Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back with a comic book review. Sort of. Instead of talking about one issue or a complete story arc/collected edition, I'm going to be talking about two number one issues from the same series. I'm talking about Batgirl #1 from 2000, starring Cassandra Cain, and Batgirl #1 from 2009, starring Stephanie Brown. I'll be discussing my history with both of those characters, why I like one issue over the other, and other things surrounding both issues. So let's get into it.
While Barbara Gordon had her own backup series in Detective Comics in the '70s, and a one-shot special issue in the '80s right before The Killing Joke came out, this series was the first time that a character who held the name "Batgirl" had her own series. Cassandra Cain is not a character I have a ton of history with. I wasn't reading comics when she was introduced during No Man's Land, and I missed this issue when it first came out back in 2000. In fact, I didn't actually pick it up until sometime during the Stephanie Brown Batgirl run. Aside from a few issues here and there of current stuff in the early to mid-2000s, and tons of back issues, I was pretty much away from comics until 2009, so I didn't even know who Cassandra Cain was until I got back into the hobby.
While I like this issue alot, I like it because of Barbara Gordon and Batman, not because of Cassandra Cain. I'll be honest with you, I've never felt a connection to this character. Her story doesn't resonate with me the way Barbara's did, particularly during her time as Oracle, and it definitely doesn't resonate with me the way Stephanie's story does. And I don't know if it's just because I don't care about assassin turned superhero/masked crimefighter characters in general, or if I just don't vibe with Cassandra in particular. Because I love Batman, and I have since I saw reruns of the 1966 TV series on YTV when I was a kid, but, despite Barbara telling Bruce that Cassandra reminds her of him in her manner, Bruce and Cassandra are different enough characters, with different enough backgrounds that her situation is one that is outside my realm of possibilities, whereas Bruce's, at least in terms of losing his parents at a young age, and deciding to something constructive with that pain, in his case fighting crime as Batman, rather than turning to more destructive ways of dealing with that pain.
It also doesn't help that Cassandra doesn't talk and we don't get her thoughts at all. So she's almost a supporting character in her own book, with Barbara taking on the main character role. So that makes it hard for me to connect with Cassandra. And at this point, Babs and Bruce don't even know her name yet, because she doesn't talk, and they can't find much information on her, beyond who trained her to be an assassin. So it's difficult to really connect to her. At least for me.
My favourite scene in this issue is where Barbara is telling Batman how good Cassandra is at stick-fighting and says that she figured she had been trained by David Cain (who turns out to be Cassandra's dad), but Batman reminds Barbara that Cain is an assassin, he would not have taught stick-fighting to Cassandra. And then he goes on to say, "I did. Last week. Took five minutes". At which point Barbara is just like, "Oh you gotta be kidding me...". It actually reminds me of the type of dry humour that's in Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond. Which makes sense because The New Batman Adventures just ended a year or so earlier, and Batman Beyond had just started only a few months earlier.
Like I said, I really don't have very much history with Cassandra Cain's Batgirl because I wasn't reading very many new comics in the early to mid 2000s when her run was starting and by the time I was back into the hobby in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Stephanie Brown had taken on the mantle of Batgirl, and Cassandra was absent, which I suspect has to do with the fact that Grant Morrison wasn't able to explore her role in Batman Incorporated because of the company wide reboot that happened in 2011 with the New 52.
Speaking of Stephanie Brown, she's my favourite character to come out of Tim Drake's Robin series that ran from 1993 to 2009. She's had such a journey from being Spoiler to temporarily replacing Tim as Robin, to being killed off in "War Games" to returning from the dead, as all good comic book characters do, to being completely erased from continuity when the New 52 started in 2011. Batgirl is my favourite Batman related comic book series that isn't an actual Batman comic book series. It came out while I was in college, and because I'd known who Stephanie Brown was from the Robin series, dating all the way back to 1994 when my mom got me Robin #5 from the CHEO gift shop while I was in for some day surgery procedure, so when I found out that she had become Batgirl and had her own series, I got really excited. Unfortunately, I missed the first issue, but I got issue #2 and then ended up missing ten issues, because, I was in college and Brad and I weren't going to the Comic Book Shoppe quite as often as we would end up doing a few years later. So it wasn't until issue #15 came out in late 2010 that I started getting the series every month.
