ghostflower enjoyer

before this she was nameless and kept getting referred to only as "batgirl"

In Batgirl: Secret files and origins, David Cain's character bio states that he named her Cassandra. But we know he'd never spoken to her before No man's land and even there he never calls her by name... So how did Cass learn her own name?

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

i miss this batman from detective comics #457

i miss batman from legends of the dark knight #79

i miss batman from legends of the dark knight #67

i miss this highly specific sequence of panels from batman: black and white that is genuinely one of the best pages about the character anyone ever fucking wrote and i'm so fucking pissed no one ever doubled back to this shit

I MISS THIS STUPID CUTE SHIT FROM DETECTIVE COMICS #474

and robin's the one who discovers that, and he's like, look, dude... you're this universe's last shot at a hero. if you stop your parents from dying, you'll never be batman, and there will never be a hero here, and in the narrow worldview of cape comics this is a Big Fuckin Deal, because then who is going to save all of those innocents? and naturally batman is like dude, fuck you, i'm gonna do it anyway. and then he goes and he saves his fuckin parents. but then you get:

he just becomes batman fucking anyway. because the whole fantasy of batman is that it is never wrong to save someone's life - even at the deep personal cost, this is fundamentally worth doing. batman's not bruce's Darker Side or this twisted alter ego that is a monument to his trauma and pain - it is the precise and exact opposite. it is the weaponization of something that terrified and scarred you (bats, violence, the night) and using it to help people, therefore this is the greatest batman story every fucking told, bar none.

When Steph was brought back, DC decided to start wrapping up ALL their Bat-Family comics at the time (Nightwing, Robin, and Birds of Prey went bye bye and Batman & the Outsiders was getting relaunched). Cass/Steph did meet in Batman & the Outsiders #13 but writer Frank Tieri was basically closing up shop on all of exiting writer Chuck Dixon’s subplots. 

The closest we “got” was Robin writer (at that time) Fabian Nicieza (who was doing the same thing as Tieri, but Dixon’s subplots for Robin) said if he had gotten more issues of the series he would’ve put it in. 

At this point in time, Dan DiDio already wanted Cass gone as Batgirl and was already prepping Babs back into the role (as teased in the final issues of BoP and Nightwing. It didn’t happen as Gail Simone and others made DiDio change his mind-- until a few years later when no one could change it). 

So Cass was an afterthought. Just there to churn out what would be spun out from the “Battle for the Cowl” event and the new status quo for Bat Family comics. 

DiDio wanted Cass gone as Batgirl and later Batgirl Vol. 3 writer Bryan Q. Miller was like, “But this is bad. We should have Cass still around.” 

DiDio: “Then your book wouldn’t exist.”

And he had to roll with the outrageous demands. Literally, Batgirl Vol. 3 is a miracle it turned out like it did.  That’s the full story. 

If there’s any solace, this bugged me a lot too. So much so I turned to artist  Eileen Widjaja and we worked on a short fan comic called “Heroes Shed No Tears” where it filled in these gaps. Giving Cass a better “exit” story as Batgirl then DC did themselves while also giving the Cass/Steph reunion that NEEDED to happen.

doesn't help that all the links to servers and such seem to be broken. screaming into the void that is tumblr will have to do for now

but then i started thinking about how their love has bloomed from that little crush and intensified, and settled itself deep within them throughout this year and a half of of separation, but truthfully, it’s still a very fresh and “immature” love. because they only knew each other for a couple of days, it’s a love based on that instant connection they can’t explain, and that spark of unspoken understanding they both attribute to being spiders. in short, they’ve spent over a year falling for the small piece of each other that they got to witness during the collider event, and then falling for an extrapolated / idealized version of that person.

but does that mean their love is weak? or in any way false? NO. the foundation is true. and what it means is that guys… guys!! there’s so much more to come. they’re going to learn so much of each other and of their own feelings. this love will grow, and develop, and transform into something much deeper and just… so different. from the butterflies and that little squeezing of the heart, into an all-encompassing feeling of longing and belonging and togetherness. they are going to have the time to grow - into their relationship and most importantly into themselves as people - and they will discover so many new aspects of what they have that the word love will begin to fall short.

they will learn things about each other that they’re not even aware of themselves yet. they will see and experience and feel and survive so many situations and just so many different seasons of life. and they will love each other because of them, and despite them, and through them.