Kōmori
18 years ago - Cassandra Cain is born to a Japanese mother in a slum in Burma, and is sold to David Cain. She is part of an experiment by David Cain to create the perfect assassin, the League of Assassin's fabled "one who is all". She is brought up without language, using her linguistic centers to instead interpret movement.
11 years ago - 7-year-old Cassandra trains under Ben Turner.
3 years ago - 15-year-old Cassandra Cain runs away after committing her first kill. She finds her way to Gotham during the No Man's Land quake, where she stops Victor Zsasz from killing Alfred Pennyworth. David Cain battles Bruce Wayne to get her back, but retreats after she says her first work, "stop". She quickly adopts the role of Batgirl, accepting training from Barbara Gordon. Sandra Wu finds her, she is clearly outclassed and battered in their confrontation, but wins with a lucky sucker punch. Shiva gives her a year before they will fight to the death.
2 years ago - 16-year-old Cassandra and Sandra Wu meet to battle to the death. Sandra stops Cassandra's heart, killing and reviving her. Cassandra ultimately defeats her, refusing to kill her. Cassandra defeats David Cain while he is framing Bruce Wayne for murder, leading him to turn himself in.
1 year ago - 17-year-old Cassandra Cain leaves Gotham for Bludhaven to assist Dick Grayson.
now - 18-year-old Cassandra Cain chooses to pass on the Batgirl identity to Stephanie Brown, and to help Barbara Gordon train her. She adopts a new identity as Kōmori, becoming a part-time member of the Birds of Prey.
Cassandra Cain is DOPE.
She's a completely unique character with a very innovative gimmick that does an unbelievable amount of heavy lifting to inform the action and drama and characterization across her entire series. That's HER series, by the way; even with an incredibly cool and beloved predecessor, she's still the very first Batgirl to headline her own series, which she did for a very impressive 5+ years.
More than all of that, though... Cassandra was a real, breathing person. Even with her larger-than-life story, she felt like someone we knew. Following along with her was a real privilege which is why, of all the characters that got left out of the New 52 continuity reset, Cassandra was one that really seemed to frustrate people. She's just a great character and we want to make sure we do right by her.
She's a completely unique character with a very innovative gimmick that does an unbelievable amount of heavy lifting to inform the action and drama and characterization across her entire series. That's HER series, by the way; even with an incredibly cool and beloved predecessor, she's still the very first Batgirl to headline her own series, which she did for a very impressive 5+ years.
More than all of that, though... Cassandra was a real, breathing person. Even with her larger-than-life story, she felt like someone we knew. Following along with her was a real privilege which is why, of all the characters that got left out of the New 52 continuity reset, Cassandra was one that really seemed to frustrate people. She's just a great character and we want to make sure we do right by her.
Cassandra Cain's Comic HistoryIn 1999, it had been over a decade since Barbara Gordon was paralyzed in 1988's Killing Joke, and there had essentially been no Batgirl in all that time. During the Batman family crossover event No Man's Land we first met Cassandra Cain, a totally new character who quickly takes up the role, carving out her own niche in the Batman family that no one had ever found before. Cassandra had been raised by assassin David Cain as an experiment. She grew up in isolation, deprived of human speech, adapting the language centers of her brain to interpret physical movement, allowing her to read body movement, anticipating action and understanding what people are saying even though she barely knew ten words. It was an absolutely brutal backstory, but the character that came from it was profoundly complex.
Cassandra got her own solo series in 2000, the first Batgirl to do so. It was an absolutely fascinating new spin on the idea of a Batman character; where her physical prowess was so advanced she was almost never in any physical danger (although Chuck Dixon found some awesome ways to threaten her by pitting her against Lady Shiva, who was eventually revealed as her mother), instead the book found it's dramatic tension in everything ELSE, as Cassandra struggled to be a person rather than just a weapon, and learned all the other skills necessary to be a protege of Batman. |
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That first series ended when DC fully reset all its books in 2006 for the One Year Later event following the Infinite Crisis crossover. Cassandra was suddenly being depicted as part of the League of Assassins, a vast departure from her exisiting character, so much so that it was retconned that she was being brainwashed by Deathstroke, using the same mind control drug he'd used on Terra, which is a really bad angle for them to take. She would appear in a variety of series after this; Justice League Elite, Batman and the Outsiders, and would eventually be depicted working in Hong Kong as a ninja-themed hero named Blackbat.
After the New 52 Cassandra, and fellow Batgirl Stephanie Brown, were both conspicuously and frustratingly absent for a number of years. Eventually she would crop up again, now using the discouragingly generic moniker "Orphan'. Eventually in the Rebirth era both Cassandra and Stephanie would star in the series Batgirls, both using the name Batgirl and working under the instruction of Barbara Gordon. It is nice that they finally are making the effort to recognize how great these characters are, but it's disheartening that such a great series with such amazing history is no longer canon. |
Our Cassandra Cain StoryCassandra's origin story, and her adventures once she becomes a member of the Bat-Family are honestly pretty much perfect. I hint at this stuff a lot, but I really want to make sure I come right out and say this; please go read her 2000 solo series if you haven't already. We're mirroring the events of the first several arcs of this series practically verbatim, with Cassandra fleeing from the assassin that raised her to be a killer, finding a home and a purpose in Gotham, and then having to survive the challenge of Lady Shiva.
What happens next, however, is more of an original idea. Cassandra doesn't want to leave, but she is devoted, even obsessed, with improving herself. To that end she ventures to Bludhaven to become partners with Nightwing, earning herself a broader and broader place in the Bat-Family. We did also have to come up with a new name for her to use; It does make a TON of sense for her to give over the Batgirl name to Stephanie, but given how much Cassandra strives to emulate the ideal Batman, it really only made sense that she would only move CLOSER to it, which none of the names she's been given in comic canon really do. We decided that she would chose then name "Kōmori", which is Japanese for bat, as a way to both indicate that she is even closer to becoming the hero she strives to be, while also embracing what she knows of her own history. |
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Cassandra's CostumeCassandra's original Batgirl Costume was uniquely hers and pretty much perfect, and is pretty inarguably the costume she needs to wear for her time using the name.
It doesn't really make sense to us for Cassandra to ever make conscious costuming decisions and put on any of the more over-designed outfits she's worn since. Instead, we think it's more likely that she would simply evolve that original costume; starting to wear wraps around her wrists, her Bat-Family cape & cowl transitioning into something more ninja cowl-esque. You saw some of these ideas at play when she was going as Blackbat. As she continues to evolve, it's entirely possible that you might see that costume evolve with her; there have been some very interesting costume concepts over the years... but she's likely always going to be wearing something much simpler and less stylized. |
Cassandra's FutureAs we leave out timeline, Cassandra is filling multiple roles. She's still working with Barbara, who has helped her from the very beginning, giving her a family and a home. She's now an agent of the Birds of Prey, working with the new Batgirl, Stephanie Brown. At the same time, she's also stepping up in a huge way in Bludhaven, Taking over more and more of the protection of the city as Nightwing's responsibilities have him covering both Gotham AND the new Watchtower. She's growing in leaps and bounds in every possible direction, always dedicated to becoming a better hero.
There's one thing that's been true about Cassandra from the very beginning of her story, something that's made her stand out among the entire Batman Family. Cassandra WANTS to be Batman. Every other one of his proteges wants to escape his shadow and be their own person, but Cassandra has always seen Bruce as a powerful ideal, something she has tried to aspire to from the moment we met her. In working tirelessly to make herself like Batman, she's managed to make herself something totally unique. |
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