Tangled Up In Blue

Time goes by. Bruce trains Steph, but he tells her she's on "probation" and that means 1) she doesn't learn any of the big secrets and 2) if she disobeys any order, no matter how small, she's fired, no second chances. For the record, none of the boys were ever on probation (Jason and Tim had long training periods but that's the opposite; they were protected until they were ready, not thrown into the field without full support), they all knew Bruce's identity, and they disobeyed his orders all the time. Tim did it on his very first mission.

Just...putting this here.

In Robin #128, Batman is fighting a villain while Steph waits in the Batplane. Fearing for Bruce's life, Steph disobeys his orders to stay in the plane and tries to rescue him, only to be taken hostage by the villain, who escapes. Bruce fires her, and tells her she's not allowed to be Spoiler anymore, either. In a particularly cruel move, he specifies that all the codes will be changed in the Batcave to keep her out, even though in the previous issue, Tim noted to Steph that Bruce didn't change anything to keep him out.

Just to make the point again: yes, Steph broke the rules. However, none of the boys before her, nor Damian after her, were ever penalized the way she was and for such a minor infraction. Disobeying orders and getting taken hostage are like the second and third most important Robin responsibilities, after puns.

Steph is devastated, and this is what leads to War Games, which was a crossover event across the entire Batman line that ran from October 2004 to January 2005. It began with Batman: The 12 Cent Adventure, in which a bunch of crime bosses all show up for a meeting that none of them called, get antsy, and start shooting. The ensuing deaths cause a gang war across Gotham. Eventually Steph confesses to Catwoman that she called the meeting. She was trying to play out a war game she'd found on the Batcomputer to show Batman he was wrong to fire her, but the meet went wrong. A guy named Matches Malone was to show up and become the new crime boss of Gotham, but he never turned up.

Of course, the reader and Selina know what Steph doesn't: Matches Malone is Batman. If Batman doesn't know about this meeting, he can't control the situation. But if Batman had treated Steph like a true Robin instead of putting her on "probation," Steph would have known he was Matches Malone, and none of this would have happened.

I'll say it a third time: Steph fucked up, yes. But Steph was sixteen. What was Bruce's excuse?

Anyway. While running around Gotham desperately trying to fix her mistake, Steph encounters Black Mask, who manages to knock her out. He then chains her up and tortures her with a power drill in order to get her to spill Batman's plans (which she does not do). Here's how this sixteen-year-old is drawn when she's being tortured (in Robin #131):

Thank god we can see her tits and her ass at the same time, that was really important to the narrative.

Here's how she's drawn the next time we see her, in Catwoman #35:

Gotta make this dying teenager look hot or what's the point, amirite?

Steph manages to fight her way free, but Black Mask gets the upper hand again after she refuses to kill him. He shoots her, then lets her go to send Batman a message. She makes it to Bruce, who takes her to Leslie Thompkins's clinic, where she dies:

THESE PANELS ARE IMPORTANT. (Batman #633.)

Side note: Bruce is with Tim when Leslie calls him to tell him Steph is actively dying, and consciously decides not to tell Tim and let him and Steph say goodbye.

Side note #2: Steph's death was always planned as part of War Games. Dylan Horrocks, who was writing Batgirl at the time, and Devin Grayson, who was writing Nightwing, both vocally opposed this but were overruled, which is why this aspect of the plot barely plays out in their books.

Anyway. What I want to talk about is the aftermath of Steph's death. Characters dying was commonplace back then (way more common than it is now, actually), and female characters was extremely commonplace - this was a time when the term "fridging" was becoming more commonplace but wasn't yet seen as something to avoid. But readers noted a couple of things about Steph's death in particular:

The art was really inappropriately sexual. Why was Steph's tortured body being drawn to titillate?

Steph didn't have a memorial case in the Batcave. Why was that? Jason Todd, the only other dead Robin, had a case. In fact, Jason retained his case even after he came back to life (his first appearance as Red Hood is in Batman #635, two months after Steph's death). Why didn't Steph get a case?

I used the word "readers" specifically up there because it wasn't just Steph fans. I remember hearing from a number of people at the time who were like "Yeah I didn't actually like Steph, I thought she was annoying. But what happened to her was fucked up."

