she provides directory assistance for several international and intergalactic teams of superheroes (the birds of prey, justice league of america, the outsiders, and she has worked with the titans before).
she is the primary hacker and information network source for many of these heroes.
she helps provide mercy ops (disaster relief and humanitarian efforts) globally.
she is able to hack into the white house cameras.
she hacks into the united states air force routinely to use their memory capabilities.
she is seen as a pentagon level threat.
she writes her own code for scanning new satellite images for human habitations and anomalies.
she's accessed air force rockets no one is supposed to know about and overridden them to fire them.
she has a team of drones ready for surveillance.
she's put her own security systems on arkham asylum.
she hacks into information databases from federal complexes and assembles blueprints and guard schedules so she can send her agents to break into them.
she sets a government complex on fire (she says it is a small and contained fire.)
she also sets the clock tower on fire to force batman to not do murder/suicide.
she hacks into cia debriefing transcripts to obtain information.
she controls a large portion of the world's internet and power grids.
she also is the reason why many world leaders are in power.
she has access to the bank accounts of several supervillains, whom she toys with (specifically for blockbuster, she regularly steals millions of dollars from his accounts in a way that he cannot track who is stealing it and where it is going -- she's stolen 3 million, 17 million, 6 million, twenty million and also a hundred million from him).
she can also hack alien drones.
she can control traffic.
she has several booby-traps in the clock tower for potential assaulters. she also a device to monitor movement of people around it, in case batman decides to show up.
cited panels down below!
"she's the four-one-one for the jla, she the database for the g.c. ex-p.d. she runs mercy ops around the world."
nightwing (1996) #38
"you have cameras in the white house?"
"don't be silly. the white house has cameras in the white house. i've just tapped into them."
nightwing (1996) #66
"i mean, someone hacks into our system and routinely uses our [united states air force] memory capabilities!"
"i know!"
"often."
birds of prey #1 (1999)
"i run a database and search engine for a select few free-land crimefighters."
birds of prey: manhunt (1996)
"we scan the most recent images for anomalies. things that don't belong."
"where'd you get a program for that?"
"i wrote my own code for that one."
birds of prey (1999) #3
"they've accessed whitehorse, sir."
"whitehorse? no one's supposed to know about that!"
birds of prey (1999) #9
"and oracle? we're going to need eyes on several places at once."
"i think we can manage that."
detective comics (1937) #1077
"they've accessed whitehorse. what's the chance of them arming it?"
"all clear?"
"oh yeah."
"fire!"
birds of prey (1999) #9
"[arkham's] security is good, but piecemeal. i installed my own system there after the last breakout."
infinite crisis special: villains united (2006)
"batgirl -- that incident a couple months back? when those government agents caught your face on tape? i found out where they're keeping it. it's a federal complex in virginia. i've sent you blueprints, guard schedules -- everything you'll need to break in."
batgirl (2000) #17
"where did you get that kind of information?"
"they traded another prisoner last month. i hacked into his cia debriefing transcript."
birds of prey (1999) #9
"kat, do you have any idea... any notion at all, of how much of the planet's entire internet i control? how many power grids? how many world leaders owe me their positions?"
birds of prey #1 (1999)
"i transferred all the funds in her cayman islands account to another offshore account. if she doesn't get the paintings to me in the next forty-eight hours, that money's going to my favorite charities."
birds of prey: catwoman/oracle (2003)
"where do you get current [satellite] shots of rheelasia?"
"that's my secret, you little netnik."
birds of prey (1999) #3
"but the asborbascons were created using languages long dead even on my planet. they are uncrackable."
"yes. the absorbascons are uncrackable. but the alien drones aren't."
convergence: nightwing/oracle (2015)
"do you have that kind of cash?"
"no. but i know someone who does."
"there's been a... discrepancy, mr. desmond."
"in plain english, mr. vogel."
"at one point, three million was electronically transferred from your numbered accounts in the caicos to a bank account in hasaragua. from there to karocco, then yemen, then split between banks in senegal and manila. and then... my hardware couldn't keep up."
birds of prey (1999) #3
"seventeen million from your account in the caymans. six from santa prisca. twenty from rheelasia. and a hundred million plus from other holdings of yours around the world, mr. desmond. and where it all goes? nobody knows."
birds of prey (1999) #18
"they're taking your cash from impregnable accounts and transferring it electronically to their own."
"and you can't find the source?"
"there's subsequent transfers performed at lightning speed. the money's split up, rerouted in and out of various banks in an eyeblink. even i can't keep up with whoever this is."
birds of prey (1999) #18
"let me handle the traffic."
birds of prey (1999) #58
"all of you. keep your hands where i can see 'em."
"not a problem. malory. ripken. peppermint."
nightwing (1996) #39
if someone can please reblog this with panels from 90s comics that show them tackling social issues (homophobia, racism, etc etc) before 11:59 today that would be great please and thank you
Charting out Shiva's "backstories" (or rather, vaguely implied backstories) throughout the years and how Tate Brombal's new History of Shiva in Batgirl 2024 impacts Shiva, Cass, and their relationship moving forward:
After Batgirl #8's publication today, I thought I'd take a look at what pieces of Shiva's history were previously depicted before now and how Tate Brombal has changed things (or kept them the same)...just to see what he did and didn't do in context of Shiva and Cassandra's history. I have a lot of thoughts on how he's approached this given what little we actually knew about Shiva going in and how messed up Cassandra's own history still is, so let's dive right in!
1975: Denny O'Neil writes Shiva in Richard Dragon as someone who has no backstory. She's here to kick ass, take names, and avenge her sister; her backstory, where and how long she trained for, etc. is irrelevant. Sandra's sister Carolyn is killed by the Swiss in a getaway chase between Richard Dragon and the Swiss, and Shiva comes after Richard because the guy who hired the Swiss convinced her Richard was responsible for it.
The two shreds of Woosan Sisters backstory we do get: 1) Carolyn has an uncle named 'Shiruto', a weapons developer who kills himself rather than reveal his secrets to the Swiss within two pages of his first appearance, and 2) Carolyn goes to school in New York City and is O-Sensei's goddaughter:
"I am Carolyn Woosan...the O-Sensei is my godfather!" -Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter (1975) #2
This is never elaborated on at any point after this comment and Shiva seemingly does not know who O-Sensei is when she and Richard track him down later in the series. Shiva has several adventures with Richard and Ben Turner within this book but is not mentioned again in the pre-Crisis universe after it ends. Within the actual source material, this is all we get of Shiva.
