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Sorry for the near immediate thread-rot nataraja, but in terms of non Cassandra Batgirl, I have to pipe up again for Batgirl: Year One, as my favourite depiction of the role. Certainly about a Batgirl who is more naive, but also more vulnerable, in that she has possibilities and strengths that could be taken away from her, while I'm not sure, to start with, what the Cassandra Batgirl has to lose, and why the reader should care. Which I suppose fits in with the recent tone of Batman in general, even if it's less interesting (in my opinion).
I don’t know if the art will appeal, as it’s far from realistic or gritty (quite the opposite), but succeeded in so far as it fitted the more joyous, warm feeling of that Batgirl. The “new” Batgirl felt both very drab and cold in comparison, and exceedingly serious. I suppose it depends on if you have strong views on what Batgirl should be like.
I think I get what the writers were trying to do in Cassandra Cain in changing the dynamic between a Batgirl perpetually less capable and responsible than Batman, into a killing machine who needs to maintain her restraint in order to live up to his ideals, but to be honest whenever one of the main elements of a character is their badass martial arts skills I switch off. I’d like to say the writers made that incidental, and they certainly make the effort in including the character elements of the adolescent finding of a method of communicating and establishing a peer group, but I just didn’t find it particularly interesting. Partly, I think, because I’m not sure what the character was meant to represent, other than that she was useful to Batman as an effective enforcer, and that she had serious issues in establishing normal human relationships. She's clearly meant in one sense to be fragile, but her origin just seemed a horribly artificial way of eliciting sympathy. The trade where she battles Shiva, Deathwish I think, makes it clear how abnormal her psychology is, but (sorry to gripe) I never really get worked up about overly melodramatic conflicts between super-powered types who don’t like themselves very much but still take themselves very seriously. So I probably shouldn’t read Batman either, but there you go.
Again, I’m like you in mainly borrowing the books and not having a full grasp of the greater Bat continuity, so I’m mainly trying to recall what the books I read ages ago were like, which is mainly that they were alright, but hardly memorable. Did you not like the Birds of Prey books? I actually thought she worked better in the (generally) less serious tone of those books and with a less austere cast of characters. And why do you think the portrayal of the character is racist/sexist? |
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