The tragedy Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl experienced at the hands of the Joker in The Killing Joke is revisited and reframed in Nightwing #85.
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Nightwing #85, on sale now from DC Comics.
With the Scarecrow’s “Fear State” quickly taking over Gotham City, the Bat-Family has rallied together to stop the villain’s latest scheme. The event has also brought Dick Grayson back into Barbara Gordon’s life to help her dismantle everything she’s built as Oracle after the mysterious Seer took control of her network. Her new foe also tried to killed Nightwing just to hurt Oracle, a feeling she’s intimately familiar with after the Joker paralyzed her. The conversation that followed revealed that, while Barbara has moved past the pain of the event, it was still incredibly unfair to her. Yet as Dick points out, she did something remarkable with her loss.
In Nightwing #85 (by Tom Taylor, Robbi Rodriguez, Adriano Lucas, and Wes Abbott) the Seer tried killing Nightwing as a way to get to Oracle. He survived, but Barbara told him that the attack on him was more to hurt her than kill him. It was part of a plan instead of being the endgame. In effect, Dick’s death or possible injury was simply an attack on Barbara, his pain not being the point. She equates this to what the Joker did to her when he shot and paralyzed her in Batman: The Killing Joke.
Barbara’s debilitating injury is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, it was done so casually to her character. At the time of The Killing Joke, Barbara was a well-known female superhero, arguably on par with Wonder Woman. However, she was grievously injured, not as a launching point for greater stories about her coping with her disability, but simply as a plot device simply meant to hurt her father. The lifetime of challenges ahead of her was only meant to be one moment in the worst day of Jim Gordon’s life.
It was a massive disservice, to have so much pain inflicted upon her just to make someone else suffer for a short time. As she summed it up, “It wasn’t even my story.” But how Dick responded pointed out that while her loss was unfair to her, she did something incredible with it. Barbara became Oracle, learning to live with her new state of living and actually improve upon the good she could do in the world, networking heroes across the world and helping to save the world more times than Nightwing can keep track of.
This was perhaps the redeeming quality of the story. Even though Barbara was unceremoniously dealt this unfair hand, what writers did with her character next was nothing short of phenomenal. As Oracle, Barbara became not just an inspiration for overcoming personal challenges and loss, she also became an inspiration for those dealing with disabilities in their own lives. That kind of representation is more valuable than anything in the world.
So while there are problems with how Barbara was handled, the good that came from it later balances the scales a little. And it’s that kind of duality that defines her. She can find the good in any situation, no matter how personal or terrible it seems at the time. And that loss has given her the perspective, patience, and strength to get through the worst ordeals.
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