Summary: <br> After defeating the arch-villain Lady Shiva, Batgirl (Cassandra Cain) faces her biggest challenge-actually having her own adventures in the midst of numerous crossovers.<br> Affiliate link included.<br> Transcript below: <br> <br> Batgirl takes an Issue off to recover from death, then she gets involved in a lot of crossover events, and finally she gets to battle Batgirl? We’ll talk all about it as we review Batgirl Volume Three: Point Blank, straight ahead.<br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.<br> OK, probably the first thing I should make clear is we’re not actually talking about the Barbara Gordon Batgirl in today’s program…talking about the Cassandra Cain Batgirl who was active from 2000 – 2006 and then again in 2008 for a mini series, but she was actually the first Batgirl to have her own title. Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl previously only had strips in other magazines such as Detective Comics or Batman Family. <br> Cassandra Cain was the daughter of David Cain as well as anti-heroine Lady Shiva. She was raised to be a killing machine by her father, and is traumatized by the memory of the one man she remembers killing when she was eight years old. The way he taught her and raised her was that she did not actually learn any language – she learned to read body movements which made her very effective as a fighter. However, she did learn to talk in the early Issues of Batgirl which caused her fighting skills to falter. She then made a deal with her mother, Lady Shiva; Lady Shiva promising to restore her powers and abilities as a super martial artist in exchange for fighting her a year later in a fight to the death. And Cassandra agreed to this, and in the battle to the death with Lady Shiva, Lady Shiva killed her but then brought her back to life and then Cassandra ends up defeating her. And I guess you would have to call that a draw overall, and that’s where Point Blank comes in. It collects Issues Twenty-Six through Thirty-Seven, and follows immediately on the end of her battle with her mother.<br> Issue Twenty-Six actually finds her out of action because she is recovering from being temporarily dead and is out like a light, but Barbara Gordon who is Oracle at this point sends Stephanie Brown who is known as Spoiler out to investigate a bit of an aftermath of that fight. And Stephanie goes out and does the investigation shadowed by her imagination’s take on Batgirl. So, Batgirl is in this as a phantasm of Stephanie’s imagination. This Issue is a bit weird, it’s OK, it’s really weird you have a Batgirl-like episode where she appears just like that as well as for a couple brief moments as she is recovering. After that we get into in Issue Twenty-Seven, the book does something and this is probably one of the chief challenges with this book, is that in the Batman Family books there was an event going on – actually a couple of events that came right one after another. One is collected in Bruce Wayne: Murderer? and then also Bruce Wayne:Fugitive, about Bruce Wayne being framed for murder and the Bat Family trying to work this out. And there are three Issues of Batgirl in this book that actually tie into those two events. I personally am not a big fan of including event-tying comics in the book because they tend to take you out of the story and out of the character’s world, and I would just rather you’ve put those in the Events Book. But they didn’t in this case and it turned out not to be so bad, they are at least mixed. <br> Issue Twenty-Seven ties in and it has her, when learning about Bruce Wayne being suspected of murder, she does something nobody else does and digs up the body of the victim and makes a discovery when she examines the corpse. And it shows her kind of unique take as well as some of her g...
