Batgirl has a spinal cord injury. Who knew? Comic book aficionado Eric Glover did–and he emailed us with details about his campaign to keep DC Comics (publisher of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern) from erasing her disability in its reboot of the comic this fall.
Reimagined as Oracle in 1988, the character is one of a sparse few comic book heroes who aren’t able-bodied, white, straight men. DC’s Bob Wayne promises that the company’s fall relaunch “will introduce readers to a more modern, diverse DC Universe… All stories will be grounded in each character’s legend—but will relate to real world situations, interactions, tragedy and triumph.” But as Eric Glover mentions in his well-put piece on the topic, this “diversity” looks to come only in the form of “shuffling a few more black characters into the spotlight.”
Eric also makes the point that disability “cures” are a way-overused trope in science fiction. All the more reason to keep Oracle the way she is, he writes.
The significance of honoring Oracle’s disability thus far cannot be overemphasized, given that pop sci-fi tends to employ wheelchair users as characters to be fixed, rather than matter-of-fact mainstays of the norm. The dramatic power of the “healed paralytic” has popularity as ancient as the synoptic gospels and a draw difficult to resist for modern writers using super-science and the supernatural as conventional plot-pushers.
For example, the paralyzed Charles Xavier of the X-Men has walked multiple times due to cloning and magic. The leg amputee Flash Thompson, of Spider-Man’s supporting cast, has new legs grown for him whenever he wears a symbiotic suit in the new Venom comic. John Locke, a fan-favorite character from the series Lost (2004), is a paraplegic who regains the use of his legs once he crash-lands on a mystical island. The moneymaking monolith Avatar (2010) is a film about wheelchair user Jake Sully, whose consciousness is stuffed into an able-bodied alien life form. Due to a transfusion of superhuman blood, Logan Cale of the series Dark Angel (2000) receives a temporary cure. Heidi Petrelli of the show Heroes (2006) is touched by a man with superpowers, which grants her the gift of walking. Perhaps most unsurprisingly, the comic-based show Birds of Prey (2002) features a faithfully rendered Barbara Gordon as the paralyzed Oracle, except for the “sub-neural” device she uses to give herself occasional mental control over her legs. Because these examples constitute only a portion of how often sci-fi characters shed their disabilities, it’s apparent that the Oracle of the comics has been an extraordinary case—not simply because she uses a wheelchair in a sci-fi universe, but because she’s managed to stay in one.
Later in the piece, Glover mentions that “DC Comics knows eliminating Barbara’s paralysis doesn’t have the same taboo as turning a black character white or a female character male,” which is so, so true.
Again, you can read the article here, and find ways to support the campaign at its Facebook page (there’s this petition, for starters).
Here’s director Kevin Smith (whose new horror movie I totally want to see, Red State, his use of the word “crippled” notwithstanding), talking up the cause:
