Oracle

28 years ago - Barbara Gordon is born in New York, the daughter of James Gordon & Eileen Kean.

20 years ago - 8-year-old Barbara's father James Gordon is transferred to Gotham City, leading her mother Eileen Kean to divorce him and leave them to move to Europe. She starts attending boarding school.

14 years ago - 14-year-old Barbara moves to Gotham to begin taking college courses, leaving boarding school to live with her father James Gordon. She first meets Sarah Essen, and talks her father into asking her out. She meets Dick Grayson's Robin.

13 years ago - 15-year-old Barbara meets Batman when he saves her from Jervis Tech.

12 years ago - 16-year-old Barbara first becomes Batgirl, saving hostages taken by Killer Moth.

11 years ago - 17-year-old Barbara begins attending Gotham University, studying Library Science.

10 years ago - 18-year-old Barbara is able to reverse engineer Arthur Brown's Mystery Theater Network, saving Batman & Robin, and finally earning their trust to learn their identities.

9 years ago - 19-year-old Barbara is kidnapped by the Joker along with James Gordon & Sarah Essen. She is injured freeing herself, and takes a bullet to save Sarah, leaving her paraplegic.

8 years ago - 20-year-old Barbara seeks out Richard Dragon, who begins training her to use her body differently, helping her overcome her insecurities about her handicap.

7 years ago - 21-year-old Barbara completes her bachelors degree.

6 years ago - 22-year-old Barbara completes her training with Richard Dragon & begins building out her equipment in the Clocktower.

5 years ago - 23-year-old Barbara first begins operating as Oracle for the Suicide Squad, and then for Batman and Nightwing. She stymies Edward Nygma's attempt to steal and sell Batman's secret identity, then saves him from Pamela Isley and shelters him temporarily. Helping him come to terms with his compulsion and to stage his greatest con, undoing his network and turning himself in. She begins dismantling Noah Kuttler's networks.

4 years ago - 24-year-old Barbara sees that Koriand'r is staying with Dick Grayson. After helping Felicity Smoak with some of the system infrastructure for the network systems she's building for Connor Hawke, She starts building her plans to run her own field agent. She recruits Dinah Lance, using a system hotkey designated Birds of Prey.

3 years ago - 25-year-old Barbara is hunted by Roland Desmond & Noah Kuttler, and uses a trapped submarine in Gotham Harbor to take out most of his henchmen. Lady Elaine Marsh-Morton comes to kill her but is stopped by Dinah Lance, allowing Barbara to spike and destroy Kuttler's systems and end the contract. This is the first time Dinah & Barbara have met in person. Helena Bertinelli's Huntress starts working regularly with the Birds of Prey. Barbara offers to train Cassandra Cain.

2 years ago - 26-year-old Barbara helps Dinah Lance deactivate the mind control technology of Veronica Sinclair's underground fighting tournament, letting her shut it down without participating.

1 year ago - 27-year-old Barbara expands the Birds of Prey bringing in Helena Bertinelli full-time. Cassandra Cain leaves Gotham for Bludhaven. The Birds of Prey take on the Order of St. Dumas with help from Kate Spencer.

now - 28-year-old Barbara brings Stephanie Brown & Cassandra Cain into the Birds of Prey. She recognizes Stephanie's need for structure, choosing to give her mich more hands-on training. She helps Richie Foley share his new data compression & encryption network with the superhero community.

Barbara Gordon is one of the most compelling characters in DC's lexicon. Her history includes some real unpleasantness, but It's pretty clear that beyond that unpleasantness some truly great writers and creators have taken a stand and done some of their best work with this character, and it really shows. The position she holds within the context of the larger DC continuity, both in its history and in the relationships she's developed, is truly awe-inspiring. I don't know that characters can develop this particular style of complexity in any medium BUT comics.

Barbara Gordon's Comic History

DC had a Batwoman and Batgirl long before Barbara Gordon arrived, but they were largely there to supply Batman comics with some heterosexual romance as a reaction to accusations that they were promoting homosexuality. They were removed from continuity in 1964 when Julius Schwartz redefined the Batman Family. Two years later Schwartz was approached by William Dozier, the producer of the Adam West Batman series, to invent a new Batgirl character. The intention was to introduce her simultaneously in comics and in the show's third season to broaden the series audience. It was Dozier's suggestion that she be the daughter of Commissioner Gordon. Schwartz worked with Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantio to create Barbara Gordon, who debuted in Detective Comics #359 to great fanfare in her own story, establishing her as a hero all her own with no need to be saved by Batman & Robin. Played by the marvelous Yvonne Craig, the character was hugely successful on tv and in the comics, and Batgirl became one of DC's most iconic characters.

Barbara was a huge part of the DC landscape for more than twenty years, a partner to Batman & Robin earning their trust and even eventually being trusted with their secret identities, but also operating on her own. Among the various female characters introduced across this era, she was one of the most uniquely empowered superheroines in comics.

