Addendum to Batgirl post | Supergirl: Maid of Might

After I posted my concerns about the new Batgirl series based on an image shown at Calgary Expo, Gail Simone sent me a twitter about the way I’d characterized her work.

Did you ever read The All-New Atom, or my Deadpool/Agent X, or Simpsons material? Not everything is dark… ;)

Fair point! I have not read those books. I can only go by Simone’s more recent books and the darker tone DC has been pushing for a while. Until we get closer to release date and more details come out, I’ve got very little to go on besides that the two panels DC chose to represent the book (maybe there were more shown, but DC hasn’t posted anything yet).

The real problem of course is that there’s such a small pool of books to choose from so every one starring my favourite characters gets held up to scrutiny. There ought to be a wide variety of different books with different tones to choose from. But there isn’t. So if this take on the character isn’t what I’m personally looking for, I don’t get any Batgirl book. That’s entirely the choice of DC management. And it turns out that DC doesn’t want me as a reader because I’m a woman.

4 thoughts on “Addendum to Batgirl post”

I think it’s fair to say a book where a panel with a guy getting a hose shoved down his throat is considered representative looks pretty dark.

Yeah, I’d call that pretty dark. And I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of image DC wants to put out.

Gail Simone seems to be in the forefront lately in defending the reboot.
I liked the All-New Atom because Giganta was in it, but those Batgirl garden hose panels are disturbing.

I wouldn’t say she’s defending the reboot *itself*, she just had to step in and defend the Batgirl book because it was such a PR disaster. She’s always super enthusiastic about any project she works on, but she’s not said anything about the relaunch itself that I’ve seen. For that reason I trust her a heck of a lot more than the folks who are pumping up the relaunch as a whole.

There are a lot of creators who aren’t saying very much about the relaunch, just about their books (in the few interviews we’ve gotten). It’s easy to not notice that amidst all the cheerleading…

Jess on June 21, 2011 at 5:48 pm said:

I think it’s fair to say a book where a panel with a guy getting a hose shoved down his throat is considered representative looks pretty dark.
Michelle on June 21, 2011 at 7:30 pm said:

Yeah, I’d call that pretty dark. And I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of image DC wants to put out.
Gene on June 23, 2011 at 1:40 pm said:

Gail Simone seems to be in the forefront lately in defending the reboot.
I liked the All-New Atom because Giganta was in it, but those Batgirl garden hose panels are disturbing.
Michelle on June 23, 2011 at 9:57 pm said:

I wouldn’t say she’s defending the reboot *itself*, she just had to step in and defend the Batgirl book because it was such a PR disaster. She’s always super enthusiastic about any project she works on, but she’s not said anything about the relaunch itself that I’ve seen. For that reason I trust her a heck of a lot more than the folks who are pumping up the relaunch as a whole.

There are a lot of creators who aren’t saying very much about the relaunch, just about their books (in the few interviews we’ve gotten). It’s easy to not notice that amidst all the cheerleading…