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The branding skills of Batman rubs off on Barbara Gordon in Batgirls #1 as she gives the members of her team their very own Bat-themed rides.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Batgirls #1, on sale now from DC Comics.
Barbara Gordon and her team of Batgirls – Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain – are on the run. With a new villain, known only as Seer, having taken down Oracle’s crimefighting network, the high tech heroes have gone analog, and that comes with a few odd adjustments to how they do things. One of the main perks of their new lifestyle is that the original Batgirl was able to secure a whole new form of Bat-themed transportation for her new team…that turns out to be utterly ridiculous.
Though they’ve had to make a few sacrifices following the events of “Fear State,” Barbara hoped to cheer up her teammates by showing them the new vehicles she designed just for them. The Batgirls were in for a shock when they finally saw their new rides in Batgirls #1 (by Becky Cloonan, Michael W. Conrad, Jorge Corona, Sarah Stern and Becca Carey).
After excitedly telling her team about all of the impressive modifications she made to the modes of transportation that they would be using, her unveiling of the new vehicles ended up revealing a couple of red and blue mopeds with a yellow bat painted on the front and little bat wings on the back. The idea of Orphan and Spoiler riding around the streets of Gotham on two tiny mopeds is a comical image, to say the least.
Obviously, the two Batgirls were not pleased with the vehicles. Rather than tell Babs what they really thought about the Bat-mopeds, they decided to ride around in something very different, with Cassandra stealing the keys to the car of a group of criminals and converting the large conspicuous vehicle to their new ride. They even gave it a name, Bondo.
Barbara’s Bat-mopeds aren’t the first ridiculous Bat-themed vehicle. Batman has a long history of recklessly spending his fortune on vehicles that are good for a single use. The Bat-Rocket from the Superfriends cartoon immediately comes to mind, as it’s not really what a street-level vigilante crimefighter like Batman needs.
Even the vehicles designed specifically for Gotham City are kind of useless. The Bat-subway Rocket, which first appeared in Detective Comics #667 (by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan) connects the tunnels beneath Wayne Manor to Gotham’s subway system, but the fact that it can only travel on the rails severely limits its usefulness.
The most ridiculous Bat-vehicle of all has to be the Whirly-Bat. This strange miniature helicopter first appeared in Detective Comics #257, by Sheldon Moldoff and Charles Paris. Capable of fitting into the Batmobile, these strange portable contraptions can be taken pretty much anywhere. However, besides their portability, they don’t really do much, and are usually destroyed whenever they’re deployed.
The Bat-mopeds are just another in a long line of fairly useless Bat-themed vehicles. Although Oracle made the engine almost silent and reinforced it with a bulletproof casing, a moped is still a sub-par method of getting around, especially for vigilante protectors of Gotham City. If the Batgirls ever had to use the mopeds instead of Bondo, chances are that the horribly ridiculous vehicles would end up in the scrap heap.
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