So one of the main selling points of the upcoming DC reboot was going to be an increase in diversity, making the DC universe look less like an Aryan Nations wet dream. DC never had much luck with heroes of colour, for the most part unable to sell anything but the usual suspects, with most attempts to replace white Silver Age or Golden Age heroes with more ethnically diverse succesors, especially in the last decade, being reversed quickly. Having diversity as one of the key elements of the reboot is therefore a good thing, if DC manages to pull it off.
But uncrippling Barbara “Oracle” Gordon and turning her back into Batgirl is a bad start. Here you have one of the few high profile heroes with a disability, who unlike e.g. a Daredevil actually doesn’t have magic powers or technology to compensate for her disability, but has to deal with its consequences while still being a hero and you turn her into just another superheroine?
And I like the Barbara Gordon Batgirl; she was a fun character and I hated what Alan Moore did to her in The Killing Joke. Having Barbara crippled, helpless and having the Joker strip her naked than take pictures, with rape implied was a cheap trick, something any hack can think up to show how naughty the villain is this time. That it was done in service of a story showing how much alike Batman and the Joker “really” are was just adding insult to injury.
But in the more then twenty years since, people like John Ostrander in Suicide Squad and Gail Simone in Birds of Prey made Barbara Gordon/Oracle into one of the more original heroes in the DC universe. Oracle was somebody who, unlike any other hero, couldn’t solve problems by hitting them simply because she was physically incapable of doing so and therefore had to use her brain. If she’s now back to being Batgirl, she’ll just be another non-powered superheroine in a tight costume and cape, not even the only redhaired Batman-related superheroine as we’ll finally get to see Batwoman too…
No doubt the Gail Simone written Batgirl series will be quite good, but if it was worth sacrifising Oracle for?