Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1975-77)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

I was waiting for Bronze Age to get to the Batman Family reprints, assuming since DC moved Batgirl from backups to an anthology—and even a feature or two—the stories must be better. Surely Elliot S. Maggin and Bob Rozakis had to be better at writing her comics than Frank Robbins. Silly me.

Most of the Batman Family stories have Batgirl teaming up with Robin. There’s one where she teams up with the Golden Age Batwoman, which features some of the worst Rozakis exposition. At least until his last story, which is the last story in the collection, where Rozakis calls the readers dummies for not understanding how his very bad plot line works. Usually he’s just being oddly sexist to Batgirl (and alter ego Barbara Gordon) in a way Maggin never hits. Maggin’s got his issues—Batgirl kisses Robin to show him he can’t tell her she’s a girl and can’t do crimefighting—not to mention his very weird take on Robin:

If Spider-Man’s superpower came from being bitten by a radioactive spider, Robin’s special power is having the agile body of a boy and the intellect of man. He’s a man-boy or a boy-man. Definitely makes Robin seem like a better superhero name.

When the Dynamite Duo—Batgirl and Robin—first team up, they still don’t know each others secret identities. They quickly figure it out—off panel because Maggin’s not into any character development whatsoever—but that discovery even further stalls their character development. There’s maybe some implications—like Dick’s girlfriends being jealous of his friendship with Babs—but he tells Batman at one point he’s not interested in older women. Bruce Wayne doesn’t agree (oddly, Barbara never figures out Bruce Wayne is Batman despite Grayson being his ward); meanwhile, Barbara thinks Dick’s too young for her and when you subtract seven from her twenty-five (I’m fairly sure they’ve de-aged her and also taken away at least one advanced degree) he’s just outside jailbait. Guess she’s not impressed with the boy body, especially since Robin’s usually just using the man intellect to tell Batgirl she’s too much a girl to be a good superhero.

All of the stories are silly or bad. The first one has the Devil bringing Benedict Arnold back to life to take over the United States, which is actually a low point until Maggin brings in the Huntress and the Sportsmaster (doesn’t matter, don’t ask) who trick Robin and Batgirl into doing an elaborate heist in South America. But then Rozakis comes on and, while the stories are less patently absurd, they’re also intentionally confusing so Rozakis can turn around and be condescending to the reader on the last page or whatever.

Also disappointing is the art. Unless you want to see when Mike Grell didn’t know people had knees or Pablo Marcos drew everyone at 6’6”. Not even the José Luis García-López entry pays off. Curt Swan’s entries are also rather disappointing. Irv Novick’s is maybe the best. It’s a very low bar.

There are some decent DC extreme long shot action panels, which usually involve Batgirl doing a flip out of danger. Those panels at least show some good composition work.

The Batman Family reprints are a tepid finish to the already tepid collection. Every story, you see the artists credits and assume it’ll at least look good and then it never even looks good.

I’m a few years too young for the late seventies Batman Family but am now really glad I never bought a bunch of back issues of it because, if Maggin and Rozakis’s writing is any indication, they’re probably pretty stinky overall.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 sure doesn’t motivate to read Vol. 2.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1972)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

I’ve been aware of the “Barbara (Batgirl) Gordon becomes a congressperson” storyline in the seventies since Who’s Who in the DC Universe #2 in 1985—I even have an anecdote about buying the issue at age seven—but I’ve never read the arc before or even read about its details.

And now I’ve read it.

And it’s about Barbara Gordon becoming a congresswoman because Batgirl can only lock up the crooks, not keep them locked up forever. Yes, Barbara Gordon is a garbage Republican. I wonder if Chuck Dixon held that ace through Birds of Prey and never got to use it.

After an ex-boyfriend from her youth—who Barbara broke up with ten years ago but then beat up and apprehended two years ago as Batgirl—shows up at the library with an Edgar Allan Poe enthusiasm, she can’t help but hope for the best. Only it turns out he’s just after a famous manuscript she’s shown him and it crushes her confidence in the criminal justice system.

Worse, she’s been helping these crooks get parole as a librarian!

Or something. I glazed over in a combination of shock and disgust. Batgirl is a Karen.

At least as written by Frank Robbins. Though I doubt it’s going to change for decades.

