Enter Oracle (?) in Batgirl #40, written by Brenden Fletcher and Cameron Stewart, with art by Babs Tarr, colors by Maris Wicks and lettering by Jared K. Fletcher.
T
he true villain behind most of Babs’ misfortunes and manipulations has been a corrupted algorithm she created while wheelchair bound to predict (as in an oracle) crime. It becomes sentiment (to a degree) and is now going overkill, planning to kill people via satellite in an act of a zealous “pre-crime” prevention. It puts Babs in a strange I presume semi-false memory state of her creating the algorithm but Frankie is there. Babs and Frankie ultimately stop this program with help from Qadir after it targets all of their friends at Black Canary’s concert. Babs finally states that yes she really does want to help people, and that’s she’s’ grown and is no longer so angry, the speech currently being the closest Babs has come to pretty much stating why she wants to be Batgirl and it not sound arbitrary or a by the fly reasoning from editorial of “just cause”. After Frankie shuts the program down successfully everything is good again and later presents Babs with a “clean” copy of the program she found/was able to create and is about to reveal the name she gave it when Dinah walks in. It most likely will be Oracle.
POSITIVES
Art is nice as it always is, Babs Tarr herself does a good job every month, it’s fun and I really dig the style. She does and this is pretty minor, really needs to work on her builds and faces for guys though because while they are noticeably diverse with ethnic features all of the main and supporting lead dudes are 100% the same type of attractive. Good character design facilitates that no two silhouettes should be the same and I’m pretty sure I’d confuse three of these supporting guy characters if seen in silhouette. A funny aside: Betty Felon and Jordan Gibson are fast becoming actual cast members of this book too with their cameos (slightly cloying really as much as I love them like we get it…you’re friends with them, right-o). The coloring on this book however is what makes it really great. It’s really nice and stylized and full of really atmospheric tones. Really love it.
NEGATIVES
This team, while earnest and does things tonally right, don’t really understand Barbara Gordon or what Oracle meant/symbolizes.
Okay so before I even begin, I must preface that this current storyline is very familiar to me. I myself am the writer of a Batgirl fan series comic Batgirl Inc. This is why Batgirl means a lot to me. I love all the Batgirls. And this current narrative resembles one of our own (this is not a gripe).
Some back story: my comic features a Babs who while was not shot, she was in an accident and literally lost her legs below the knees. While she recovered for two years during what you could call a “dark time” she decided to be proactive and created a program and hub for an AI (we’re a lot more science-y in a kid’s TV show sense), to assist her in fighting crime, but was unable to power it correctly; she designed software and hardware too advanced for her own materials. It isn’t until the start of our comic when she steals a computer chip from Killer Moth is she able to power up her program for th
e first time. The chip unfortunately, is preloaded with some *coughApokolipsiancough* programing she wasn’t supposed to find, dubbed Ophelia, and it quickly hijacks her Batgirl bunker computer system. She however, with some quick programing and a firewall is able to inject her own programing basically overriding Ophelia with Oracle (who is indeed an AI intent to help solve problems and also harass Tim Drake), her intended program from the start. It works, and now Babs has a new partner to help her with fighting crime. I wrote this pretty much three years ago.
I am not saying this creative team copied me; that’s pretty absurd so don’t think that’s my intention of mentioning my own amateur comic. I just found a parallel in how people are thinking of new ways to have Oracle reinvented. If Babs cannot be Oracle in a physical sense as a mantle for herself, dividing it up into an AI is an appealing way to link a “Batgirl” with the Oracle moniker while still having her as Batgirl. There are other ways to do it, but this is the one I came up with, and it appears like Fletcher and Stewart did too. That’s fine, I’m not complaining there. Mine is more…Zordon inspired anyway.
The problem here is that having Oracle rooted in something so negative as they’ve done here, Babs negativity making a dangerous program and it gaining sentience instead of being something positive grown from a negative state is..just low. DC being obsessed with Alan Moore and The Killing Joke, making it the bedrock to this new Batgirl’s character and throwing away everything Kim Yale and writer John Ostrander did to turn an awful story into something amazing for Babs is just…gross. This is a fact that continually taints this current Batgirl and makes it hard for me to fully support her. And this.. is not a good way to introduce Oracle for me.
Kim Yale and John Ostrander are saints in how they saved the character and turned something that wasn’t even about her at all (it was Jim, it was all about Jim) into a display of perseverance and a transformation based on her own sheer will and skill. It was bold in the face of editorial wanting to shelve her with the infamous “cripple the bitch” go ahead. Having the Oracle AI program rooted in Babs’ anger, depression, wanting people to fear her, is an awful way of honoring what Oracle was to Babs pre-boot. It was proactive. Not spiteful.
Here Babs isn’t given that 
strength in the face of adversity and instead was consumed by the negativity. This is an entirely different Babs. While it is Babs’ speech that halts the program from it’s proposed slaughter it isn’t even Babs herself that “fixes” it with her own skills, it’s Frankie. Frankie shuts it down and later creates the clean “good” copy, and names it, which will most likely be Oracle. Why can’t Babs do that?
Babs chose that name for herself pre-boot. It was her choice. It was all her. And that was an important part of the identity. Why are we taking that power away from Babs? I like Frankie, I just wish Babs was the one who reconfigured the program and named it herself. I’m excited to see what Frankie will turn into for Babs, but I’m noticed a siphoning of skills here between her and Qadir and people doing a lot of things for Babs with a lot of her struggling in the middle. I like her having friends. I like her having a team. But let her have defining skills! Stop making her so…green. I admire her speech and the fact that she’s grown and they’ve reintegrated her computing smarts, but it’s taken us way too long (40 issues?!) to get her here. We should be miles away from this by now.
VERDICT
I understand what they’re doing and they mean well and I do think it will get better but Batgirl continues to not fully understand what made Babs great. Batgirl did not make Babs great. Babs made Babs great. Oracle was a reflection of that. So let her really be great. Please. Give her power back. Good art supports this book a lot. It’s stylish and great, and I really want to like it even more. I hope from now on they can do that.