And these readers started asking DC where Steph's case was. Social media wasn't really a thing yet, but they asked in fan letters, at conventions, on LiveJournal and blogs, on forums.

"She wasn't really Robin," DC said, over and over again (like when Dan DiDio said it at Wizard World LA in 2007).

"But Batman said she was Robin. Right there on the page."

"Well, she wasn't."

"Why not? What makes her different from the other Robins? What makes her different from Jason?"

"...no comment."

(Hint: IT WAS THE GIRL COOTIES.)

At another con, Bill Willingham, who was writing at the time, said he wanted to "take a gun to all those girls who kept asking about a memorial case for Spoiler." I'm paraphrasing because the source is some LiveJournal page buried deep in the bowels of the internet, but I'm confident in the "take a gun to those girls"* part of the phrase because it burned itself onto my brain at the time.

*It was of course not only girls and women, not that he cared.

To be very clear: this man thought it was appropriate to respond to a group of mostly female readers pushing back against the comic book industry's relentless depictions of violence against women by...describing his fantasies of enacting violence against women. Out loud. With his mouth. To an audience. While acting in a professional capacity.

I also want to note something that never occurred to me at the time, but we (yes, I was there, Gandalf; this is in fact my origin story) weren't even asking for them to bring Steph back. Like, the thought never crossed my mind. Compare to HEAT (Hal's Emerald Attack Team), a group of fans who waged a harassment campaign after Emerald Twilight demanding Hal's reinstatement to the Corps and the firing of the writer who wrote the comic. We were only asking for DC to acknowledge that Steph had been Robin, and it infuriated them.

As a last point on Steph's death: I mentioned this in another post, but when Steph died in 2004, she had zero official action figures despite having been a recurring character in comics for 12 years. She wouldn't get her first action figure until 2010. But in 2005, DC started selling this:

Yes, he is holding the power drill.

Anyway. Fans kept the pressure up for four years, and eventually DC got so fed up that they just...fucking brought Steph back. I don't know how much of the reason was so that they wouldn't have to give her a memorial case and thus "let the girls win," but I bet it was more than 50%.

This is so fucking funny to me. What a bitchy little line to give Bruce. (Robin #174.)

See, immediately after Steph's death, Leslie Thompkins told Bruce she could have saved Steph but deliberately let her die to teach Bruce a lesson about letting kids fight in his war, which was a shocking bit of character assassination for Leslie and also...lol. As if Bruce cares about Steph enough to change his behavior.

Now in 2008 the official retcon was that while Steph was out of it and barely clinging to life, Leslie snuck her out of the country to Africa (where in Africa? don't worry about it, it's all the same, right?) to recover, and just told Bruce she was dead for the same ineffective lesson-teaching from before.

So Steph was never really dead! And Bruce knew that despite being by her side when she flatlined! And then he lied to Tim and said she was dead for...enrichment? Tim needs a little unnecessary grief in his enclosure sometimes. (Lol j/k Tim was nothing but grief and several nervous breakdowns in a trenchcoat at the time.) And Tim's just...basically fine with it???

DC sort of didn't really know what to do with Steph for a couple of years, so they put her through some really bad writing, and then since they had conveniently also put Cassandra Cain through several years of really bad writing, they had Cass quit being Batgirl and vanish out of comics for a bit, and Steph took over. What was done to Cass could be a post in its own right and the way she vacated the Batgirl role is awful, but it did give us the beautiful, golden, shining joy that is Batgirl (2009):

STEPHBATS YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE MY WHOLE HEART.

This comic was beloved. It wasn't a huge seller (though comfortably above the usual cancellation threshold), but everyone I know who has read it loved it, even people who had never liked Steph before. This is the book that changed her from "cautionary tale about comic book sexism" to "fan favorite funny Batgirl."

And then the New 52 happened. And the second battle of the Steph Wars began.

If you weren't reading comics in 2011, you may not know that aside from all the controversy any major reboot engenders, the New 52 was very specifically controversial because of how women were treated by the reboot. Prior to the reboot, 12% of the creators working on DC's comics were women, which is just...an incredibly embarrassing number to begin with.

After the reboot, 1% of their creators were women. There were two (2) women in the initial New 52 lineup: Gail Simone and Amy Reeder. They were both fired the following year.

