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A review by spacestationtrustfund
Death of the Family by Gail Simone
1.0
This one is... complicated. I generally enjoy Gail Simone's writing and narrative decisions, and the art in this volume (collecting various singles) was generally really good, it's just... I don't know how I feel about what's been done to Babs. Look, there's never a good way to approach the behemoth that is past comics canon: when you've got nonsense like CAPTAIN AMERICA: COMMIE SMASHER (eerily prescient for, uh, certain slash fic things), or BATMAN: A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (just, Jason Todd in general, really), or, well, what happened to Babs in THE KILLING JOKE. You know, the one where she was paralysed from the waist down, wheelchair-bound, and turned into Oracle instead of Batgirl. I mean, I liked Cassandra Cain as Batgirl fine, and I liked Barbara Gordon as Oracle fine. The issue I have is the, well, ableism.
Superhero stories are mostly ableist by nature, which is kind of a quirk of the genre; sometimes stories about magically (or scientifically) overcoming your disability (Captain America, Daredevil) or weaponising it (X-Men, Batman) can be fun, escapist catharsis. Sometimes ability-ex-machina feels cheap: the Percy Jackson series was pretty notorious for this, turning dyslexia and ADHD into literal superhuman abilities bestowed by gods. And then there are stories like this one, where Babs was disabled—she used a wheelchair, and it didn't prevent her from being productive, albeit in a very different way—and now she isn't. And it feels kinda shitty.
Superhero stories are mostly ableist by nature, which is kind of a quirk of the genre; sometimes stories about magically (or scientifically) overcoming your disability (Captain America, Daredevil) or weaponising it (X-Men, Batman) can be fun, escapist catharsis. Sometimes ability-ex-machina feels cheap: the Percy Jackson series was pretty notorious for this, turning dyslexia and ADHD into literal superhuman abilities bestowed by gods. And then there are stories like this one, where Babs was disabled—she used a wheelchair, and it didn't prevent her from being productive, albeit in a very different way—and now she isn't. And it feels kinda shitty.