Batman likes to give an image of being the ultimate loner, working through the night to defeat the worst enemies you can imagine. However, he’s not anything close to a loner. Bruce Wayne lost his family and Batman created another one, a group bonded by justice and revenge. The Bat-Family has numerous members, each of them coming from different walks of life, and each of them having a specialty that makes them dangerous. Among the family, some members have more experience than others and one of the most skilled of them is Barbara Gordon. She was the first Batgirl, working with Bats and Dick Grayson as Robin, becoming best friends with Supergirl. However, a terrible attack by the Joker would see her spinal cord severed, leading to her retirement. Sort of.
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Barbara became Oracle in the pages of Suicide Squad, using her librarian and computer skills to become the master hacker of the superhero community. She became massively popular as Oracle, to the extent that when the New 52 made her able to walk again, fans were pretty outraged, as they felt that she was good disability rep and a better hero. Nowadays, she usually does both Oracle and Batgirl stuff. As an important part of the DC mythos, she often shows up in various alternate universe stories and Dark Knights of Steel II #1 is yet another one. However, you’ll never guess exactly which role she’s playing – Batgirl or Oracle.
Spoilers for Dark Knights of Steel II #1 Ahead!
Dark Knights of Steel II Finds a Way to Bring Barbara Gordon to Her Ultimate Form
Dark Knights of Steel II #1 is an outstanding comic. It drops readers into the world after the war against the White Martians has started an alliance between the nations Metropolis, Amazonia, and the Kingdom of Storms. The issue starts with a framing device, as a mysterious narrator tells the readers the story of the coming of a red crystal comet to Earth. This causes a battle between Darkseid and the Queen of the Sea, with a shard of the crystal taken. The flashback ends with a young arm reaching up to grab at the shard, as it floats above a crib, with two mysterious men commenting on her fixation.
The story lets you know that this is the narrator and it goes on from there, as they outline the goings on of the book. The issue does a great job of keeping the identity of the narrator a secret, lasting til the end of the issue, after a member of the league of kingdoms is struck down – Zara El – and the narrator intimates that she was poisoned. Then we learn her identity: it’s Babs and the last page reveals that in this world, she isn’t Batgirl, not working with the sojourning Bat-Prince. No, on this world with no technology, she’s Oracle. She was the one who looked at the red crystal shard and has been changed by its power, able to look anywhere.
Oracle in the mainline universe worked because she had access to the most powerful computers, supplied by benefactors like Batman and the Justice League. Barbara Gordon went to college to study being a librarian and computer technology and was able to hack into everything, allowing her to keep an eye on everyone when she needed to. However, none of that would be possible in Dark Knights of Steel II, so they had to improvise and that’s where the crystal comes in. We don’t really know very much about the shard yet; we only know that Darkseid wanted it and it made Barbara Gordon into something superhuman, allowing her to watch everything.
Making Barbara into Oracle in Dark Knights of Steel II makes more sense than it might seem. In this book, Batman is traveling the kingdom as the Bat-Prince, trying to come to termss with learning that Jor-El was his real father and the power that entails. Giving him partners could be pretty cool and Batgirl is very important to DC history. However, making her Oracle is much more interesting. You can say a lot of things about Oracle, but it brought Barbara to levels of popularity that she had lost over the decades. Plus, she serves a more interesting role in the story instead of just partner to Batman; instead, she’s the omniscient narrator discovering what her visions mean alongside the readers. Babs is a favorite of many and making her into one of the touchstone characters of this book was a stroke of genius.
Oracle Has Finally Reached Her Full Potential
Barbara Gordon was an instant icon, partly thanks to Yvonne Craig’s portrayal of the hero in the 1966 Batman series. In the comics, she found a niche as one of the girl heroes and would play a somewhat important role in the DC Universe up until her paralysis in Batman: The Killing Joke. It seemed like that was the end for her, but Oracle took her career to new places. She founded the Birds of Prey, worked with Batman and the Justice League, and became a legend of post-Crisis DC. For modern fans, Babs will always truly be Oracle, even if she’s wearing her Batgirl costume, and her form in Dark Knights of Steel II #1 is the ultimate expression of Oracle.
With her computers, Barbara was able to see just about anything she wanted, but she was somewhat limited, especially back in the day when tech wasn’t as good. This new version of the heroine isn’t, though. She has been given powers unlike anything she has on the prime Earth. Oracles are those who can look through the veils of time and find information that no one else can and she fits that perfectly. In Dark Knights of Steel II, Barbara Gordon has reached a level of power that she never had before. This is the ultimate Oracle and it will be interesting to see how the story uses her.
Dark Knights of Steel II #1 is on sale now.
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