I am really struggling to communicate how badly women were treated around the New 52: creators, fans, characters. It was so bad that the Wikipedia page for the New 52 has multiple subsections about it. But I want to call out one part in particular:

This led to a tense interaction between fans and DC Comics co-publisher Dan DiDio at the 2011 San Diego Comic Con, where DiDio was asked by a fan about the drop in female creators from 12% to 1%. DiDio responded by saying, "What do those numbers mean to you? What do they mean to you? Who should we be hiring? Tell me right now. Who should we be hiring right now? Tell me."

What Wikipedia doesn't mention, but was widely reported all over the internet in 2011, was that the fan who held DC's feet to the fire at multiple panels over their obvious misogyny was dressed as Stephanie Brown.

Just like she had in 2004/2005, Steph became a symbol of the comic book industry's mistreatment of women - and a symbol that "all those girls" Bill Willingham had fantasized about shooting would not go away.

But what about Steph herself? Well, the New 52 reboot was meant to be starting over from scratch. Batman had only been around for five years, so obviously he couldn't have gone through five Robins in all that time!

...No, he'd gone through four. Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian were all still around. But Cass and Steph were gone and Babs was still Batgirl, erasing both her status as DC's most iconic disabled character and her legacy as the first of and mentor to all the other Batgirls. Legacy only matters when it's boys, you see. And following the rules only matters when it's for the purposes of keeping girls out.

And the erasure of Steph in particular was very clearly targeted. In 2012, Bryan Q. Miller (who had written Steph's Batgirl series) tried to include Steph as a future Nightwing in his Smallville Season 11 comic, set in the Smallville universe and not the main DCU. He was told to replace her. Not with anyone in particular, just get her out of there.

Later that year, DC launched the adorable digital first Li'l Gotham series by Dustin Nguyen (who had also worked on Steph's Batgirl series) and Derek Fridolfs. The Halloween issue included a little blonde girl trick or treating while wearing what was clearly Steph's Batgirl costume, a cute little Easter egg for fans. That is, until later editions, when the girl's hair was recolored to black. Again, this is a comic that was not set in the main DC universe, and the little girl wasn't even Steph, just a random kid. (Dustin managed to sneak a reference into a later issue in 2013, and by 2014 things had chilled out enough that Steph got a proper cameo.)

Scott Snyder asked to use Steph and Cass and was told no. Same with Gail Simone. Word on the street was that DC had declared them both "toxic."

Was it DiDio who hated Steph? I have no idea. But it was certainly DiDio who publicly berated a cosplayer in a Steph costume when she asked why there were so few women in the reboot that would become his ultimate legacy. (Well, his other ultimate legacy besides shielding and repeatedly promoting noted sexual harasser Eddie Berganza for 15 years.)

Steph finally, finally returned in 2014, not just to Li'l Gotham but to the main DCU with Batman #28. It makes me very happy that Dustin Nguyen got to be the one to draw her:

(Cass would have to wait nearly two more years, until Batman & Robin Eternal in late 2015 - further proof, as if any was needed, that however bad white women have it, women of color get treated even worse.)

As the comic above would indicate, Steph was reintroduced as being Spoiler and only Spoiler - still no girl Robins allowed. The 2016 Rebirth reboot introduced the idea that she had been both Robin and Batgirl...but in a different timeline. Finally, 2021's Infinite Frontier (after DiDio's departure from DC) restored both Steph and Cass's full history with all of their previous roles to continuity, further reinforced in 2022 by both the Robins miniseries and the Batgirls ongoing, both of which co-starred Steph.

Is the comic book industry still sexist? Yes, obviously. Do I wish DC had a better idea for what to do with Steph these days than occasionally pop up in the background of a Bat comic to make a joke? Yes, obviously. But when I look back at how openly misogynistic the industry was in the 2000s and early 2010s, how naked the vitriol against female characters and readers was, I'm always shocked anew by how much has changed, and how much we used to put up with.

We've come a long way, and some of that is thanks to Stephanie Brown becoming a symbol for women who would not lay down and die, would not be erased, would not shut the fuck up. As Bruce himself put it waaaay up at the top of this post:

"I did everything I could to make her quit. She wouldn't. She stood up to me, right down the line--defied me."

So in honor of Steph, the get-back-up-again-est girl in comics, please take two things away from this post:

Remember what they did.

Never, ever shut up.