/World of Warcraft-type game, in issue #2 she either killed or almost killed a couple of muggers in Hong Kong, and in both she has other people doing hacking-like things for her, which results in their endangerment and one of them getting killed.)

What's interesting is that the last months of Birds of Prey saw an editorial mandate for a change in tone of the book, as Tony Bedard says in this Newsarama article (read the whole thing, it's interesting):

Platinum Flats served as the backdrop for the second confrontation between the Joker and Oracle in the pages of Birds of Prey. Unlike the first confrontation, this encounter was purely physical. Although the Joker defeated Oracle in the issue, Bedard described that issue by saying, “That story morphed a bit. I originally had her busting out his teeth and he is so horrified that he runs away. It was supposed to be that she really hit a nerve there: he took her legs, so she takes his grin. But then the decision was made to cancel the series, and the whole direction of the book and the tone of the encounter needed to be different, and we ended up making it a much more even match.”

I ranted about this elsewhere, but the second-to-last issue of that Joker storyline genuinely seemed to be setting Babs up for a bigger victory over the Joker than what we got, rather than him throwing her down a flight of stairs. That negative tone with respect to Barbara continued to the last issue of BoP, which ended with her blowing up her HQ, abandoning her team, skipping town and leaving Misfit with a lousy note.

My understanding is that Barbara's part in Birds of Prey had to end off on a negative note in order to set her up for her depressing debut in her solo mini-series. Theoretically, starting off from a point of depression would make for a satisfying read if it ended on a high note. And let's face it, with the Omens & Origins bit from the last issue of BoP (which had Babs looking at her Batgirl costume and obsessing over the Joker's first attack on her), the announcement of a new Batgirl book, and DC's general concern with having their characters in their most recognizable, "iconic" forms, I don't think we were being paranoid for thinking Barbara Gordon might be wearing a batsuit yet again.

It seems odd that DC would deliberately change directions with the last few issues of Birds of Prey, to set Oracle up for her mini-series, with a Batgirl book supposedly to be released in June, then an urgent meeting about Batgirl in March, the Batgirl book being announced as coming out in August and the end of Oracle: The Cure not changing anything in Babs's life. (Additionally, if we're counting the other BftC titles, Oracle is not separated from the Birds or the Bats, but is actively working with them.)

What I'm wondering is, perhaps, DC was going to have Barbara Gordon go back to being Batgirl, but then thought better of it. Because Oracle: The Cure seems pretty useless in terms of plot or character development. It doesn't leave Barbara Gordon in any new place, or sets her up for a new series or with a team. At most, it means the Calculator is effectively defeated, and it changes the lives of the Calculator and Wendy, but I doubt either of them is going to be a major focus in any book (at least I hope not) (well, maybe Wendy'll go back to Teen Titans).

Either DC originally wanted to make Babs Batgirl, and then realized that would be stupid and have had to change things around since then. OR, they never had plans to do it and just went to a lot of effort to make people think that's what they were going to do, in order to generate hype. If it's the latter, then despite the fact that this series has pretty much nothing to do with Batman or the Battle for the Cowl, it is rather fitting that it is a Battle for the Cowl...for in my bitter humble opinion, Battle for the Cowl seems like all it's doing is killing time until the launch of the new Bat-books in June.

In other words, to quote Homer Simpson: "Exactly. It's just a bunch of stuff that happened."

But now that we know Barbara Gordon will not be Batgirl again, I am left with a new pressing question: in what book can I find Oracle in now? Batgirl, I guess?