Then we start getting into the additional information and various changes that occurred post-Crisis:
1987: In the Who's Who in the DC Universe 1987 Update, after Denny O'Neil reintroduced Shiva in The Question, we get a Shiva write-up seemingly indicating that the entirety of Richard Dragon is still canon while also providing a few new shreds of Shiva backstory:
"After being convinced by criminal industrialist Guano Cravat that her sister Carolyn had been slain by Richard Dragon, Sandra Woosan swore to slay her sister's killer. She studied and prepared, taking the name Lady Shiva." ".....before transforming herself into Lady Shiva, Sandra had a basic knowledge of the martial arts. These skills were then honed to near perfection and she is now one of the deadliest fighters in the world." -Who's Who: Update '87
1991: the next Who's Who write-up of Shiva further implies that Richard Dragon is still canon and somewhat explicitly says that Shiva did not start studying martial arts until Carolyn was killed:
"Life presents many different paths and opportunities to a person. Sandra Woosan's life took a destructive path when Guano Cravat, a criminal industrialist, convinced her that martial artist/spy Richard Dragon killed her sister Carolyn. Motivated by revenge, Sandra dedicated her life to mastering the martial arts, hoping one day she could beat Dragon at his own game. Sandra became a master of many forms of combat and confronted Dragon." -Who's Who in the DC Universe (1990) #10
Both the 1987 and 1991 write-ups are extra-canonical material that are not, to my knowledge, mentioned anywhere in-text, and neither were written or directed to be written by Denny O'Neil. But like. They're there and ambiguously canon.
2004: Chuck Dixon writes Richard Dragon, a maxiseries that de-canonizes all previous information in favor of saying that Shiva met Richard at a fighting tournament in Japan while scouting for students. Richard, Ben, and Shiva's histories are all massively fucked up as a result of this maxi. While nothing is explicitly stated about Shiva's history, she mentions offhand near the beginning of the book that she has "unfinished business in Detroit," which leads us to...
2006: Andersen Gabrych writes Shiva in Batgirl as a girl who grew up with her sister Carolyn in Detroit. This is first mentioned in Batgirl #65 and then slightly elaborated on in Batgirl #73, in the process of retconning Shiva to be Cassandra's mother:
"We all knew each other. But there was one time...[Cain and Shiva walk away from a fight. He seems to be telling or asking her something. She shoves him and walks off]...never asked her about it. Me and Sandy weren't tight like that."
"Wait. Sandy?"
"Oh. Haha! Well, before she annointed herself Lady Shiva, she was just plain old Sandra Wu-San from Detroit." -Batgirl (2000) #65
Sandra and Carolyn are now both martial arts prodigies who trained constantly, fought together, and either a) trounced people on the competition circuit or b) put on fighting exhibitions that everyone came to see, depending on how you read and extrapolate from the two pages of story we get, which is how Cain found her:
"Long ago and far away...in the land of Detroit, lived two sisters. Though as different as night and day, they loved each other deeply. And more than that—they loved to dance. Every moment of the day was spent in lessons. They danced all through the night. They danced so much it became the secret language of sisters. The world had never seen anything like it. People would come from near and far to watch the sisters perform. People like the lonely hunter, Cain." -Batgirl (2000) #73
Cain kills Carolyn to "unleash Sandra's potential." Sandra goes after him in revenge and fails to kill him. Explicit sexual coercion happens (Cain gave her a 'give me a child or die' proposition with a gun to her head), Sandra trains with Cain until she has Cass, and then she goes off to "be reborn" as Shiva.
Batgirl is the first time we get any actual substantive Shiva background in-text post-Crisis. Her time working with Richard and Ben as part of the Kung-Fu Fighter Crew is now extra definitively non-canon, as even beyond Dixon's book there is no way to reconcile Cain killing Carolyn in Detroit with the events of KFF. O-Sensei is similarly not mentioned in any capacity. Carolyn has been slightly revamped from helpless damsel to someone who was theoretically capable but "got in the way." We still see none of it beyond a 7 page fairy tale-esque sequence that does a lot of victim-blaming of Sandra for taking Cain's deal to save her life. Moving on.
2007: Gail Simone writes Shiva in Birds of Prey as someone who may or may not have grown up in an unidentified, purposefully hidden "Southeast Asian village." Regardless of whether she grew up there, that's certainly where she "became Shiva," training under the brutal woman known only as "Mother." Carolyn is not mentioned. Simone implies that the Detroit backstory established in Batgirl is also somewhat true:
"This is the agreement we made. To trade life experiences." ... "Why here, Shiva? I'd heard you grew up in Detroit." "That is only part of the story." -Birds of Prey (1999) #93
However, Simone's new backstory (if taken as true, which is not necessarily the case, because nothing is definitively stated at any point) completely contradicts Gabrych's backstory, as Mother implies that Shiva was raised in the village on multiple occasions:
"Just so you are aware, Tag...at four years of age, she cried out less than you did just now." -Birds of Prey #92
There is also an implied "there must always be a Shiva" element to this backstory, as Sin Lance was being groomed to become Shiva's successor before Dinah dropped in.
Generally, I think a reasonable explanation, given the sequence of canon events, is that you can fit this village into Shiva's post-Crisis backstory if you assume it's where Sandra at least partially trained to become Shiva after leaving Cain and Baby!Cass. So Mother credits herself as Shiva's "mother" because it is where Sandra died and Shiva was born. But that's an assumption and not anything definitively backed up by canon.
Fast forward to...
