Batgirl #15 (June 2001)

Writer:  Kelley Puckett

Pencils:  Damion Scott

Inks:  Robert Campanella

Colors:  Jason Wright

Letters:  John Constanza

Writer:  Kelley Puckett

Pencils:  Damion Scott

Inks:  Robert Campanella

Colors:  Jason Wright

Letters:  John Constanza

A priest freaks out and starts shooting people in an apartment building and a war veteran goes full-on Rambo (wearing his striped tie as a headband) right on the streets of Gotham City.  Batgirl is on the scene and she tracks the real culprit to a nearby rooftop where she ends up subjected to some kind of hypnotic laser beam device.  Moments later she's chasing the Joker because he killed Batman and when she gets her hands on him, she's mad enough to...

Well, that would be telling.  This is one of the fastest reads so far in the series.  The plot isn't the thing (we never find out what happens to the scientist who invented the story's killing device, although certainly he's in for some major punishment as a result).  What matters is the exploration of Cass' psyche.  We've known all along she was born and raised to be an assassin, a killer.  But has she completely escaped this programming, and just how thin is the veneer of hero?  Is it as thick as her belt pouches, or as thin as the bodysuit she wears?

Instinct and the ability to change and make decisions counter to that instinct is a major theme running through Batgirl.  The character even addresses instinct directly in Batgirl #13.  How much killing instinct is Cass tamping down as she struggles to redeem her one kill by wearing Batman's symbol?  Batgirl #15 suggests it's quite a lot.  Even Cass is shocked by this revelation.  We'll find out more as the series goes along.

Oh, and if you ever wanted to read a comic book featuring scene where the Joker sings Britney Spears, this is that comic.  Although considering what's really happening this is more the product of Cass's subconscious than anything to do with the Clown Prince of Crime and his musical tastes.  Just what kind of music has Barbara been exposing Cass to?  No, pop hits are inescapable.  Even if Cass tried to avoid them by sticking to college radio-- Cass as a hipster?-- she'd still overhear this song in stores or while watching TV.

Which makes me wonder-- what kind of music does Cass like?  It may be a taste signifier that to Cass this particular hit becomes part of a hallucinated Joker's repertoire.  If you dislike something, assigning love for it to an enemy can one way of expressing your feelings about the song and that person.  Or maybe Cass spent the last week or two happily bopping around Barbara's place listening to the song on headphones and it came to her through familiarity, and the association with evil or wrongness is just an accident of the subconscious, as it might be in a dream.  After all, pop usually has a strong, danceable beat and would probably appeal to Cass and her love of movement.  Considering how quickly she learns martial arts moves she could probably pick up dance choreography just as fast.  Would she be able to predict a dancer's next move?  If she watched enough dance she could.

Robert Campanella returns as inker in this issue.  I still have no idea why he took a break.  Maybe he just had too many other jobs at the time, or DC pulled him to put him on something else.  It's not as if the book took a visual downturn in his absence, because John Lowe did a fine job.  I just like to see the varsity team on this book.

Whoever inks, Batgirl during this era has a distinct look.  You could ask for a creative team more in sync than Puckett and Damion Scott, but I doubt you'd find one.  At this point Puckett thoroughly understands Scott's strengths-- action and over-the-top "acting" by his characters-- and provides plenty of opportunities for Scott to work it out while maintaining Batgirl's ever so tragic tone and filling in the sides with character work.  I have a feeling Damion Scott's pencils are pretty tight.  I've seen old style pencils from the 70s and 80s and they tended to be a lot looser, with more room for an inker's interpretation.  Inkers were more responsible for keeping a book's look consistent, especially if the turnover on pencils was pretty high.  These days the penciller carries more of this load.  This doesn't reduce an inker to a mere "tracer," but Scott has such an idiosyncratic approach to anatomy and storytelling you're going to recognize his contribution before you recognize any particular inker's.

Campanella provides all the jagged-edged black spotting and speed lines you could want and while panels sometimes become a bit too busy, that was state-of-the-art stuff for the early 2000s.  A little Michael Golden, a little manga flavor.  When it comes to comic book art, I prefer to see the artist's hand, and I get that a lot from Scott and Campanella on Batgirl.  It's funky and energetic and still fresh after all these years.

