Is Barbera Jim Gordon's neice or daughter?

[batGRRRl4ever]

Honestly while I don't mind Babs back as Batgirl saying that Oracle was mistreating the character is simply untrue.

I wasn't saying anything about that former iteration of character, only the events that preceded and up to the end of The Killing Joke by DC editorial in terms of what happened to Batgirl.

That was when she was most popular amongst fans and when she was one of DC's best female characters and one of their few disabled but still able to do superheroing despite disabilities.

"Most popular"? Sales clearly don't agree with that. Bab's as Batgirl is cracking 50K in sales repeatedly, that's something that former iteration of character in the prior universe never achieved. And defining her as "one of DC's best female characters" is a subjective belief.

But we are now drifting from the OP too much I think, and this argument has been done to death on the CBR bat-forum in the past, BELIEVE me, lol!

[Aquacatlungfish]

Oracle was more of a presence in not just the Batfamily but in the DCU general. And the character wasn't in demand in the time period so they didn't use her, it also made Batman way to old for it to be Barbara, the reason why Moore got to do that was because he was coming off Watchmen meaning he was unstoppable. He was really the only one that was truly sexist.

[batGRRRl4ever]

Gotta completely and respectfully disagree with that, history just doesn't hold up that argument. It was Moore's understanding that TKJ was supposed to be an alternate reality tale, and he has stated if he had known that DC would change it to actual canon then he wouldn't have done to Barbara what he did. Also it wasn't Moore who stated "Cripple the b****", that was DC editorial.

But again, this is off track for the question of the OP and for this thread.

[Lorendiac]

I heard it differently. According to John Byrne one of the things going to happen in "Year One" was that all would have thought that the baby is a boy just to be revealed as a girl - Barbara Gordon. But then Frank Miller and Denny O'Nel realized that this would make Batman really really old in the "present day" timeline.

Interesting -- I hadn't heard that one!

The version I heard before, and tended to believe, has also been mentioned in this thread: something to the effect that Frank Miller felt it was his Sacred Duty to make sure he wrote "Year One" in such a way that there was not a daughter named "Barbara" cluttering up Jim Gordon's home life in a story arc set "several years ago!"

In other words, the rumor I heard goes that Frank Miller certainly didn't "forget" about her; he made a deliberate decision to work hard to erase her from history, hoping and praying that it would "stick" in the Post-COIE continuity! (Which was a possible outcome, since DC hadn't done much of anything with Babs, in any title, for a few years before Miller wrote "Year One," so it appears that she didn't have much of a fan club within the editorial offices at DC in the mid-1980s.)

[An Ear In The Fireplace]

I think if O'Neil could have had his way he would have killed, crippled, or erased from continuity every member of the Batman family except Batman. But ultimately under O'Neil the Batman family expanded (much too much for my taste), because that's what other people wanted given there was so much demand for more Batman-related product. O'Neil's duty to make money for the company ended up trumping his aesthetic desire to make Batman a loner.

[Lorendiac]

I think if O'Neil could have had his way he would have killed, crippled, or erased from continuity every member of the Batman family except Batman. But ultimately under O'Neil the Batman family expanded (much too much for my taste), because that's what other people wanted given there was so much demand for more Batman-related product. O'Neil's duty to make money for the company ended up trumping his aesthetic desire to make Batman a loner.

As far as I know -- granting that I don't know everything -- in the 1980s Denny O'Neil was fine with the idea of "Dick Grayson used to be the Original Robin who always tagged along on Batman's adventures back in the Golden and Silver Ages, but now he's over in New York City, a proud member of the Titans (as written by Marv Wolfman), and only showing up once in a blue moon in the core Bat-titles!"

Why bother to kill, cripple, or erase him, when you can simply ship him out of town and let someone else worry about publishing his ongoing adventures?

[Aquacatlungfish]

Gotta completely and respectfully disagree with that, history just doesn't hold up that argument. It was Moore's understanding that TKJ was supposed to be an alternate reality tale, and he has stated if he had known that DC would change it to actual canon then he wouldn't have done to Barbara what he did. Also it wasn't Moore who stated "Cripple the b****", that was DC editorial.

But again, this is off track for the question of the OP and for this thread.

The reason TKJ was put in canon was because it was and is considered to be one of the best Batman stories ever and DC wasn't using the character that much so it didn't matter that much. Same reason why they erased and remade Batwoman and retconned killed her, because the character wasn't that popular as she was associated with the TV show which was considered sacrilege.

[Mr. Holmes]

The reason TKJ was put in canon was because it was and is considered to be one of the best Batman stories ever and DC wasn't using the character that much so it didn't matter that much. Same reason why they erased and remade Batwoman and retconned killed her, because the character wasn't that popular as she was associated with the TV show which was considered sacrilege.

Moreover, there was a conscious effort to scrap the "family" aspect of the Batman mythos.