2015-2018: Cassandra is reintroduced into post-Flashpoint continuity during the events of Batman and Robin Eternal. Shiva is not mentioned. When Shiva does finally appear in Tynion's Detective Comics Rebirth run, her backstory and relationship with Cain is not elaborated on beyond the fact that she "had no idea what David Cain did with her daughter" and wanted to see if Cass was "worth her time." We get one tiny tidbit from Ra's taunting Shiva that hints that the Batgirl-era Detroit backstory is possibly canon, but that's it:
"Sandra Wu-San. Searching so hard to find what she lost back in Detroit. But instead losing more and more of herself until there was nothing left. Nothing but Shiva." -Detective Comics (2016) #956
2019: Bryan Hill writes Shiva in Batman and the Outsiders as someone who now vaguely grew up in a village in China. Apparently this village used to be full of assassins but is now a village of farmers:
"As I recall, you were born in a small Chinese village. Once a place of assassins. Now a land of farmers." -Batman and the Outsiders (2019) #12
There is no elaboration on whether it was still an assassin training ground when Shiva lived there or if it was already a farming village by the time she was born. This is a brand new backstory that completely contradicts Gabrych's Detroit backstory (which had been previously hinted at in Tynion's Tec run) and largely contradicts Simone's possible village backstory...and only Detroit is even remotely reconcilable with Cassandra's New 52 backstory. Shiva also does a complete about-face from Tynion's portrayal of her; she now thinks of Bruce as someone who "took" Cassandra from her and seemingly desperately wants to be a mother to her. This portrayal continues into Batgirls and more recent books.
2022-2023: Che Grayson explicitly names this Chinese village as 'Duoyishu Village' in Batman: Urban Legends #3:
We have no idea how long the girls lived there with their parents, what their life in the village was like, and no clue what happened in between then and now other than the tidbit that Shiva has very few memories of her childhood and loved her mother's pork belly:
"Memories...you know, I don't remember much from when I was a child." -Urban Legends #3
Grayson also continues the throughline established by Hill in Outsiders and Cloonan/Conrad in Batgirls of Shiva seeing Bruce as someone who "took Cassandra from her" in both this story and the "Memory Lane" Birds of Prey story in Urban Legends #14-16.
Then Kelly Thompson reintroduced Sin Lance in Birds of Prey (2023), largely wholesale; this means that Dinah and Shiva's "life experience swap" arc from Simone's BOP run is canon again...and implicitly, Simone's potential Shiva backstory. We also have Alyssa Wong, who wrote Spirit World (2023) and effectively re-canonized the entirety of Batgirl (2000) in the process. So both Detroit and "Asia" are both actively on the Shiva multiple choice backstory menu; any pre-2004 conceptulization of Sandra as a "normal girl" who never really knew martial arts before Carolyn died? Seemingly off the table.
By this point, the events of Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter have not been canon since (generously) at least 2004. Shiva now has four largely contradictory origin story hints, three of which are ambiguously canon and none of which have been expanded upon enough to actually say anything useful about Sandra, Carolyn, Cassandra, their relationships with each other, or their collective past. Cass's own backstory is also still a royal mess with all of the nonsense that happened with her between 2006 and 2023.
Cue Batgirl 2024 and Tate Brombal, who for the first time sat down and told Shiva's story in her own words. In this new interpretation, we get a solid mixture of old and new that's been put into a blender:
Ming-Yue and Mei-Xing's parents were a forbidden romance from rival sects, the Blood and the Unburied. They lived as nomads in China, including in Duoyishu Village, until they were killed by Wu Feng (leader of The Blood and the father's brother) in the Tibetan Himalayas. They were then raised and trained by Akhu and a group of monks, hidden away in "a small village in the Himalayas" until the Blood attacked.
After leaving the village post-Blood attack, Mei and Yue traveled the world for a few years, mastering various combat forms and martial arts, and finally landed in in Detroit, where they took the American names Carolyn and Sandra and started putting on exhibition fights. We then get the Batgirl-era backstory of them continuing to dance, fight, and perform for crowds as a travelling act and being seen by Cain.
Brombal then does some timeline shenanigans, making Sandra and Carolyn crimefighters once they meet Richard Dragon and Ben Turner, adding Carolyn to the Kung-Fu fighter team and fully re-canonizing everything from the 1975 Richard Dragon series post-Shiva's introduction (for the first time in 20 years+) so they can all work and chill together before everything goes to shit.
Cain, who has been stalking Sandra for some time, makes a creepy af proposition to her in a dark alley. She refuses. He states that he knew she would, which is why he's already removed Carolyn from the equation. She rushes home, and together with Richard and Ben finds Carolyn dead and left for her to find. And this is where we've left off, with the final part of the story (Shiva and Cain) seemingly left for the final part of this three-part arc.
So. Where does this leave us with Shiva? Well, let's start with a look at what Brombal seemingly took from Shiva's various other canon lore drops:
Shiva was born and at least partially raised in a Chinese village as a young girl before their parents' deaths (Batman and the Outsiders, Urban Legends),
Sandra and Carolyn were raised and taught by Akhu, implied to be the O-Sensei (the man who trained Richard and Ben in Kyoto, Japan), in an unidentified southeast Asian village located somewhere in the Himalayas (possibly calling back to Simone's potential backstory in Birds of Prey). They call him "practically a godfather," calling back to Carolyn's lore drop in RDKFF #2
Sandra and Carolyn lived in Detroit for some time (re: Batgirl #73),
Sandra and Carolyn danced and fought together for years, to the point of being able to work together seamlessly (Batgirl #73)
Cain finding Shiva through Sandra and Carolyn's exhibition matches in Detroit, seeing potential in Sandra and thinking Carolyn holds her back, and killing Carolyn and leaving her body for Sandra to find (Batgirl #73)
The entirety of the events of Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter (1975) post-Shiva's introduction, excepting the specifics of Carolyn's death (which he takes largely wholesale from Batgirl #73 while changing the timeline so it occurs during the time Sandra was working with Richard and Ben rather than before),
Richard Dragon's name, look, and general pre-O-Sensei backstory from Dixon's Richard Dragon run, with the caveat that all of the nonsense about Ben training Richard got thrown out the window in favor of the OG Richard Dragon interpretation of both Richard and Ben being trained by O-Sensei
……also the Richard/Shiva implications from both the 1975 Richard Dragon run (where it was mostly a couple of jokes Ben makes at Richard's expense) and Dixon's 2004 Richard Dragon maxi (which makes Richard kind of obsessed with her)
And now a look at what's new: Sandra and Carolyn Wu-San not being the girls' birth names, the family history with the Unburied and the Blood, the defined adolesence in the Himalayas, the nomadic life post-China and pre-Detroit, Carolyn being part of the Kung-Fu Fighter crew (+her relationship with Ben), and the timeline shenanigans to re-canonize RDKFF while also keeping Shiva's Batgirl-era backstory intact. Also new: Carolyn having a personality, Sandra and Carolyn's rather complex familial relationship, and Sandra's hunger for vengeance pre-dating Carolyn's murder.
