So the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon, who ends up paralyzed in the Killing Joke. And it gets interesting right away because that’s not the end of Babs’ career as a crime-fighter. No, specifically because she is a librarian, specifically because she’s got the mad information skills she doesn’t lose the superhero mojo when she loses the use of her legs. She’s reborn as Oracle.

Oracle is all about the information. She still has all of the geek-cred, the photographic memory, the advanced degrees - everything that Batgirl had. But now, she uses it. Wikipedia tells me that Oracle made her comics debut as a member of Task Force X in the series called Suicide Squad. I’m not going to talk about that Oracle, because I’ve never read it. There’s also a whole host of appearances with the Justice League and a whole romance thing with Nightwing, and I’m not going to talk about Oracle there either.

When it comes to comics, I’m pretty much a dilettante. I read what I like and I don’t seek completion - I haven’t worked through all of the zillion Justice League trades to find the Oracle depictions and I probably will read some but not all of the many places she appears throughout the DC universe that aren’t Birds of Prey. Yes, I’m going to write about Birds of Prey!Oracle as depicted by the awesome Gail Simone.

Which means that I’m not even going to write about all of the Birds of Prey series, since Gail Simone only wrote the ones in the middle. Oracle and the Black Canary join up in a 1996 standalone by Chuck Dixon, Gary Frank and John Dell called Black Canary/Oracle: Birds of Prey. Gail Simone took over the series in 2003, adding Huntress make a group of 3. Oracle runs the show, getting her field operatives the information they need.

(She plays a similar information-broker role for the Justice League, and even for Batman himself)

But this Oracle doesn’t just search databases really well. She hacks her way in, and gets the stuff people are hiding. She uses her mad information skills to attack –

from Birds of Prey: Of Like Minds (TPB)

And no shrinking away from the Librarian Label here. In fine superhero tradition, most of the DC world doesn’t know Barbara’s true identity — or even if she’s human or computer — instead of a cowl and cape, this green mask is what she shows the world.

Oracle has the potential to be the librarian superhero - where the librarian part and the superhero powers are coming from the same place. What I wanted from Oracle was a story (not all the stories - but a story) where she is Barbara Gordon, kick-ass librarian and information superhero, front and center as the primary action figure in a Birds of Prey story. Not in every story - I also like behind-the-scenes-string-puller Barbara. But some story. I want librarian superhero where librarian power is the active power, where the intellect and the action are melded instead of understood as an either/or.

And she never really *quite* gets there - she’s usually the broker behind the scenes, feeding the active agents what they need to succeed. When they start pushing her story further, it’s still interesting but it’s not exactly what I was hoping for. And isn’t it all about me? But it does get at the physical/intellectual thing that started this whole thing off…

Oracle gets possessed by Brainiac, best known as a Superman adversary, who seeks to use her super-intelligent body to become embodied, or biological, in form. And the subtext of that is interesting, right? Barbara Gordon has been hailed by many as an example of an interesting disabled character in the DC universe, and the idea that an A.I. entity like Brainiac would pick a differently-abled body with which to become embodied is interesting and says something about the centrality or power of the intellect.

Equally interesting to me is the way, though, that Barbara’s physical disability is a necessary precondition to her using her intellectual/ information powers as such, to making them the focus of her action - to making them active. With most superheroes, at least in my admittedly limited experience, bouncing back after being paralyzed wouldn’t even be an option, at least not without a major character backstory overhaul. With most it is hard to even imagine how they could come back and continue to fight crime and evil without the active, physical power that made them initially famous.

Those for whom that is not the case - it’s mostly the same people who were in Southern Fried Scientist’s comics post, the inventive, science geniuses with the brains (and, let’s face it, usually the bankroll) to invent something to make up for any physical gifts they might lack or lose - Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Bruce Wayne himself.

Barbara’s a little different, isn’t she? I mean, she’s still got the fighting chops - you’re not going to knock her out of her wheelchair without getting at least knocked back yourself.

