birds of prey

While the decision to paralyze Barbara Gordon was certainly a misogynistic one, the way that her character develops after the shooting speaks to the transformative power of information and technology...and librarians! Last week we looked at Barbara Gordon's character prior to The Killing Joke. She was a librarian by day and Batgirl by night. Her role as a librarian disguised her alter ego as Batgirl; reasserting the stereotype of librarians as meek and the opposite of badass. But this all changes after The Killing Joke. Thanks to a few writers who decided to make the best of what had happened to Gordon, Gordon's character decides to embrace her identity as a skilled librarian. She becomes Oracle, a computer hacker who discovers that access to information is a pretty phenomenal superpower.

Bad news in the superhero world over the past few months: the downturn in the economy is impacting comic book publishers, and both Marvel and DC Comics are canceling a whole of bunch of their midlist superheroes. Unfortunately, the midlist is where a lot of titles featuring women and superheroes of color live in the comic book world. As a result, comic book diversity seems to be the biggest casuality of all these cancellations.