So. What are my thoughts on all of this?
First off, I really love the reinvention of the Kung Fu Fighter crew. It solves a lot of timeline issues, leaves the door open for someone to truly update those stories for the modern day, and fixes 3.5 characters in one go (giving Richard and Ben their proper histories and personalities back, giving Carolyn something to do outside of die in Richard's arms, and giving Shiva her crimefighting era back, inserting the moral ambiguity back into her history rather than making her a flat villain like she has been so often for the past 25 years), so I'm not mad about it at all.
I'm happy Brombal is giving Shiva a life, voice, and perspective outside of 'Shiva The Mother' and 'Shiva the Villain.' Shiva the daughter and Shiva the sister are not things that have ever been explored before! I also genuinely love the work being put in to make Carolyn an actual character, especially the page-time dedicated to showcasing Sandra and Carolyn as two women who have a complex relationship and long history outside of Carolyn's fridging and Sandra becoming Shiva in response. It gives us a real look into why Carolyn's murder was the catalyst for Sandra becoming Shiva, and I think it's a very effective one.
Mei has opinions that put her in conflict with Yue; she's more peace-loving and disciplined in general than Yue, but less willing to keep her head down and look the other way when injustice is happening. She doesn't like combat as much as Yue even though she's better at it. She clearly feels parentified by her mother's last charge to look after her younger sister. She likes boys more and wants to proactively help people and move on from her past in a way that Yue is simply incapable of thinking about. It's a really fascinating glimpse into Carolyn as a person and her relationship with Sandra.
I'm also a huge fan of Brombal seemingly doubling down on unpacking the implications of Cain's "proposition" to Sandra in Batgirl #73 when she tracks him down for revenge and fails to kill him:
"I want what you want. Perfection. To help you meet your target. The power and ability to put the world in its place...vengeance against the man who killed your parents. All I ask for is one thing. For years, I have been developing the perfect weapon, the perfect...killer. But failure after failure has only proven [he touches Sandra's stomach] the importance of good stock." -Batgirl (2024) #8)
He previously implied that Shiva hated Cain and the entire situation surrounding Cass's birth, but that one was a lot more ambiguous:
"I know what I am, and I know you hate it. But that old woman, Ba Bao, she said that there is soft and there is hard. Well, somewhere along the way, I lost my soft, and I now realize it was when I had you. You took all my soft, daughter. I held you in my arms, and I saw it. I saw my sister, too. And perhaps I hated you for it. Perhaps I wanted to hate you for it. To make it easier to leave you with that—that man." -Batgirl (2024) #4
Personally, this is a fantastic and very welcome change in my book. The only time we've ever gotten the story of Shiva and Cain was a victim-blamey 7 page sequence in the last issue of Batgirl (2000), where Shiva implies that she appreciated him "unlocking her potential" as a fighter and "setting her free" from Carolyn despite also explicitly stating that she still missed Carolyn every day. While I don't AGREE with the interpretation that Shiva actually genuinely loved Cain at all and think it's an incredible simplification of what Shiva actually told Cass, it's very easy to walk away with that vibe if you don't dig into it much, so I'm super happy to see a writer willing to actually unpack all that.
We've also never gotten any attempt to deal with the implications of Cass knowing that history, as Cass spent most of that issue fighting Shiva and leaving her for dead dangling over the Lazarus Pit and then the Evil Cass arc happened...so absolutely nothing in that last arc about Cass finding out Shiva was her mom and the origins of how she came to be got unpacked or dealt with. And then her backstory was fucked over during the New 52 (something that still hasn't actually been fixed and dealt with), so she didn't know about it all over again!
Overall I'm mixed on the various childhood stuff, specifically the inclusions of the Unburied and the Blood. It's always fun to see new cool secret warrior groups, especially ones unconnected to the League of Assassins (which modern DC loves to use as an umbrella assassin group instead of 'one among many'), and their inclusion in Shiva's backstory is very obviously a set-up for one of the things that Brombal wants to have Cass deal with moving forward. This is his way of expanding Cass's world beyond Gotham and beyond Nyssa's League of Assassins sect. I think I'm withholding full judgement until I see where he goes with it, and whether my theories that a) the groups will be used to explain Shiva's odd capacity for healing and b) Wu Lin (the Bloodmaster introduced in Batgirl #4) will be revealed to be Shiva's cousin—and Cass's second cousin—actually pan out.
What I'm not a fan of: Sandra having a hunger for vengeance prior to Carolyn's murder, having dream premonitions of Carolyn's death and becoming Shiva, and brazenly dictating all of this history to Cass via a post-mortem diary and saying she trusts her with her life and her vengeance. I do think it defeats the purpose of "Shiva" for it to be an inevitable conclusion for Sandra instead of an avoidable tragedy, and I dislike the concept of Shiva being anything other than in love with danger and in love with living life on the edge during the Kung-Fu Fighter era. While the rest of it certainly has its place in Shiva's life, the jaded perspective and Batgirl-era death wish should have come later, after Cain. I also think she trusts Cass far too much considering their history up to that point, but I'm willing to give some grace on that front since it's a plot device.
Generally speaking, I find that Brombal's Lady Shiva is a Sandra that generally follows from what we've seen of her since 2006, a Lady Shiva that's clearly couched in an attempt to deal with 50 years and three universes worth of history, and a Shiva-and-Cass relationship that encompasses basically the totality of everything that's been done with them since they first met in Batgirl (2000) #7, including the work done since the 2019 Outsiders run.
While that's not necessarily my preferred interpretation of Shiva or her relationship with Cass, it's also not one that Brombal is inventing out of thin air for the sake of a story. He's obviously very well-read on both Shiva and Cass and is trying to reconcile all of the various contradictory aspects of what's been handed to us in canon regarding Shiva's history and her behavior towards Cassandra. This is very difficult considering that 50 years and three continuities have happened since Richard Dragon #5 and Brombal clearly has his own story that he wants to tell with both Shiva and Cass.