1988's Killing Joke is pretty infamous for what it did to Barbara Gordon. We'll get into that story in a minute, but the end result is that Barbara was no longer Bargirl (technically, she retired as Batgirl in a single issue called Batgirl Special from that same year, but it's pretty clear that it was written to set up the events of Killing Joke).

Writers John Ostrander & Kim Yale, disliking how badly Barbara had been mistreated, started to make references to the mysterious hacker & information broker Oracle across their various series, ultimately leading to the reveal that it was actually Barbara. She became a regular part of Ostrander's series Suicide Squad, and within the next several years Barbara started to show up more and more not just there but also in the mainstream Batman stories. Soon she was being depicted as Batman's main source of intel, and very clearly as his intellectual equal.

In 1995, Chuck Dixon created the Birds of Prey; a team book featuring only two characters, which quickly evolved into one of the best comic book teams available. It's in this series that Barbara was first written by Gail Simone, starting one of the best writer/character partnerships in comics.

By the New 52 the decision was made to return Barbara to her role as Batgirl, simultaneously replacing several beloved subsequent Batgirls and removing one of the greatest wheelchair-using heroes in all of fiction.

The Worst Thing That Happened

In short, Barbara is shot by Joker and left paralyzed. This in and of itself is perhaps not the worst thing in the world; violent acts happen to heroes all the time, and in the case of Barbara the result was such an amazing character that it actually becomes very difficult to separate this event from Barbara's larger story.

The problem here is that this violent act is depicted so gratuitously, that I don't even want to show it here. Even worse, it's one of the worst examples ever of a female character being subject to horrific trauma (even sexualized trauma) just to advance the story of the male hero. I can't imagine there's anyone out there that thinks that what happened in Killing Joke was acceptable anymore. Even Alan Moore himself described it as too nasty, too violent, and too sexualized. So this is what needs to be dealt with; not the incident itself, but the way it's depicted.

Our Barbara Gordon Story

To begin with, we wanted to resolve some issues with Barbara's age. When she was originally introduced she was a grown woman with a doctorate in library science who ran the Gotham Library. As time went on and her relationship with Dick Grayson became a core part of her story she was continually having her age reimagined to make her younger, ultimately resulting in her depiction in the 2015 Batgirl of Burnside series in which she appeared to suddenly be barely in her early twenties. This was a great series, but we're going to move those stories over to Stephanie Brown, who fits that characterization much more accurately.

For our story, Barbara is going to be a little older than Dick Grayson, starting out as Batgirl when she's 16. She earns the trust of Batman and Robin, and is accepted as their partner. We want this part of her life to feel complete, as though, in the absence of the tragedy she experiences, she would still be Batgirl today.

Of course, if our timeline is going to include Oracle, one of the best superheroes DC has to offer, then we're going to need to include a VERSION of her attack. We're having the Joker kidnap the commissioner and his pregant wife, and having Barbara sacrifice herself to save them, CHOOSING to take the bullet. We don't even really need Bruce involved. The important thing here is that we give her agency, and we make this HER story.

Barbara's transition into her new role is actually fantastically supported by lots of in-cannon content, depicting the work she had to do to build herself into Oracle. She came from a place of absolutely understandable depression, but would overcome it as she trained herself to use her body differently, and to slowly build up the infrastructure and contacts necessary to be the most important information broker in the world. It's honestly a titanic arc for her to undergo, and the fact that she does it is just one more reason that she is such an amazing character.

In continuity, the reason Barbara Gordon was able to return to being Batgirl in the New 52 was because of a deus ex machina spinal implant. Later, she realizes she's overstressing the implant, and chooses to return to her role as Oracle, although now she's out of the wheelchair and able to walk. Technically, this is a world including shapeshifting martians and magic swamp monsters, so its at least possible that Barbara may at some point be able to address her handicap... but I think we can all agree that when you have one of the best characters comics have ever produced, and she happens to be in a wheelchair, that when you take her out of that chair you lose something precious.

Oracle's Future

Batgirl is an incredibly important character, and Barbara Gordon was absolutely iconic in that role, one of the best characters in DC's history. That said... we've had some really amazing other characters that have taken up the mantle of Batgirl, and in the meantime, Barbara has gone on to become something WAY more important. Oracle holds an absolutely unique position in the DC canon, and in a catalog with thousands of characters that's nearly impossible. All of DC is more interesting when it includes Oracle. Batman is a better character with Oracle in his ear.

Beyond that, however... Barbara herself is pretty much the best of what DC has to offer. Looking to the future, We know that Barbara's friendships and partnerships are going to continue to grow and strengthen, giving her an even broader role to play in the world, but we're also going to see the evolution of her relationship with Dick Grayson. Not just for all the reasons I've outlined previously on this site, but also because they are my favorite characters in comics, and I love them together.

Babs is one of DC's most relatable, most human characters, and I challenge you to read her story without her becoming your favorite too.

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