Batgirl #14 (May 2001)

Writer:  Kelley Puckett

Pencils:  Damion Scott

Inks:  John Lowe

Colors:  Jason Wright

Letters:  John Constanza

Cass’s imprudent actions from the previous issue have consequences this month as the CIA analyzes her via video and blood tests.  Writer Kelley Puckett has these black-suited government agents drop a lot of intriguing info on our hero Batgirl—she’s not meta-human (DC’s house jargon for super-people) but her aggregate abilities certainly make her seem that way.  We find out she has "off the chart[s]" serotonin levels, by which I guess Puckett is suggesting she has more neurotransmitters in her brain or something along those lines.  I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure this is supposed to indicate she has a different brain chemistry than most of us, which accounts for the unusual way in which she processes information, a reasonable pseudo-scientific basis for all the wonders Cass can do.

There’s also a human cost to both Cass and the man she saved, and we learn Barbara is a tattletale.  Which is probably a good thing because if Batman is to have Cass as one of his tools or weapons, it’s a good idea for him to learn as much about her as possible.

This is a melancholy issue.  Cass can act as comedic relief in her own title due to her single-mindedness at times, but her naivete-- especially in this story-- can be heartbreaking.  Despite (or because of?) her abusive upbringing, she must be largely an optimist, with a belief in the light side of human nature even as she explores its darker places.  Witness her cheerful “Bye!” to the ex-agent she rescued in #13, without a thought given to his frailties and conflicting desires.  He tries to tell her in an oblique way, but it simply doesn’t register with Cass.  She doesn’t have the experience yet to understand these subtleties.  And when her heart breaks as a result, she deals with it physically.  Luckily, Batman is available to help her to catharsis this time out.  Damion Scott then drops her into the midst of a seedy group of “ex-Special Forces” for a quick workout in a bravura sequence where Cass moves so fast we don’t even get to see it—Scott illustrates only the results in a quick sequence of panels that still manage to leave no room for misunderstanding.  Guest inker John Lowe fills in admirably for Robert Campanella this issue.  I'm not sure what Campanella was up to, but Lowe helps keep the book looking consistent.

But the most important thing happening this month is the exploration of how Cass functions both physically and mentally.  Along with their seratonin discovery, the analysts studying her compare her to world-class athletes, and Puckett has them reveal Cass’s fighting techniques as "all over the place" and with "no dominant school" (recalled later in the same conversation with a name-check of Bruce Lee, who hoped to "free [his] followers from clinging to styles, patterns or molds"), which is probably all of them since she can learn one in its entirety within a few hours.  These guys can’t believe what they’re seeing, or what their measurements tell them.  The athlete analogy invokes a human operating at her highest capacity.  As the man says, "Humans can throw a 100-miles-per-hour fastball, smash concrete blocks with their heads, and run 4.2 forties.  What they can't do is can't do is all of that at once."  Guess who can.

No, besides me.

And this issue doesn't just explore Cass's weird brain chemistry or her fighting skills.  Puckett explores another facet of Cass's functioning-- her sense of self.  Secret identity?  It just never occurs to Cass she might one day go to school or learn to drive a car, which really bothers Barbara.  Barbara has long been portrayed as an advocate for what she considers a “normal life,” dating and friends and all that.  As written here, Cass wants nothing more than to be Batgirl.  Being Cass—or at least the one Barbara wants her to be-- just isn’t important to her at all.  It shows just how relentless Cass is, but you have to wonder if some of the reason for this detachment of identity is residual guilt.  After all, this is Cass of the famous death wish, who has often seemed simply reckless or full of herself when actually she's been courting oblivion.

This is good news...

According to an article at The Mary Sue, Stephanie Brown appears in an upcoming video game.  Something to do with Scribblenauts, I think.  I have no idea what that is (astronauts who can't draw very well?), but I do know who Stephanie Brown is.  She's the former Spoiler/ex-Batgirl who, along with Cassandra Cain, DC unceremoniously dumped from their ongoing continuity.  The comments attached to the story are a litany of fan joy, which is a wonder to behold.  When fans are happy, all the world is filled with song.  Fans are happy so rarely, after all.

One of the comments attempts to pre-empt and "boo Steph, yay Cass" kind of responses.  Yeah, don't do that, people.  Doing that is a terrible idea.