I think just like all other previous attempts to tell both Shiva's story and Cass's story....some of it worked, some of it didn't. But overall I generally loved the issue and think it was pretty well done considering what Brombal had to work with. I'm super interested to see how he tackles Cass's reactions to all of this and what impact it has on her perspective of her mother moving forward. The whole 'Mother' arc, after all, was ultimately about Cass trying to reconcile who she thought Shiva was with who Shiva actually is in the context of her own life and history with her, and then setting up a new emotional status quo for both women. And we're finally past the set-up, so I'm really looking forward to the payoff.
Not to NML post again but thinking about this... thinking about Babs losing her mom figure who was never a mom in the same event she meets Cass... thinking about whether Sarah's death affected any part of how Babs treated Cass... thinking about how Cass calls Babs 'Oracle' and never mom either........
A brief history of eskrima (Filipino martial arts) in comics
[NOTE: This article features updated text that originally appeared on TheGeeksverse.com.]
As a lifelong comics reader, a fan of combat sports, and as somebody with a slightly more-than-casual interest in the martial arts, one of the developments in popular media that I’ve found quite intriguing in recent years is just how prominent depictions of the Filipino martial art eskrima have become in comics, films, video games, and television outside the Philippines.
But what exactly is eskrima?
Eskrima (from the Spanish term for fencing, esgrima), alternatively spelled as escrima and known by other names such as arnis, kali, or the more generic FMA (Filipino Martial Arts) is a catch-all term for the traditional martial arts of the Philippines, which place an emphasis on stick-fighting and the use of bladed weapons alongside unarmed combat techniques. The historical origin of the martial art and even the etymology of its various names is a matter of contentious debate in certain circles, with regional biases and the usual distortions of fact and outright fabrications that accompany the oral history of traditional martial arts adding to the confusion. Growing in acceptance, though, is the hypothesis that eskrima is a syncretic fighting system based on indigenous Filipino armed and unarmed fighting techniques fortified with influences from Spain, Indonesia, and Southern China.
As a “living” martial art however, eskrima is subject to on-going evolution and adaptation, its various schools absorbing elements from diverse sources, its descendant arts responding to pressures both practical and theoretical. As such, any reasonably accurate definition of eskrima is bound to be in a constant state of flux and what could be said to be true of the art in the past and today may not necessarily be so in the future.
Besides being a component of the current public school physical education curriculum in the Philippines (where it is referred to as arnis), principles and concepts drawn from eskrima have found their way to the programs of instruction taught at the FLETC, the US Border Patrol Academy, and the US Army Combatives School. It is also a popular stylistic base for action cinema fight choreography, with films such as Blade 2, 300, The Book of Eli, and the Bourne trilogy all featuring eskrima-inspired sequences.
One of the earliest references to the Filipino martial arts in a mainstream American comic book can be found in Marvel Comics’ G.I. Joe Order of Battle #2 (January, 1987), where the dossier written by Larry Hama for the character Torpedo states that he is an expert in the use of the balisong, a knife associated with the Philippines’ martial arts.
An in-story reference to the Filipino martial arts would appear three years later in a back-up feature (“Punisher’s Fighting Techniques”) in The Punisher Annual #3 (June, 1990):
The feature, written by self-defense instructor Roger Salick with art by Mark “TEX” Texeira, shows the Punisher trapping his assailant—incidentally armed with a balisong—with a highly stylized (if somewhat inaccurate) depiction of an eskrima trapping/disarming move called gunting (“scissors” in Filipino and Indonesian/Malay) and its transition to elbow and knee strikes.
Various comics superheroes have appeared over the years equipped with weapons and fighting styles coincidentally reminiscent of the doble baston forms of eskrima—Marvel’s Daredevil, Shang-Chi, and Night Thrasher among them—but technically, the first mainstream comics character to be explicitly acknowledged by its creator as an eskrima practitioner is Grail, from Whilce Portacio‘s action-horror series Wetworks that began publication under the Image Comics banner in 1994:
Later that same year, DC writer-editor Scott Peterson and artist Brian Stelfreeze found themselves with an interesting quandary: how to present the then-paraplegic Barbara Gordon (a.k.a. Oracle) in Showcase ’94 as a more action-oriented character. As Peterson recalled in an August 2011 post on the DC Women Kicking Ass blog:
… we talked to Kelley Puckett, a black belt, about what kind of fighting techniques someone in [Barbara Gordon’s] situation could master. ‘Escrima,’ he said. A Filipino martial art, one of the features of escrima is using sticks to fight, sticks which rely more on speed than sheer strength—although we figured her arms were probably stronger than ever by now. So an escrima master she quickly became.
Following the events of the “Prodigal” storyline in the Batman comic book, Nightwing (a.k.a. Dick Grayson, the original Robin) received a self-titled miniseries in 1995 wherein the character got a costume and design makeover. While the series was illustrated by Greg Land, the new costume and prop designs were created by Brian Stelfreeze who, taking a cue from his experience redesigning Barbara Gordon for Showcase ’94, gave Nightwing eskrima sticks as well:
The incorporation of eskrima as a permanent fixture of the character’s design is all the more impressive given how resistant the superhero comics genre can be to significant and lasting change.
Eskrima would become something of the trademark martial art of the extended “Bat-family” over the years: Stephanie Brown wielded eskrima sticks during her stint as Batgirl; ex-Robin Jason Todd, in the guise of the villain/anti-hero the Red Hood, has taken to wielding a kris, a knife associated with the eskrima variants originating in the island of Mindanao as well as the related Indonesian martial art of silat (although some have proposed that Todd’s weapon is based on the “flame dagger” of medieval Europe); and the “New 52″ Earth-Two version of Batman uses paired eskrima sticks as his preferred melee weapons.
The depiction of eskrima in comics is not limited to the superhero genre. In a brief online conversation I had with writer Arvid Nelson a few years ago, the writer revealed that the knife-fight scenes in his alternate history graphic novel Zero Killer (published by Dark Horse) were staged and choreographed based on his knowledge of arnis.
Nor is the depiction of eskrima in comics outside of the Philippines limited to Western publications. Rinka Urushiba—the platinum-haired protagonist of Hajime Segawa’s Tokyo ESP manga—is explicitly described as an eskrima adept, using twin collapsible batons as her weapons of choice.