There’s some hilariously dated election fraud, with the mob threatening voters to not vote for Barbara “Boots” Gordon. She’s called “Boots” initially because she’s going to give the crooks the boot, but then it’s the swamp. There’s a whole subplot about Batgirl accidentally endorsing Barbara and then Barbara apparently feeling weird about it.

The congresswoman is the last Robbins and Don Heck arc. The earlier stories in the year have Barbara going to Mexico to bust up a drug ring run by an American mobster dropped from a Dick Tracy script for being too boring. Again, Robbins is weirdly dated.

Heck’s got some good panels throughout. Not really sure his grasp of human musculature and movement is adequate, but he makes up for it well enough. His faces have personality even if they’re a little static. Oddly enough… he really can’t draw Batgirl’s boots. She’s always doing these kicks and he’s always messing up the boots.

Robbins tries the “can you spot the clue to solve the case” bit a couple more times, but with less and less enthusiasm. At one point it’s just at the end of a page, not even a cliffhanger. Though I guess Batgirl doesn’t lose as many fights in 1972. Well… wait. There are some bad losses in here.

But she wins against a killer jai alai team.

I had originally assumed these Bronze Age backups would be disposable except for the some of the art—Robbins has never been good (though he’s been better than some of the original Batgirl writers)—but there may actually be something in here for anyone writing about the characterization of women in male-written mainstream comic books of the seventies.

Though just because you can unpack it doesn’t mean it needs to be unpacked. Robbins is pretty shallow.

Thank goodness I’m through his Bronze Age Batgirl.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1971)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

After a cliffhanger resolve with Gil Kane pencils (Vince Colletta inks, which shockingly is an improvement over previous Kane inkers on the Batgirl backups), Don Heck takes over the pencils with Dick Giordano on inks. Can Dick Giordano inks save Don Heck pencils? It’s not terrible. Even after Giordano leaves and the Batgirl strips are Heck solo, it’s at least a nice nostalgic seventies middling. Low middling. But solidly middling; though Heck’s got some weird costume choices, like when he dresses Barbara up like she’s in Little Women for bedtime.

Frank Robbins writes all the stories for the year (backups in Detective Comics), which have a single moment of character development—Commissioner Gordon discovering Batgirl’s secret identity–while Batgirl has a variety of misadventures.

The opening cliffhanger resolve has some concept of Batgirl as female role model for the young women of Gotham but it’s the one mention. Otherwise, Robbins’s stories start as globe-trotting—off to Spain for the bullfights—then fashion world related (the killer wigs are better than the gangsters out to find out if a supermodel wants to show her legs or if there will be six more weeks of winter), then random Hollywoodish stuff. Oh, and then the one where Gordon finds out; he’s out for a cop-killer and it’s possibly Robbins’s worst writing, which is a statement to make because there’s some bad writing throughout.

Reading Frank Robbins’s thought balloons seems to definitely prove thought balloons are bad, actually.

There are some big bad themes throughout—like random people being able to kick Batgirl’s ass in a fight, which is really just the norm but it’d have been nice if Robbins and Heck got away from it. They dabble in bondage imagery for a couple stories but apparently it was a bit too far and instead settle on doing those lousy mystery stories where they give you the clues and you should be able to figure out the killer because he was holding the gun in the wrong hand.

There are contemporary movie references–The Godfather becomes The Stepfather (no Terry O’Quinn, sorry), what appears to be Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, and John Wayne analogues—where Robbins either tries too hard or not enough.

The best story, art-wise, is the Spain one, where Barbara finds herself in a Spanish manor fighting a Zorro-type. Throw in the romance novel dresses for her and it’s at least a Gothic thriller with some visual flare. Had they done these backups Marvel-style, at least for that one, and had someone write the story over the art… it probably would’ve been better.

The biggest problem with Robbins’s writing is his inability to get to that first cliffhanger. At least two of the stories resolve in between the first and second half, or could if Batgirl just managed not to always get her ass-kicked in the first scene of the second part. Unless she’s held captive in a James Bond villain trap at cliffhanger.

There’s undoubtedly a way to do these two-parter backups well and Robbins just doesn’t know it. Though it’s not all on him—whoever edited these stories (Julie Schwartz it seems like) didn’t do a good job either. Even if you ignore the seventies sexism, the lack of character development over a hundred pages for Barbara is a glaring defect.

It’s even worse when Jason Bard’s along. He’s a bad romantic interest, which isn’t a surprise, and it’s better Robbins isn’t interested in their relationship.