This kind of thing makes me sad.  While I think it's fine to poke fun at various characters-- I do this all the time because if we're not having fun with our comics then why are we reading them?-- as we've seen, it's not necessary to express your love for one character by expressing your hate for another.  I've been accused of this myself because I once wrote a little piece about Cass with a few jokes aimed at Steph and Tim Drake.  Someone read it, didn't like it, blogged about it and her friends played soccer with my severed head in the comments.  I changed it in a moment of weakness and yet every time someone does a Google search for Cass and Steph this will be among the results.

I mention this because, coincidentally, one of the search term hits for one of my other blogs is a link to that response.  I now believe I should have just shrugged and let my original stand, but the last thing in the world I would ever support is the idea you have to hate one character to love another, that it's either Cass or Steph.  Certainly there's room for both.  I have no stomach for Cass-Steph wars.  Partially because I can't fathom truly hating a comic book character and partially because while I'm very into Cass, I don't take any of this that seriously.

What makes me sad we even have a fandom where people have to think about these things.  Where we're hyper-sensitive on behalf of imaginary superpeople and pixies from other dimensions and you can't just enjoy an announcement without anticipating backlash.

So I'm glad about even this reemergence of Stephanie Brown.  I hope her fans do more than just happy-blog about it.  It's probably more effective in terms of bringing Steph back into the DC universe to spend a little money on this game.  The people who own Steph's trademark or copyright will get some of that cash and that's what they live on, not love or good intentions or packages of waffles.  Support Steph financially and you just may get Steph's triumphant return in the pages of Batman or Detective Comics.

Now.  If they'd just do the same for Cass.

It's time for more Cassandra Cain cosplay!

And here it is, have a look for yourself!

I think it's great.  It seems a little familiar, so maybe I've linked to another set of photos of this particular cosplayer's version of Cass, but with Cass news so hard to come by we have to go with what we find.  Check out those boots.  They're not what Cass wears in any comic I've seen, but they're a nice touch and give this costume a uniqueness.  Different artists tend to detail Cass according to their whims or whatever they feel works best, so cosplayers should feel free to create their own Cass looks.

Even though I'm unfortunately disqualified from Cassplaying myself, as a fan of the character and cosplay in general, I spend a lot of time thinking about what goes into a successful Cass costume.  I'm sure the dedicated cosplayers could set me straight on a lot of technical aspects, but I've formulated a few loose ideas just from studying different examples.  I want to encourage more Cassplay, so here are a few of them...

Again!

Material is an important style decision a potential Cassplayer must make.  In some comics, Cass looks leather-clad, in others head-to-toe in fabric.  How to choose?  Full head and face masks seem problematic.  The fit is tricky.  This one has wrinkles.  The fabric masks fit closer to the face with their stretching quality, but don't have the leather-esque look of vinyl.  This is true of the bodysuits I've seen as well, but they tend to cling and resist wrinkles.  If excess wrinkling bothers you because comic book artists rarely illustrate them when drawing costumes, then you're going to have to really work at it to get the proper smoothness.

I wonder if some Cassplayers attempt to duplicate a specific artist's take on the character.  You're never going to inflate your head to Damion Scott proportions, but his Cass has a shiny suit with huge belt pouches that flop around when she moves.  Brian Bolland's Cass is more naturally proportioned and has a duller finish to her costume, with smaller, firmer pouches.  Tim Sale's features a more silhouetted approach that could be either.  Another idea is to think of your Cass costume as the movie version and design accordingly.  What would Cass wear in a Christopher Nolan film?  How about a Tim Burton-style Cass?  Or just do something of your own imagining.  You could do practical Cass or fanciful Cass.

Black Bat/Blackbat Cass seems the most forgiving of all her looks, other than civilian Cass (just wear a black sports bra and some baggy martial arts pants!).  So while any Cassplayer earns my undying admiration and respect, I have to accord a little extra to the Batgirl Cassplayers.

Cassandra Cain kicking someone...

Here's a marker sketch I just finished of our gal Cass making someone wish they'd never gotten out of bed.

Tiny tumbling Cass

I call this one "Back in the Hobbit."  There's an inverted Cass somewhere in this mess.  See if you can spot her.  She's doing a one-handed hand-spring or a cartwheel or something.

Another Cass from my sketchbook

It's Cass giving Robin the business while wearing the silly retro costume I designed for her.