STOP THINKING HELENA BERTINELLI IS STUPID JUST BECAUSE SHE'S NOT A SELF PROCLAIMED DETECTIVE OR A BATFAM LEVEL PRODIGY GENIUS WHATEVER. SHE'S A SCHOOLTEACHER FOR CRYING OUT LOUD AND SHE SOLVES CRIME CASES ON HER OWN!!! SHE CALLED OUT BRUCE AND BARBARA'S MANIPULATION!!!!! SHE DOESN'T RECKLESSLY KILL EVERY MAN IN SIGHT YOU JUST THINK OF HER AS INFERIOR FOR NO DAMN GOOD REASON!!!
not explicitly, but it is very much reflected when people (writers or fans) think helena needs to be fixed and tamed and taught better by the batfam, or when people think helena just brutally kills everybody in sight and doesn't understand the consequences of her actions or moral values, or acting as if helena isn't a skilled vigilante and needs to be in a team or whatever as if she doesn't solve cases even as a solo vigilante :/
also while discussing the birds of prey, i absolutely don't think it's wrong to say that babs is the brain, because she does oversee and head the logistics and missions, but to act like she's the only intelligent one here while helena is the brutish brawn and dinah is the naive goody two baby is so ...
We know Helena is a billionaire heiress, what do you think she will do with her family's legacy?
thank you for the ask! i apologise if my answer isn't satisfactory, but this is my subjective take on it.
logically speaking, as the one and only remaining surviving member of the entire bertinelli family, helena would be thus the sole inheritor of the entire wealth she would be entitled to. heaps of generational wealth whose value would only increase with age, and god knows what else she has access to, considering that the bertinellis have been said to be the most powerful family in gotham. her net worth would be startling to say the least.
in huntress: year one, the matter of her inheritance has been a prominent subplot in the comic, as she's supposed to receive her inheritance on her twenty first birthday, only to find that her money was stolen and she had to go and steal back her family's wealth from mandragora. the exact sum stated here is three billion.
however, in huntress (1989), she shows no interest in taking the wealth. she even transfers the responsibility of her father's mysterious ledger on other people.
provided that most of the time, we see that helena mostly lives in apartments (even in the current continuity) and lives a pretty modest lifestyle (she wasn't exactly living a life of luxury in the nml arc), it's safe to assume that she isn't keeping the wealth for herself, and that she's not living at her childhood home (likely a mansion). she's also said something about living on a teacher's salary in the bop comic.
honestly, i have some assumptions about her wealth:
she didn't accept any of it in the first place. after all, it is money earned with blood and sins.
if she did accept the money, then she did it out of obligation because there was no way she'd allow that sum of money to enter the pockets of any corrupt predator.
she donated the money. to her school, to some valuable charities in gotham, to a museum, anything to help other people and leave a better impact on the world.
she keeps some amount of money, but just what she needs to get by; after all, suits and gears and weapons and vehicles aren't cheap to maintain.
she's only kept the stuff that has sentimental values to her; heirloom jewellery, her mother and brother's belongings, a recipe book passed down through generations, that sort of stuff. one person doesn't need a mansion or multiple properties.
as for the bertinelli legacy... it's not straightforward. on one hand, she loves her family and their absence tears her apart. on another hand, should she really want to preserve the impact of a crime family? of a father who did questionable things to provide for his family?
i think one thing helena could do is leave their legacy in a new image... not as huntress, but as miss bertinelli. as a teacher. while she cannot undo the insurmountable losses, she can guide her students — broken kids of gotham — towards the light of a better future, and they, in turn, can leave their marks on the world. she could even take it up a notch and fight for a better education system to any capacity; fighting against book bans, unlawful rules, student debts, etc, anything to make education more accessible and enriching for everybody. i think that's a legacy worth fighting for, her fight as an educator in a city shrouded in darkness.
because let's face it, a lot of gotham villains and criminals are actually pretty smart, but have not been provided ample opportunities to exercise their gifts in a more law-abiding and sustainable way. so, educational reform would be greatly beneficial. and in general, the kids need an adult in their corner who will fight for them and their well-being til their last breath.
[gulp] aw s-shucks… i don’t know stephanie.. hacking the gcpd… that sounds like it might be [gulp] a little u-unethical! Uh…Better do this the legal way!
Batgirls #9 (2022)
VS
Chad Birds of Prey (1999) Barbara Gordon:
[hacks US Air Force to use their memory capabilities]
Birds of Prey #1 (1999)
[hacks into Blockbusters account to steal tens of millions of dollars from him regularly]
BOP #2 / BOP #18 (1999)
[hacks into Air Force to casually fire rockets from their top secret satellite]
BOP #9 (1999)
[hacks the cia]
BOP #9 (1999)
[hacks into White House cameras to spy on Lex Luthor]
(originally published in yuri zine - i've moved most of the footnotes to parentheticals for tumblr readability!)
I. This Too Is Yuri¹
Birds of Prey (1995-2009) is a comic about power, control, physicality, the internet, and convincing your girlfriend to set aside her moral principles. Well, not quite.
Some quick background for people who haven’t spent the last year in DC hell: Birds of Prey is one of the more famous female team comics, mostly starring Barbara Gordon and Dinah Lance, though there’s a rotating cast of other women who come and go (Helena Bertinelli joins the team later in the run.) The comic started off with a handful of one-shots, continuing to be a top seller for a decade. (There was also a brief and very doomed TV series, which apparently featured t.A.t.u's “All The Things She Said” during a deeply homoerotic fight scene.)²
Barbara Gordon, formerly Batgirl, is the daughter of Gotham police chief Jim Gordon. At the beginning of Birds of Prey, she’s acting as Oracle, a sort of technosupergenius capable of hacking everything from Army satellites to banks. (DC Comics has a lot of ideas about what a library degree prepares you for. Clearly I missed the hacking classes.) She’s forged this role for herself after the Joker shot her in the spine; in Birds of Prey, she’s paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair.
Dinah Lance is the Black Canary, one of the most talented martial artists in the world. She fights crime in fishnets, the costume her mother (the first Black Canary) wore. (This is one of the more normal ways to react to a superhero parent I’ve seen in comics, actually.) At the beginning of Birds of Prey, Dinah is reeling from the death of her longterm ex, Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, and also the loss of her powers, a sort of superhuman shriek that can blast through walls or knock out opponents.
