By [ad_1]
Today, we look at how Kim Yale and John Ostrander, in effect, “saved” Barbara Gordon by making her Oracle in the pages of the Suicide Squad.
This is “Always Kind of Wondered,” a feature spotlighting instances from comics where a comic book writer has clearly said, “Hey, why doesn’t Character X ever do Action Y?” The sort of things that typically occur when comic book fans grow up to become comic book writers, which wasn’t really a thing until the mid-1960s.
This one is a bit of a stretch, as I generally like to use examples that occurred to people for a longer period of time, but at the same time, I think the whole “work as a writer based on their experience as a reader” applies her perfectly, it just happened to occur when they were adults.
Okay, as you might have noticed at the end of the recent film, The Suicide Squad, John Ostrander and Luke McDonnell, the main writer and penciler on the 1987 Suicide Squad comic book series, got a special thanks in the film. However, bizarrely, Kim Yale, who co-wrote roughly HALF of the series with Ostrander, did not get a thank you at all.
I thought that that was a shame, so I thought I’d go over again how important Yale was and especially how important she was in the introduction of Oracle in the pages of Suicide Squad.
After the events of The Killing Joke (by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland), Barbara Gordon was transformed by Yale and Ostrander to their little corner of the DC Universe (Suicide Squad, Manhunter and Firestorm) into Oracle. This was based on their reaction to the original Batman story. As Ostrander later recalled, “There were no plans for her in the continuity at that time. We decided that if that happened, we weren’t just going to make her better magically — we wanted to explore what happened when someone like her was crippled and how she would respond.”
Here is the infamous sequence from The Killing Joke where Barbara Gordon is visiting her father on a day that the Joker has decided to use to prove that anyone, even someone as stand-up and as righteous as James Gordon, could be broken by essentially “one bad day,” as Moore and Bolland intercut throughout the stories flashbacks to a possible origin for the Joker where he, too, was a normal guy who just had “one bad day.”
Here’s Ostrander on the scene from his ComicMix column:
There stands The Joker and he has a large caliber handgun. He shoots Barbara somewhere below the middle. From the angle, Kim and I thought it was the spine although others think he actually shot her in the uterus. He then rips off her clothes, beats her, takes pictures of her (while her father, off panel, is held motionless by The Joker’s henchmen), and possibly rapes her. Kim and I felt that was strongly implied but, to be fair, it was not directly shown.
I know women who have been assaulted. I know women who have been raped. That’s heinous enough but can you imagine what it would be like to have been shot, to have your spine broken, and then to be sexually assaulted? The pain, the horror – I can’t dwell on it too long.
Kim and I discussed it. To have been shot at the close range, to have your spine shot out, should have killed Barbara. If not, Kim thought severe sepsis would have set in and Barbara would not have survived. However, in the story, she does. That’s a given.
I should point out that the cover has a close-up of the Joker aiming a camera at the reader and saying, “Smile.” In that context, the only possible interpretation I can conceive is that the reader, the viewer, is Barbara as she lay on the floor, after she had been shot, presumably after she had been violated.
How does that feel?
Thus, in Suicide Squad #23 (by Ostrander, Yale, McDonnell and Karl Kesel), Flo, the main computer technician for the Squad, encounters Oracle for the first time…
She presents Oracle to Amanda Waller in the next issue, who agrees to work with Oracle…for now.
Oracle is a regular presence in the series for the next year, but we never actually see who Oracle is. That changes after the classic Suicide Squad story where a bunch of the Squad is kidnapped to Apokolips (and Flo is manipulated into going, as well) and while on the mission, Flo is murdered. When they return home in Suicide Squad #38 (by Ostrander, guest-scripter Robert Greenberger and artists Luke McDonnell and Geof Isherwood), Waller eventually contacts Oracle to let the hacker know about Flo’s death and we finally get to see that Oracle is Barbara Gordon…
Oracle continued to help the Suicide Squad after this, but with her identity now revealed to the readers, Ostrander and Yale could do more with the psychology of the character. Eventually, in Suicide Squad #49 (by Ostrander, Yale, McDonnell and Isherwood) , after the villainous new Thinker tries to hunt down and kill Oracle (who is using the pseudonym of Amy Beddoes), Waller tracks them both down and stops Oracle from shooting the Thinker but also saves Oracle from being killed by the Thinker, as well, and so she agrees to go work for Waller directly.
Later on, in Suicide Squad #56 (by Ostrander, Yale, Isherwood and Robert Campanella), after some bad guys have shot Waller (she survived through Oracle’s quick-thinking sending the Atom through the phone line to prevent her would-be assassins from finishing her off), Oracle is forced to take over as the interim leader of the Suicide Squad…
The Squad shut down in Suicide Squad #66, but Oracle would soon transfer to the main Batman titles where she would become very famous and all because Yale and Ostrander did not like how The Killing Joke treated Barbara. Impressive.
Yale would later get to do an “Oracle Year One” story with Ostander and Brian Stelfreeze before her tragic passing in 1997.
About The Author
[ad_2]
