Then, in 1988, along came The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. And I’d’ve got her the hell out of Gotham, so she no longer had Bruce looking over her shoulder. I’d have kept all of this – maybe changed her costume a bit, making the yellow bits white and losing the hair. The only other superheroine of the 1960s that I can think of whose costume gave this little emphasis to her body as Batgirl’s is Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl. Wonder Woman) Jim Lee gave Batgirl the domino mask look in All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. Few superheroines wear a full cowl, most going with a domino mask (e.g. The only exposed flesh was, unusually, her lower face. Yes, it was skintight, but it was coloured in dark hues, predominantly blue-black. A similar costume appears on the cover to Batgirl 27.īatgirl’s costume was different. And that was itself not as bad as the costumes Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell inflicted on the female members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, which were often barely there at all … but still. Batgirl’s Earth-Two equivalent, The Huntress, was originally saddled with a one-piece tank suit, split down to the bottom of her breasts (or in some depictions halfway from there to her navel), and thigh length boots. Okay, she was at first saddled with impractical high-heeled boots, but apart from those, it deviated from the standard superheroine costumes. Most superheroine costumes look like swimsuits or lingerie, or both, and have lots of bare flesh exposed. This applies even to a character who supposedly represents strong womanhood, like Wonder Woman. Many costumes, such as the Black Canary’s original outfit, seem more appropriate for the boudoir (admittedly, a kinky boudoir) than for the mean streets. One of the other things I always liked about Batgirl was her costume. She goes on to explain that, of course she knows Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson are Batman and Robin, she isn’t stupid after all, but she let them believe she didn’t know their secret identities because it seemed so very important to their male egos that she not know. But they know (for reasons I don’t recall, and which don’t matter) that Batman can’t be there, so who is this? It turns out to be Batgirl. But that Batgirl moment…ĭick Grayson and Alfred are at Wayne Manor, when they see the famous silhouette of Batman at the window. Here, the overall story is Conway being pretty mundane. The writer was Gerry Conway, who generally is a workaday comics writer, but capable of occasional moments of brilliance (aged twenty, he wrote the classic death of Gwen Stacy story in Amazing Spider-Man). My favourite Batgirl moment is one of the first I read, in Detective Comics 526, the five hundredth appearance of Batman in Detective, back in 1983. Of course, sometimes she was badly written, especially in the early days, when writers could get away with more sexist nonsense than they can now. So sometimes she employed Bat-compacts, carried a Bat-purse, or stayed out of a fight because she had a run in her tights (though that turned out to be a ruse to distract the bad guys so that Batman and Robin could clobber them).īut sometimes she was written brilliantly. After all, this was an independent career woman, with a Ph.D., who had been head of a major public body – the Gotham Public Library – and subsequently a United States Congresswoman. When written properly, she was of a lighter disposition than Bats, but she still took her superheroics seriously, and wasn’t frivolous. Sure, she was a female knock-off of Batman, but she was never as broody or miserable as Batman. She was more than just a female knock-off of Batman. Why did I want to write her? Because she was cool. She was Barbara Gordon, daughter of Batman’s ally Commissioner Gordon. Technically the second Batgirl (though the first was a hyphenated Bat-Girl), this heroine was created as a character that could be employed in the Batman television series in the 1960s, and simultaneously appeared in the comics (in a different, and rather less gaudy, costume, designed by the late Carmine Infantino). But top of the list of characters I wanted to write was Batgirl. Not the obvious ones, like Superman or Batman. I did want to write the Avengers, and Captain America. But let me tell you who was top of the list of characters I wanted to write. Fortunately, I never got to do so – most of my plot ideas were rehashed from my favourite stories by other people. Tony Keen ruminates on how he wanted to portray the Dominoed Daredoll, comparing and contrasting her with other ladies of the DC Universe …īack in my youth (in my case, my early twenties), like many comics fans, I had a fancy to write superhero comics for a living.
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