And it’s not even like Robbins is atrocious. For the time period, he’s bad but he’s not, like, spectacularly bad. He’s a lot less sexist in his characterization of Barbara than previous Batgirl writers. Sure, some of it is because he’s disinterested in her character development and she’s just a pawn to move around the board, but… it’s not like she ever screws anything up because she’s trying to look pretty.

She screws things up. But because the story requires her utter, should-be-fatal incompetence to get to the next page. Not because she’s a girl.

Presumably. The only other action heroes are Commissioner Gordon, who gets hoodwinked so his screw-up is disqualified, and Jason Bard, whose bum leg—which inevitably causes him to trip, fall, let the bad guy get away—disqualifies him too.

Maybe the Giordano-inked Zorro-esque story would have been worth a read in the floppy, but it’s hard to imagine looking forward to the Batgirl backups every month of 1972 in your Detective Comics. Though it was the seventies so who knows.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1969-70)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

Maybe I shouldn’t have complained so much about Gardner Fox.

After approximately a year off (or just appearing as a guest star in Batman or Detective and not getting an Omnibus reprint), Batgirl’s started getting backups in Detective. Gil Kane came back to do the pencils, but with Murphy Anderson on the inks and—outside the occasional eyes—the art rarely looks like Gil Kane. Anderson seems to have entirely erased and redone the faces, which leads to some strange face placements on heads. So outside the curiosity factor of seeing pencils and inks not going together, Batgirl’s going to need some good writing to get through.

Starting with Mike Friedrich, it’s pretty clear she’s not going to get any good writing. Friedrich takes Fox’s bad flexes—Barbara Gordon’s female vanity and her professional indiscretions as a librarian—and streamlines them into a tale of Barbara stalking a handsome customer. The first part of the story is just her deciding when he doesn’t come into the library at the regular time she needs to go to his home, where she finds another woman, so then we get Batgirl stalking the dude while being jealous of this other woman. It’s fairly obvious how the resolution is going to work but along the way there’s some constrained action—Batgirl fighting random thugs, who always manage to get the upper hand, which really reminds of the old Batman serials where the heroes would get beat up the entire fight scene and then succeed through a cliffhanger reveal. Unfortunately, Batgirl getting beat up because she doesn’t pay attention or just isn’t, you know, as good a fighter as a random college student maintains through the different writers.

One of the few things writers Friedrich, Denny O’Neill, and Frank Robbins are all going to agree on is Batgirl not actually being a competent crime fighter.

Robbins takes over after Friedrich’s first two-parter and has Barbara stumbling into some kind of plot because she wants a cheap apartment. It opens like it’s a Red-Headed League homage–oh, there’s another thing they all agree on: fetishizing Barbara being a red-head. Anyway, it’s not a RHL homage, instead having Barbara at a costume ball as Batgirl fighting with crooks dressed as other superheroes. Arguably the Anderson inks on the Kane pencils never work better than with the pseudo-superheroes. They’re at least effective. The resolve has what should be a gloriously silly resolution but it just doesn’t play; some of it is how Kane breaks out the action, so it’s not all on Robbins or Anderson. A lot of it is on Robbins and Anderson, obviously, but not all of it.

The next story introduces Jason Bard, an amateur detective who can’t be a professional because he’s got a bad knee, which may or may not have happened in Vietnam. He definitely was in Vietnam, but where he hurt the knee is immaterial or so I’m going to keep telling myself because I clearly skimmed that exposition dump. Though Bronze Age so there will be plot-changing details revealed in six words in a tiny thought balloon in the top right of an action-packed panel.

Barbara and a work pal are gossiping about customers—it’s just what librarians do, the pal tells Jason, silly ladies—and they set their sights on him. He’s in the library doing his amateur criminologist research and now he’s going to go out and investigate and prove his methods correct, starting with a mugging turned murder in Central Park. Gotham Park. Whatever. They both have Taverns on the Green. Jason makes quick work of setting a lunch date with Barbara and soon they’re investigating together, except she’s doing it behind his back as Batgirl while telling him how cool it must be to be an amateur criminologist on full disability. Jason Bard’s a weird character.

But his first appearance is nowhere near as cringe as his second, when someone at DC told Robbins to up the Vietnam references so nearly every panel in the second half of Bard’s intro mentions Vietnam or war, including something about Bard’s amateur criminology being “his new war.” It’s a lot. And a fairly blah resolution anyway.