[An Ear In The Fireplace]

As far as I know -- granting that I don't know everything -- in the 1980s Denny O'Neil was fine with the idea of "Dick Grayson used to be the Original Robin who always tagged along on Batman's adventures back in the Golden and Silver Ages, but now he's over in New York City, a proud member of the Titans (as written by Marv Wolfman), and only showing up once in a blue moon in the core Bat-titles!"

Why bother to kill, cripple, or erase him, when you can simply ship him out of town and let someone else worry about publishing his ongoing adventures?

Yes but another editor "owned" Dick Grayson, since he was attached to the Titans. Whether O'Neil would have killed or erased Dick, if O'Neil had been in control of his fate--and if management would have let him--we'll never know.

More and more though, Dick's contribution to Batman's back story was minimized. Where once Batman had encountered most of his major foes when he was teamed with the Boy Wonder, now Batman had taken on all these villains, when he was a loner, before Robin became his partner.

[geoff2005]

so to be clear in the old DCU she was both? i never quite understood it. so far reading old dcu I took it as she was adopted after her parents got killed or something like that.

[MajorHoy]

so to be clear in the old DCU she was both? i never quite understood it. so far reading old dcu I took it as she was adopted after her parents got killed or something like that.

Define "old DCU". Remember, you're talking about a character who debuted in the mid-to-late 1960's.
* She was originally Jim's daughter by birth then.
* In the 1980's, after CoIE, the character was changed to being his adopted daughter (but his niece by birth whose parents died in an accident I believe). A later story (by a writer who I don't think works for DC anymore) raised the possibility that she was his niece, but also possibly the result of an affair between Jim and his sister-in-law. (I thankfully never read those stories.)
* With the New 52, she appears to back to his daughter by birth.

[melkorjunior]

Regarding the Batman "Family" generally, Babs is, to me, the only one with any legitimate reason for existing. Dick, Jason, and Tim make no sense to me as Batman's partners because the idea of Bruce deciding to bring a kid along with him makes no objective sense. It works, tonally, in the golden and silver ages, but the modern Batman (and by "modern" I mean beginning with the O'Neil/Adams revamp) is "realistic" enough in tone that the idea of him bringing a kid out there with him to face lunatics like Joker and Two-face is just ridiculous. Babs is the one member of the family who just decided to mimic Bruce on her own, and in an alternate continuity that exists only in my mind, Bruce, who has never had a "Robin", continually tries to dissuade Babs from dressing up like him and fighting bad guys, but eventually realizes that she's just going to keep on doing it, so he decides to train her instead. (Why is she so obsessed? Bad guys killed her Dad.) Batgirl works because it absolves Bruce of the sin of being stupid, reckless and yes, abusive enough to bring a boy out with him to fight crime. In an awful way, Frank Miller's All-Star Batman had it right: if you're going to have Robin, what kind of Batman does that give you? An obsessed child abuser, that's what kind.

And the most unrealistic thing about Commissioner Gordon to me is that he never once considers arresting Batman for child abuse/endangerment when he sees these little Robins swinging around.

The Bat-books work at cross-purposes; on the one hand they are continually upping the ante with brutal realism; on the other hand, we're supposed to believe that these kids are part of Bruce's quest. You can't have both, no matter what DC's bottom line says.

[Lorendiac]

Define "old DCU". Remember, you're talking about a character who debuted in the mid-to-late 1960's.
* She was originally Jim's daughter by birth then.
* In the 1980's, after CoIE, the character was changed to being his adopted daughter (but his niece by birth whose parents died in an accident I believe). A later story (by a writer who I don't think works for DC anymore) raised the possibility that she was his niece, but also possibly the result of an affair between Jim and his sister-in-law. (I thankfully never read those stories.)
* With the New 52, she appears to back to his daughter by birth.

On the bright side, I suspect that during her "Oracle" days (all through the 1990s and 2000s and up into 2011), in about 99 percent of her appearances, one or the other of the following things was probably true when we saw her doing anything on-stage:

1. We'd be reminded in that comic that her name was Barbara Gordon, but without anyone spelling out (in that script) what her exact relationship was to Police Commissioner Jim Gordon,
or
2. We'd simply see her referring to Jim as "Dad," and/or Jim mentioning that she was his "daughter," without any explicit mention of the silly "she's really my niece who eventually became my daughter-by-adoption" retcon.

In other words, most of the time there was nothing in the story you were reading (such as a typical "Birds of Prey" issue) to prevent you from simply thinking of Babs as "Jim's daughter," plain and simple, if that was what you preferred to think while you kept your mind focused on the details of the plot that was unfolding right in front of you! This made life so much simpler for those of us who remembered the way it used to be and preferred to ignore the occasional bit of nonsense about "she's his orphaned niece who got adopted, except maybe she's also his secret illegitimate daughter to boot," and so forth!

[thwhtGuardian]

It's pretty easy to have both actually, it's been done successfully for 30 years now.