Cue the yuri. In Birds of Prey, Barbara (Babs) acts as Dinah’s handler, sending her on missions that range from comic-book normal to absolutely wild (Dinah fights a dinosaur at least twice.) Babs books her travel, orders her food, buys her clothes, and acts like a jealous girlfriend any time Dinah works with another woman without Babs orchestrating it.
¹ I struggled with how to frame this essay almost as much as I struggled to research it. Birds of Prey debuted during the days of the “old internet,” making it fairly challenging to find contemporary fan responses (more on this later.) So there was a great temptation to say this, the archival gap, too is yuri. But while I love to talk about research methods I think an essay about my attempts to get into comics DC++ servers is not actually that interesting, and also oh my god I want to talk about Dinah Lance and Barbara Gordon and their nightmare relationship.
² “But We’re Out of Time: Queer(ed) Nostalgia and WB’s The Birds of Prey” covers the show; it’s also a great read about queering memory. Very funny to read this blog after scrolling through a lot of forum posts deeply upset about the show when it first aired.
Black Canary/Oracle: Birds of Prey (1995), Chuck Dixon and Dick Giordano, p. 16
Birds of Prey: Manhunt #1 (1996), Chuck Dixon and Matt Haley, p. 14
The intimacy only goes one way, though. Despite her exhaustive knowledge of Dinah, Babs remains a voice in Dinah's ear for the first 21 issues of the run. Dinah doesn't know the name of the woman who sends her into danger every other week.
Critically, Barbara keeps her identity-- not just her superhero and civilian identities, but also her identity as a disabled woman-- secret. She has nearly unlimited access to information about Dinah, as well as the rest of the world; and she will not allow herself to be known. Her anonymity and her remove are her power and control. This makes the little worms in my brain do a sort of unhinged samba. If yuri is about absence, as the tumblr memes go, about reaching out and trying to grasp something you can never quite have, well!
Birds of Prey #3 (1999), Chuck Dixon and Greg Land, p. 11
Birds of Prey #13 (1999), Chuck Dixon and Greg Land, p. 16
Birds of Prey #19 (2000), Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, p. 14
Identity, both in its revelation and its concealment, is a key feature of any superhero comic. Who has a secret identity? Who is allowed to know it? Identity in comics is about who you are, of course, but it is also about safety, about masking and unmasking, about intimacy and trust, about having a place to go when you hang up the spandex. As the Black Canary, Dinah doesn’t wear a mask; her identity is something of an open secret, and it’s only her relative obscurity among civilians that keeps her safe in her day-to-day life. Oracle, on the other hand, is so much of a cipher that most of the villains trying to target her don’t even know that she’s a woman, a fact she regularly plays to her own advantage. After all, who would suspect a poor disabled girl of being the ruthless cyberwarrior who’s been blackmailing them for months? Barbara’s weaponization of societal ableism and sexism leads to some very girl power rah-rah moments. But Barbara isn’t just someone who (depending on the writer) either overcomes or reclaims her disability; she’s also kind of a hot mess.
II. More Girlboss War Criminals
Throughout the comic’s 127 issues, Babs is consistently portrayed as both deeply caring and also manipulative, secretive, and frankly, a little unhinged.<3 Even after she and Dinah meet in person for the first time in issue 21, she keeps key mission and personal info from her friends, who she regularly refuses to admit are actually her friends; she emotionally manipulates both Dinah and, later, other members of the team; she goes to incredible lengths to maintain her independence. Her past history with Power Girl is hinted at so darkly that every time Power Girl appears on screen I hear “No Children” start to play.
Birds of Prey #17 (2000), Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, p. 15
I love this for Babs, in part because it positions her as Birds of Prey’s Batman, despite how often she butts heads with him, and in part because it creates a nightmare codependency between her and Dinah that is just catnip for my little brain.
Where Babs is a practical master manipulator, Dinah is idealistic, stubborn, hot-headed, and reckless; she believes (often correctly) that she can either sweet-talk or punch her way out of any situation. In the early issues of the comic, she flings herself into danger so much that she comes across as having some sort of death wish.
Unfortunately, as delightful as this dynamic is, because the first 46 issues of the run were written by Chuck “Got My Start Writing the Punisher” Dixon, this means that Babs is operating as a sort of one-woman CIA and manipulating Dinah into destabilizing foreign governments because that’s what she believes is right. (This is usually happening in vaguely Middle Eastern countries, of which DC has a whole stable of fake ones so they can continue the long comics tradition of using the Middle East as a setpiece without contending with any actual political realities. Sometimes they branch out and we’re in Africa or southeast Asia instead. That’s a separate essay but one I would like to read.)
This isn’t unique to Birds of Prey, of course, but it is particularly notable here because Babs is so powerful and operates so independently. There is no Justice League to reign her in. The only person to reign her in is Dinah, who achieves only middling success because Babs constantly keeps her in the dark. Doubly unfortunately, Chuck Dixon’s era of Birds of Prey, and not Gail Simone’s later and arguably more influential run on the title, is the one that gives me the most brainworms.
III. It’s Time to Talk About Chuck Dixon
Birds of Prey was created by Chuck Dixon, who after a series of successful one-shots went on to write the first 46 issues of the series. Dixon is one of the most famous writers in comics; his runs on Detective Comics and Robin in the 90s defined those characters for decades. He’s also a profoundly reactionary homophobe; his most recent comics star a hero who is literally reskinned QAnon. Normal man with normal views! Somehow, he ended up writing a comic where the two female leads come across as deeply, deeply in love with each other, to the point that other characters comment on it. Lampshading it does not make it seem less gay, Chuck! ( This is not the only time Dixon has done this; he has a habit of being so afraid to write sex in comics that all of his characters come across as gay. Tim Drake/Robin and Connor Hawke/Green Arrow’s characterization in Dixon’s arcs laid the foundation for them to later be canonized as bi and ace, respectively.)
Birds of Prey: Wolves #1 (1997), Chuck Dixon and Dick Giordano, p. 21
I don’t have a lot of interest in trying to psychoanalyze Dixon. I don’t really care about why he wrote Babs and Dinah the way he did; in general, I think trying to psychoanalyze comics writers is a great way to make yourself deeply unhappy. But it does make me feel vaguely hysterical that the moment when Babs and Dinah finally meet in person, where Dixon called out shippers in the comic script, ends up being one of the gayest panels I’ve ever seen.