Still better than the next one, which has Batgirl trying to take down a lonely hearts killer. Here’s where we find out Robbins thinks Barbara is homely (whereas Friedrich made sure to establish she was ogle-worthy).

I can’t imagine how these would read as backups, what with the very iffy art and the bland action. This two-parter is just more Batgirl fighting random thugs in alleys. It’s bland stuff. And then Jason’s hanging around because Barbara’s doing the Sea of Love thing, obviously, not Batgirl so Jason’s got to stalk his love interest because romance. Maybe if Robbins had committed and done Jason as a creepy vet stalker but he’s just there to remind Barbara she’s his lady whether there’s a ring on it or not.

I don’t even remember if he unintentionally fumbles through a fight scene to deus ex something. In his first story he falls down some stairs and it saves the day.

Vince Colleta takes over the inks for the O’Neill-written two-parter, which promises to be the first time Robin ever teams up with Batgirl. Clearly O’Neill hadn’t read the second or third story in the Batgirl Bronze Age Omnibus where Batgirl and Robin very definitely team-up… maybe they mean without Batman at all. Or maybe they mean with some flirting. There’s this really weird bit where Batgirl flirts with Robin in the last panel and there’s no time for a reaction from him. And as a late nineties Oracle/Nightwing shipper, it’s fine? But maybe it’s just the art. The Batgirl and Robin adventuring scenes are about as good as you’re going to get, even if it’s just a page.

O’Neill’s writing is… not great. His mystery—an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and some other mystery writers—would probably not make Poe blush. At some point you’re wondering if O’Neill realizes there can’t be any question of the villain’s identity because there are only five characters in the story, two of them are superheroes and two of them are dead. Or something along those lines. I was too busy appreciating decent movement for once in the comic. Oh, but funny thing about the Batgirl and Robin team-up—no Robin in the first part. Total bait and switch. You get a two panel Dick Grayson cameo without Batgirl knowing Dick Grayson is Robin. Then O’Neill switches over to Robin’s perspective for most of the second part.

Robin, it turns out, is just as bad a criminal investigator as Batgirl, so at least there’s consistent incompetence to Gotham’s best funded paramilitary enthusiast organization.

Wait, are the Bat-family just larpers at their core?

Then Robbins does a story about an Andy Warhol analogue getting murdered. Well, combination Andy Warhol (Billy Warlock—wait, isn’t that the guy from “Baywatch”) and underground pornographer. Maybe. I’m not sure what Robbins means when he talks about “x-epics” and it’s not worth trying to figure out. Frank Giacoia’s inks aren’t great. They don’t clash as much as Anderson’s—and initially the art seems like it’s going to be all right, the inks giving Kane a cartoon-y quality—but no. Jason Bard’s also back for this one and there’s—maybe—the first appearance of Commissioner Gordon in the backups. He was too busy in the features to bother making an appearance apparently.

The cliffhanger (since I’m cutting off at a year mark) has Colleta inks again—who knew you could be so happy to see “inks by Vince Colleta”—and involves Batgirl using her knowledge from library to hunt down random citizens again. But this time she’s after protestors and they know their rights so we get a scene where someone’s like, “Get your vigilante ass off my porch,” and we’re supposed to be siding with Batgirl harassing the person. Who she only knew to target from the library. Will Batgirl be able to save the day against the hippies who say they aren’t violent but really are? Hashtag peace is for pansies apparently.

Batgirl 1969 and Batgirl 1970 aren’t a complete waste of time—I’m also curious how Kane’s original pencils look—but given the best thing about a hundred or so pages of comics is a dozen panels with Batgirl and Robin doing acrobat stuff thanks to Vince Colleta inks? I mean, it’s pretty close to a complete waste of time then, isn’t it.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1967-68)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

The strangest thing about the first five stories in Omnibus Volume 1 isn’t how writer Gardner Fox uses Barbara Gordon’s position at the Gotham Public Library to explain how she somehow targets criminals. She violates professional privacy standards—if not laws (it was the late sixties, who knows)—to figure out where the bad guys are going to strike so she can go out and beat them up before Batman and Robin get there.

I’m going to assume Fox just didn’t know anything about the library profession (were there Ph.D.s in library science in the late sixties or is Barbara’s doctorate just there to be something else for her father not to be impressed with) and not it being some kind of statement on how we should all be a little more fascist when it comes to enabling women (and men) dressed as bats.