Eventually I got the first two trade paperback volumes, which let me catch up on the issues I had missed, and that's how I read issue #1, and the rest of the issues, minus issue #8, which ended up collected in the first trade paperback volume of Red Robin, which is a series that I've never read. Not because I don't like Tim Drake, I mean he is my favourite Robin of all time, but I didn't actually know about the series until it was about to end just before the New 52 started. It was the only Bat-Family book that wasn't very well advertised, and aside from the crossover with Batgirl, Red Robin never overlapped with the other Bat books.
The opening of this issue feels like the opening to a Fast and the Furious movie or the opening scene of an episode of some teen drama with the illegal street racing. And then Stephanie shows up in Cassandra's Batgirl costume and it feels more like Smallville or a later CW DC Comics based show. And that's because the writer for the series, Bryan Q. Miller, was a writer for Smallville from 2005 to 2011, AND he wrote an episode or two for season 2 of Arrow from 2013 to 2014, and wrote at least one episode of The Flash in 2016. So, he was the perfect choice to be the writer for Stephanie Brown's time as Batgirl.
And while Barbara Gordon is basically the secondary main character of the series until Bruce returns and has the entire Bat-Family working on different assignments to take down Leviathan, she doesn't overshadow Stephanie the way it felt like she was doing in the first issue of Cassandra Cain's Batgirl series. Barbara was to Stephanie what Bruce was to Terry McGinnis in Batman Beyond. And I think that's because we've already had seventeen years of history with Stephanie up to the point that this issue came out since she first appeared in Detective Comics in 1992.
I think the reason Stephanie Brown, and this series, resonated with me so much is because it was about Stephanie proving to herself she could do something, it was about Barbara proving she was still worth something despite things being messy with the Birds of Prey at that point, and Bruce being dead following Final Crisis which had just wrapped up when this issue came out. At that time, I'd flunked out of the Radio Broadcasting program at the college I was going to, and I didn't have a backup. Luckily the college had a special winter General Arts program for people who wanted to go to college, didn't know what they wanted to do in college, and weren't able to start college in the fall for whatever reason. But still, because I'd flunked out of my dream program because my health got in the way, and I didn't know what else I wanted to do, my confidence was a bit shaken. So even though my problems were academic based, I still understood what Stephanie was going through. As a disabled person I also kinda understood what Barbara was going through thanks to everything going on with Bruce being gone and the Birds of Prey being in whatever situation they were in at the time.
While I often say that Marvel heroes are who we are and DC heroes are who we want to be, I think there are plenty of superheroes in the DC Universe who are just like us. Not all of us are Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman or Green Lantern, Green Arrow, the Flash or Martian Manhunter. Sometimes we ARE Barbara Gordon, Stephanie Brown, Tim Drake, Jaime Reyes, and Courtney Whitmore. And that's why I love those characters, and why I love this series.
Obviously, you can tell that I like Batgirl #1 from 2009 more than I do the one from 2000. That's just because Cassandra doesn't relateable to me, whereas Stephanie does. Storywise they're both still really good first issues. I do think Lee Garbett and Trevor Scott's art on the 2009 issue is better, and looks less cartoony than Damion Scott and Robert Campanella's art on the 2000 issue does though. I only have one other issue from the Cassandra Cain Batgirl series, so I probably won't cover that issue for a while, but I have all 24 issues of the Stephanie Brown series so I think I'm gonna do a major series review of that series once I'm finished the Tales of the Jedi trades that Jonathan lent me.
That's it for me for today my friends, but I'll be back on Friday with another review of some sort. Next week I'll be starting my reviews of the Home Alone movies because I have all five of them on DVD, I have access to all of them on Disney+ (for now), and I have Home Alone 3 on VHS. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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