James Nicoll Reviews

Sarah Kuhn’s 2020 Shadow of the Batgirl is a superhero graphic novel. Comic art is by Nicole Goux.

David Cain had a simple dream: raise his daughter Cassandra as an assassin, in an environment bereft of speech and human contact (save for martial arts). Result: a girl who can read body language but not print, a girl with prodigious skills at killing whose rudimentary speech skills will protect her from any suggestion what she is doing is wrong.

All it takes to ruin this perfect plan is a single word.

A doomed businessman pleads: ​“daughter.” This is one of the few words that Cassandra knows. But it’s in a new context. It hints at something that she’s never experienced: parental affection. The experience is disturbing enough that Cassandra goes into hiding rather than return to David.

Gotham City is rife with criminals and bereft of any social services aimed at street kids. There are, however, a few kindly people who will feed runaways. Diner owner Jackie is one such. Although wary of strangers, Cassandra trusts Jackie.

The Gotham Public Library offers both refuge and a school of sorts. During open hours, Cassandra is just another kid. When the library is closed, nobody is aware that Cassandra is lurking inside. With the assistance of librarian Barbara Gordon, Cassandra expands her language and reading skills, as well as her people skills (aside from reading body language before killing people). Cassandra also leans something of Gotham’s rich history of superheroes and supervillains.

All of which leads Cassandra to some uncomfortable conclusions. David is clearly a villain. Cassandra was a villain. Now she is not sure what she is. Is it possible for a killer to make amends?

There’s one possible route for redemption. The now-vanished Batgirl fought people like David Cain. Perhaps Cassandra can take up Batgirl’s mantle and challenge her father.

~oOo~

Picking at the worldbuilding: Cassandra learns conventional language faster and more comprehensively than she should. This is the DC Comics universe, though, and there’s really no justifiable reason to complain that someone’s language acquisition is unduly successful in a universe where poor lab technique confers superspeed, people can learn to fly by being raised by condors, and someone can melt steel with a hard stare.

Picking at the art: some of it is nicely executed, but other panels seem awkwardly composed. The way Cassandra is drawn doesn’t allow me to guess just how old Cassandra is, aside from ​“young.” In the standard DC Comics timeline, Cassandra is eight when she begins to suspect murdering people is wrong. Well, we knew David Cain was a baddie. The ad copy for the graphic novel suggests that Cassandra is a teen, as does her awkward romance with a fellow library patron. [1]

David Cain is undeniably a bad dad. What about Cassandra’s new protectors, Jackie and Barbara Gordon? Even though they care for the traumatized Cassandra, it’s clear they don’t actually object to kids being trained to be living weapons. They just want to point those living weapons at socially responsible targets.

In Barbara’s defense, she is the former Batgirl, so crime punching is a perfectly normal response to trauma for her. Also, Gotham City is a fucked-up place where more often than not public institutions are run by corrupt, incompetent, and/or malevolent people, a number of whom are or will become supervillains. Individual solutions to systemic problems don’t work all that well (ensuring that crime continues and supplies new comic plots), but they are only ones available.

To all of the characters, Gotham is normal so none of this is as horrifying as it might be to any reader who thinks a little more deeply about the situation. On a surface level, the graphic novel is a lot more upbeat and life affirming than one might expect from a story about a child/teen assassin who learns to become a child/teen vigilante.

Shadow of the Batgirl is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: There is a Morton’s Fork issue with Cassandra’s age. Either she’s eight and Barbara and Jackie are content to let a grade-school age kid run off to confront assassins, OR she’s a teen and she spent even more years innocently killing whoever David chose.