(Untitled)

[kksimone]

I'm trying to get an article together for the Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels so I can get some academic street cred. It's an issue on gender, so I was briefly toying with looking at The Killing Joke and Heart of Hush and if they're both fridgings.

Comments

[yellowlantern]

I was working on a long, rambling response about The Killing Joke, but I belatedly realized that I didn't actually have a point. I will just share one of my favorite lines from Barbara Gordon's Wikipedia article:

DC Senior Vice President Dan DiDio comments, "Some stories... are so strong that undoing them would be a crime. The DCU would be a lesser place without [former Flash Barry Allen]'s sacrifice, or the crippling of Barbara at the hands of the Joker." However, DiDio has undone Flash's death but not Gordon's paralysis.

Even ignoring the Barry Allen hypocrisy, think about that: according to DiDio, "the DCU would be a lesser place" if Barbara Gordon wasn't irreversibly paralyzed by the Joker. I can't even begin to unpack all the terrible implications in that statement.

[kksimone]

Yeah, that was sort of the problem I found with writing/thinking about TKJ. My argument would be something like, "Come on!"

Worse, Barry Allen died saving existence. Barbara forgot to look out the peephole before answering the door.

There's been at least two stories basically written to prove that Barbara Gordon Must Die Be Paralyzed: Booster Gold tries to rescue her, and Wonder Woman and Zatanna take her pity-clubbing because they know what's going to happen (and yet they don't make any attempt to try to actually, you know, protect her).

[yellowlantern]

The Booster Gold story was part of my rant. I love that book otherwise, but to use that incident to explicitly illustrate the very PRINCIPLE of being unable to avert comic book "destiny" was so annoying that it almost seems like it was done specifically to taunt the people who have different opinions about Barbara's treatment.

That Wonder Woman/Zatanna story sounds pretty awful in its own right.

To be honest, I like Oracle for who she is and it was an interesting thing to do with Barbara in the short term, but I don't see any reason that she shouldn't be able to move on from it in some fashion. Paul Dini had an interesting idea about her regaining her mobility via a Lazarus Pit, then dealing with the mental consequences of that. With the big two publishers increasingly grasping for "events" to boost sales, I'm hoping they'll try letting Barbara out of the chair out of desperation, if nothing else.

[kksimone]

What makes the WW/Zatanna outing especially awkward (as if the premise itself wasn't terrible) is I don't think Barbara has any history of hanging out with the two of them. But her BFF Supergirl has been retconned to hell and back, and I don't remember how long she's known Black Canary so...random other female superheroes! Even Selina would make more sense (except I can't really imagine Selina weeping in the bathroom over poor, poor future-cripple Barbara)

My issue is that in a world with Lazarus Pits, the Amazon Purple Healing Ray, magic, and however the hell Bruce recovered from Knightfall, it makes absolutely no sense that Barbara Gordon still uses a wheelchair. Other than feeling the need for a token.

[yellowlantern]

however the hell Bruce recovered from Knightfall

Holy shit, that detail had never occurred to me. That makes it ten times more infuriating. I can't believe I didn't make that connection. Fuck you, DC.