She’ll fight you from the chair; she’s an expert in some kind of martial arts that uses weapons. But for the most part, she’s not building a suit or a weapon or something physical that will replace or enhance the physical skills she lacks. Instead, she’s more like Daredevil, the blind person who loses one sense and gains in all the others - she loses physical skills and that leads her to push the other skills she has to crazy heights.

But the Brainiac storyline never quite takes a stand on this - she defeats him, knocking him back out of her body, but he leaves behind a virus that … allows her to telepathically connect with her computers. So it enhances her non-physical, intellectual gifts - making her an even more kick-ass librarian than before. But before you get to attached to the idea of intellect as superpower (a la Charles Xavier) there’s an operation, the virus is gone, but hey! she can wiggle her toes. So there’s lots of things to think about about the larger question throughout this arc, but the whole adds up to something less than the sum of its parts.

Enter - this guy. So when I started reading the Perfect Pitch trade paperback on the plane back from Denver, I was happy. Calculator is also described an information broker, but, you know, evil.

And with an attitude like this - who better to fight this particular evil than a librarian?

And the resulting storyline is just what I wanted - there are active agents out in the field, but the real battle is between these two brains.

(I hear Calculator comes back after Gail Simone left Birds of Prey, but I don’t know what happens with those because I haven’t read them. My point is just that in this moment - yay kick-ass librarian superhero!)

(and then I turned the page and found a message saying - hey! because of our lame crossover event Infinite Crisis, everything in the DC universe has advanced a year! Okay, I am paraphrasing. But everything was all gone. It might as well be a new series. I might be a little bitter, still.)

Which brings me back to the physical/intellectual divide I was talking about before - the one that never quite gets resolved, or even fully explored in Birds of Prey. One of the big questions where Barbara Gordon/ Batgirl/ Oracle is concerned is - will she/should she walk again? I mean, we all know that crazier things have happened in comics.

There are a lot more than two sides to that question. Her maiming was not a good moment - The Killing Joke may have been a good book but that was not a good moment. Turning back the clock happens in the comics, so why not do it here? She is a unique and positive portrayal of disability, why take that away? Or, I love Misfit!Batgirl, and don’t want Barbara Gordon to take the title back. Or, I hate Misfit!Batgirl, bring Barbara Gordon back! And so on and so on and so on and so on.

And my thoughts about that are all mixed up with this whole question of what makes Barbara’s powers super. See, to me the Barbara Gordon of Batgirl, Year One, the one who was on and on about OMG my life of the mind is so boring and tedious and I must do something physical to really matter - is so annoying. I like Barbara who can’t walk, Oracle who has rejected that ridiculous premise right at its root SO MUCH BETTER.

Which gave me a lot of pause, when I saw my Birds of Prey Oracle talking like that other Batgirl - but it didn’t bug me. Why? Why was I not annoyed?

But here’s the thing. This whole arc happens when Barbara is all excited about the toe-wiggling. But for all that, I don’t think it’s about a return of her physical skills. This whole arc is also tied up in the question of what being the all-knowing, in some ways all-powerful leader of the Birds of Prey is taking from Barbara Gordon.

There are lots of comparisons to Batman, how making the hard choices all of the time - making those hard choices for everyone else even when they didn’t ask because that’s what loner vigilante heroes do - makes him hard.

Barbara here is talking, I think, not about being able to go back to the hitting, kicking, punching form of crime fighting so much as she’s talking about going back to a time when she didn’t have to make those tough choices, when she didn’t have to decide for other people when she was, in short, less powerful. When she could just be one of the capes, working on a smaller scale, able to focus on the hands-on day to day and not having to think about the big picture. And I find that fascinating.

So there is probably a lot more out there - good, bad and indifferent - in all of the Barbara Gordon stuff I haven’t read. Maybe someday this will be continued, maybe not.

—–

p.s. There is also a Birds of Prey TV show, but include that in the list of things I’m not talking about, even though I have seen some of it. They made Barbara Gordon a high school teacher for one. And for another, they talk about her amazing information skills but they sure as heck don’t show them. There’s one horrible moment early on where they all sit around waiting for someone to get back to them with something - an address I think - and it doesn’t even occur to information-maven Oracle that she could, you know, look stuff up.  Argh.