November 1987. The de-aging of Batgirl begins, courtesy of Barbara Randall and Rick Leonardi, who attempt to reconcile Babs' pre-Crisis history with a condensed timeline and her omission from Miller & Mazzucchelli's "Batman: Year One" (which shows Jim and Barbara Gordon Sr. having their first child, James Jr., during the first year of Batman's career). Rather than Jim Gordon's natural daughter, this story establishes Babs as his niece, whom he adopts after the death of his brother Roger. Randall even tries to rationalize Babs' term in Congress, claiming that she could still serve despite being too young because of a fictitious law called the Knight Dependents Act of 1946 (probably a nod to Sen. Henry Knight, father of the Golden Age Phantom Girl) — cute, but clearly unconstitutional, and never mentioned again. It's a valiant effort, and really a decent Batgirl story despite the contrivances, but it's hard not to feel the whole mess could have been avoided with a little editorial clarity from Bat-book editor Denny O'Neil. The real problem was that almost nobody at DC other than Randall (who also did the okay BATGIRL SPECIAL around this time) had any further use for Batgirl or Barbara Gordon, who, if not for John Ostrander and Kim Yale's creation of Oracle in SUICIDE SQUAD, would almost certainly been written out altogether.
The Dr. Mid-Nite origin, meanwhile, is a straightforward retelling of the story in ALL-AMERICAN COMICS #25 (April 1941), explaining how being nearly blinded by a vengeful gangster gave physician Charles McNider the ability to see in the dark. I always got the feeling McNider was gay (likewise Pieter Cross, the third Dr. Mid-Nite), and kept wrongly thinking DC had eventually confirmed that at some point. I did a double-take when the version of Charles McNider in the STARGIRL TV show turned out to have a wife.