Dixon’s script, which he’s so proud of that it’s still up on his website:
PANEL FOUR
Canary crouches and holds Oracle to her. Oracle is curled in a fetal position and dripping wet. The more drama you can squeeze from this the better. We're going for The Pieta as opposed to anything that HINTS of the sexual. This scene is apparently RIPE for misinterpretation (or OVERinterpretation.) by some of our readers.
BARBARA: (WEAK) not Oracle...
BARBARA: (WEAK) BARBARA.
BARBARA: (WEAK) CALL ME BARBARA
Birds of Prey #21 (2000), Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, p. 20
You know, the Pieta, when you’re both dripping wet, and your hand is on your platonic girlbestie’s boob.
IV. This 2 Is Yuri
This is the part where I would love to talk about the fan reaction to Dinah and Babs. There were clearly enough shippers that Dixon was both aware of and bothered by them (although I think Dixon would probably have been bothered if there was one person who thought his characters were gay, so that’s not a sure-fire barometer.) Unfortunately, Birds of Prey came out in the late 90s and early 2000s, and digital decay has not been kind to fan writing. The Wayback Machine’s coverage of forums tends to be spotty. (“Any fellow gay DC fans?” thread on the official DC forums from 2000 and “frokeback femmeslash thread” from 2006, you are my white whales. Also huge thank you to Max @zeiat for digging up some unofficial fan forums, especially Words of Prey, which were a treat to dig through even if I couldn’t see most of the posts!)
The letters pages, where DC published fan letters and which often serve as a barometer for fan response, aren't collected in the trade paperbacks that (unless I want to spend $300 on a full issue collection on eBay) are all I have access to. (The inaccessibility of fan letters is deeply depressing to me, and I think it’s unfortunate to erase that for a lot of comics history comics was intentionally positioned as a dialogue between fans and creators. There are a lot of memes about the fan poll that led to Jason Todd, the second Robin,’s in-comics death, and it is very funny, but it was part of a larger medium-wide understanding that fans did have some input into the narrative.)
I can find fans looking back on Birds of Prey, but for contemporary reactions I’m left to fill in the gaps by reading forum post titles and clicking around defunct Geocities archives. This digital absence is oddly ironic for a comic that relies so much on the internet for its plot. But it also makes sense. Queer readings, like queer fans, vanish from the archives. We find our own spaces, and those spaces are spottily recorded; when we do make it into the record, as in the case of an extremely touching letter in Green Arrow (1988), it has to be sought out and resurfaced.
But comics themselves aren’t intended to last. As objects, individual issues are fragile, usually printed on cheap paper and referred to as “floppies.” The way they make us feel isn’t meant to last either; the industry is notorious for the way it churns through storylines, characters, and creators. That was last month’s issue. On to the next! And yet comics fans are often as obsessive as we are opinionated, cataloging every appearance of characters across 70 years of comics history, writing exhaustive wiki pages for one-off villains, reading a thousand pages of comics for a character who appears in maybe 30% of that runtime. (You can read the entirety of Knightfall for Tim Drake’s Robin, but you shouldn’t.)
So where do I go from here? I’m not meant to be fixated on iterations of these characters that are nearly 30 years old. Since Birds of Prey volume 1 ended, the DC Universe has been rebooted twice. Barbara got magically healed and is back to being Batgirl, an identity DC seems unwilling to let her transcend. (There’s been a ton of academic and fan writing on Barbara’s disability and its retcons. I’d recommend in particular José Alaniz’s “Standing Orders: Oracle, Disability, and Retconning” in Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narrative, Chris Foss, Jonathan Gray, and Zach Whalen, eds., as well as Marit Hanson’s “Mistress of Cyberspace: Oracle, Disability, and the Cyborg” in Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability, Scott Smith and José Alaniz, eds., and Carolyn Cocca’s “Re-booting Barbara Gordon: Oracle, Batgirl, and Feminist Disability Theories” in ImageTexT 7(4).) In current comics she’s written much younger and regularly relegated to being Dick Grayson’s supportive girlfriend— a far cry from the secretive, deeply jaded woman who forges her own identity because she has to. Dinah has fared a little better— DC is at least willing to let her be an adult.
There is a new Birds of Prey series coming out; the reviews are glowing, both from comics press and fans whose opinions I trust. But I haven’t read it yet. I will probably enjoy it when I do, but part of me will still be waiting for Babs to wheel onscreen.
That’s the lot of a comics fan: you wind up longing for deeply flawed versions of characters who haven’t existed in 15 years. And if longing for the impossible is yuri, well!
Why magical, fictional solutions to real, incurable disabilities and chronic illnesses suck.
Listen, it’s not that I can’t possibly comprehend a person wanting a cure for their disability or illness. If someone came up to me tomorrow and offered me a cure for RA, hell yes I would take it. Because having a chronic illness is fucking difficult, and expensive, and painful, and frustrating, and it never ends.
So it’s not that I can’t see why a disabled or ill character would jump at the chance for a “fix.”
But here’s the thing: no one is walking up to me tomorrow with a cure for my illness. Chances are, that’s just never going to happen. I’m going to keep right on being chronically ill, most likely until the day I die.
So the fact that 90% of the time, disabled and chronically ill characters in film and television have to be magically cured before their stories can begin is incredibly depressing. It’s not just that I lose the opportunity to relate to someone who deals with something I also deal with.
It’s also the repeated implication that that there are no roles for disabled/chronically ill characters, no adventures for them to have. That they are not interesting, not useful, not able to participate in the narrative. That they are not hero material, or even sidekick material, until they’ve been “fixed.”
A lot of us will never be “fixed.” We will never not be chronically ill and/or disabled. So where does that leave us?
If DC was at all smart they would have spent the last two decades marketing Barbara Gordon as THE icon for women in stem and computer science.
They introduced a powerful, cool super heroine whose whole thing is being super smart and being (one of) the best programmer(s) in the entire DC universe in the 80s and they didn't think to capitalise on this?? In a time where there is a large push to get more girls into coding and STEM and many portrayals of the tech industry barely include women (much less as awesome, confident leaders)??
stormborns
kaledo-art
prguitarman
baratheonpilled
izzy806
areudirty
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