The strangest thing is how it takes Fox until the last story to explore how Barbara’s inherent femininity as expressed with concern for her appearance, her deference to men, and her propensity to scream at inopportune times is going to be a problem for crime-fighting. The collection opens with a foreword from Gail Simone talking about how the character—as created—didn’t have much to offer the female readership but reading Fox’s stories?

It’d be worse if he thought there were a female readership. Sure, he’s telling little boys how to be both misogynist and ignorant, but at least he’s not telling little girls their value is only as sex objects for boys? Probably? Like, Fox’s Batgirl isn’t really cheesecake though artists Carmine Infantino and Sid Greene do employ some cheesecake, but there’s this definite undercurrent with Robin lusting after her. But in late sixties Code comics so it’s simultaneously subtle and grossly overdone.

Anyway, why Fox waited until the last story to remind everyone girls are better to look at than anything else—it’s also an about face from earlier stories where Batman tells Robin they have to respect Batgirl even though she’s, you know, a girl–is the strangest thing about his stories. They go out on a low; already brought down by a two-part Catwoman story (Frank Springer pencils the second half; it misses Infantino) where Catwoman is jealous of Batgirl and wants to force Batman to put a ring on it ASAP.

The most amusing part of that story is Fox finding an honest moment with Barbara, who’s surprised and perplexed why Catwoman is all of a sudden pissed off at her.

Aside—it seems like Selina Kyle is publicly infamous costumed criminal Catwoman? Or at least Bruce Wayne knows about it? Even acknowledging these comics require a profound willful suspension of disbelief, but at some point, Fox is responsible for things not making logical sense. And they can’t be too steeped in continuity because this Bat-era is when they were introducing characters from the TV show to try to get TV viewers to read the comics.

Then again, Barbara very obviously should’ve figured out Bruce’s secret identity in one of the stories and there’s even a hint about it, but it goes nowhere. Because Fox’s stories get worse as they go along, as Batgirl is more and more the guest star. At least in the origin story she’s something of a protagonist.

Though she’s the protagonist in the story about her worrying about her hair too much to stop bad guys from trying to kill her.

I thought about writing this post with abundant alliterations but decided against it. Outside keeping a dictionary (or thesaurus, really) handy, there’s not really anything to talk about regarding Fox’s use of alliteration and adjective. I mean, other than to track if it was ripped off from Marvel at this point. Similarly, the frequent sports metaphors in Batgirl’s thought balloons had me expecting her to talk about loving jazz at any point.

But leaving these first five stories—the character’s foundation (Barbara was a new character at this point, right?)—there hasn’t been much in character development or even establishment. Fox avoids Commissioner Gordon conversations with his daughter other than to chastise her for not being more like Batgirl; otherwise, Gordon just speaks in transitional exposition to his daughter. Fox does firmly establish Batgirl’s got no romantic interest in Batman and vice verse (despite Infantino pencilling otherwise at one point), which ended up just making me remember that terrible Killing Joke movie.

It’s not the worst thing it could be. At least until the last story and then, really, the Catwoman ones foreshadow it, but even then it’s not like Batgirl quits being she’s too sexy by far. No, she’s going to keep crime-fighting and use that sexy, just like Batman says.

Ew.

There’s a little of Robin being the sexist teen and Batman having to tell him not to be—within limits—but then there’s also the Robin as Batgirl’s partner thing. It’s a complex web of mediocre comics writing (see how I qualified that one), misogyny, patriarchy, and lots more. Lots of good Infantino art, with Gil Kane pencilling the last story in a way almost indistinguishable from Infantino. The Springer you can tell, but the Kane seems just like more Infantino.

Though it is just cheesecake when Barbara is hanging out in the library after work in her Batgirl costume, which definitely seems like someone—Infantino or Fox—really wants to fetishize it.

So much of these comics should’ve gotten a “No” even in the sixties but—I just realized—they’re objectively a lot less misogynist than DC output from forty years later. It’s a definite flex to present these stories without contextualizing the rampant misogyny because outside the art, any reading of them has to be either subjectively, nostalgically influence or you just have a terrible taste in comics and bad critical thinking skills.

That statement made… obviously I’m going to keep going. Even on sale the book wasn’t cheap.