DC 1ST #1: BATGIRL/THE JOKER

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Tuesday, June 11, 2002

The problem that many modern DC titles telling a story in flashback have is that they almost always run into the post-CRISIS continuity snarl. It's incredibly difficult to set a story in the Silver Age, for instance, when according to modern timetables the Silver Age started sometime in the late '80s or early '90s. The SILVER AGE debacle a few summers ago almost proved that doing such a thing was impossible. Luckily, DC FIRST's inaugural issue proves just the opposite - it can be done, and it can be done fairly well.

After Cassandra stops a group of Reydoviki freelancers from robbing a rock concert, she's angry that she couldn't prevent more death. This self-recrimination leads Barbara to explain to her that she can't control all the variables, using Barbara's first experience fighting the completely unpredictable Joker as an example. Her lesson has an equally unpredictable effect, however, as Cassandra goes to bust the Joker out of Arkham so that she can prove herself against him just as Barbara did.

Steven Grant does an excellent job of avoiding those aforementioned continuity pitfalls, mainly by sticking to the story of Batgirl's first encounter with Joker told in the 1997 BATMAN: BATGIRL one-shot and avoiding anything that might give an indication of when exactly it happened. The only indicators of "then" and "now" in this book are the shifts in artwork - about which I'll talk more in a moment - and even those give no specific clues that might cause a continuity-obsessed vulture to sweep and tear apart the carcass of the story. (It's a very nice touch, though, that our first glimpse of the Barbara Gordon Batgirl is her defeat of Killer Moth, her first case in DETECTIVE COMICS #359 in 1967. I wonder if that's meant to be 1987 now, though? Ah, forget it.) Grant also makes good use of the often-misused Joker here, making it clear why the Clown from Hell is such a formidable adversary. The conversation between Batman and Barbara about why Cassandra will have such a difficult time fighting him gives us some new insight into a character about whom we thought we'd never see anything new. Finally, Grant handles the relationship between Barbara and Cassandra in a believable fashion, making it clear that Cassandra listens to Barbara because she thinks Babs is the best Batgirl there was (and, of course, she's right). It's an element of their relationship that doesn't often come up in the regular BATGIRL title - perhaps Terry Moore will remedy that when he takes over scripting chores on the book.

Perhaps he should draw it, too, if his work here is anything to go by. The biggest drawback to this book is the incredible disparity between the "now" sections, featuring artwork by Bill Sienkiewicz and Jimmy Palmiotti, and the "then" section drawn by Moore. Moore captures the style of the Silver Age flawlessly, blending into it a modern sensibility that marries the current bloodthirsty version of the Joker with his fairly innocuous late sixties incarnation. It's almost enough to make you believe that the Joker was always like this, even though we know that the era that produced Batgirl and the era that produced this Joker are two different worlds. Sadly, the "now" sections, with Sienkiewicz's idiosyncratic artwork, are that much harder to deal with when juxtaposed with Moore's clean lines and Sheri Van Valkenburg's choice of Day-Glo colors for that section. Certainly an underlying theme of Barbara's story is that times have changed even if the Joker has not, a theme brought out in the artwork itself, but it doesn't make the contrast any easier. On the plus side, Sienkiewicz's interpretation of the Joker truly captures the horror of the character - but it's still damned hard to figure out what's going on in parts of the action sequence. Appropriately enough, only Frank Miller's artwork is harder on the eyes than this, and he's inexplicably lauded for his work on the Batman, too. Ick.

Apart from the need for eye drops after the book's done, though, this is a well-written exploration of the first encounter between two of DC's best-known characters. With the exception of the Superman-Lobo pairing, the rest of the DC FIRST titles look to be just as interesting as this. We can only hope they're better drawn, though.


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