So you I hear that some of you like Cassandra Cain /co/! Then here's my gift for you this weekend. The story that thrust her into limbo because it was just that awful.
Previous Threads:
Day 1:
>>94011836 → (Marville)
>>94015371 → (Trouble)
>>94013505 → (The Unfunnies)
>>94017323 → (Nemesis)
>>94014562 → (Joker's Daughter)
>>94017305 → (Amazons Attack)
>>94015704 → (Change)
>>94024786 → (The Surface)
>>94017795 → (Earth-2: World's End)
>>94016653 → (Countdown pt. 1)
>>94021468 → (Countdown pt. 2)
>>94026850 → (Countdown pt. 3)
Day 2:
>>94036625 → (The Rape of Ms. Marvel)
>>94033336 → (Jade Street Protection Service)
>>94037347 → (Liberty for All)
>>94037063 → (Champions)
>>94036764 → (Nightwing: Brothers in Blood)
>>94035400 → (The Deal/God’s End)
>>94038108 → (America)
>>94041770 → (Marvel Mangaverse: Ghost Riders)
>>94044426 → (Rich Johnston's The Avengefuls)
>>94047152 → (Sonichu)
>>94043883 → (Cry for Justice)
>>94048652 (Phoenix: Legacy of Fire)
>>94051195 (Countdown pt. 4)
Why are there so many Storytimes of Pain?
>>94051806
Tradition during every SDCC.
>>94051806
It's a SDCC /co/ tradition
No meta commentary here.
>>94051730
Also:
>>94050809 (Chaos)
>>94050401 (In Real Life)
>>94051894
Thank you based anon for putting in the ones I missed.
Fuck this shit, she was better than "muh shot by Alan meme" and "I love me some cliches xDDDD" Stephanie. Why did it have to end like this?
>>94051894
Forgot my current storytime too >>94048655 (Rise of Arsenal)
>>94051931
Because A.) Didio himself said at the time nobody wanted her more than Mr. Beechen.he was lying of course.and B.) The plans for Babs being back as Batgirl were in place after this mini bombed.But a last minute protest by Gail Simone made them change their mind for the new Batgirl to be Stephanie..
>>94051931
What a fucking crybaby
>>94052039
go back to your shitty blog Simone
>>94052033
and then they saddled Simone with Babs for the N52
>>94052124
Only because she realized she had to do it herself. If they put on anyone else but her it would been far worse.
I was going to leave a summary, but when the comic does it for you. Why bother?
So much text.
> dat March Poisony Ivy.
HNNNNG!
DUN DUN DUUUUUNNN!!!
Wait a second...
Um okay Babs.
Why hello there um-- that guy.
>no one's bumping
We deserve to see Cass' suffering.
>>94051730
let me breathe man!
so many shitty comics to read
Right...
>>94052771
There is no mercy during this weekend. Just pain. HORRIBLE HORRIBLE PAIN.
What a twist!
They really have only themselves to blame for this.
Aaaah those costumes! Why do my eyes hurt from looking at them?!
> Shiva and Bruce together.
Damn that's some weird fanwank you got there Cass.
> Dat Rose.
there are 13 story time of pains up
>>94051730
Adam Beechen should be in prison for crimes against comics.
>>94053055
And it's Friday.
> Ki, k,i ki; ma, ma, ma
GIRL POWAH!!
....
Sorry.
>>94052110
>Batman believing in psuedo-science like the polygraph
I mean, I know what story this is, written by who it is, but
Wait.. they were just walking in that direction. How did they not see them?!!
Dick gonna dick.
So extreme.
Damn Dick.
Oh great she's a female Zsasz.
Wait didn't Rose not see this? She's got-- nevermind. Remember who's writing this.
>>94053421
Wew
Geez Marque!
>>94053464
Who da fuck is the girl with the mask? Steph?
This what should have happened to the Batfamily:
-Bruce retires and Dick become Batman
-Cass Cain becomes Nightwing
-Tim remain as Robin
-Babs still crippled and as Oracle
-Steph becomes Batgirl after training with Cass.
-Damian and Batwoman never happened.
Dayum Slade!
>>94053715
That's Misfit. Gail created her at the end of her first run. McKeever and Bedard kept her around until the series ended (which just a bit right after this mini ended).
She later showed up in Gail's second run of BoP then disappeared when the New 52 happened. Then she showed up again in the final issue of Gail's Batgirl issue on the ongoing which was a mini BoP reunion arc.
>>94053715
Misfit, a Simone OC who was rarely used by anyone other than her. She can teleport, but can't bring organic matter with her.
Fun fact about Misfit! She originally went around saying she was Batgirl. Then Barbara found out. Had the Birds get her. Brought her to where she was at. Then began showing Misfit the autopsy pictures of Stephanie Brown to scare the living shit out of her.She stopped being Batgirl and adopted the Misfit guise.
Okay, Marque will you stop being this extreme! This isn't the 90s!
Huh... so that's a thing.
They should be dead. Like literally everyone should be dead.
Um they should all be dead right?
So extreme.
Well, that's um convenient.
> why am I gawking so much at this first panel?
> click. click.
> continues to stare.
> It was Dr. Manhatten ALL ALONG!
Well hello there um-- love interest we'll never meet again.
What the hell is that in the second to last panel? Cause that sure is not a kiss.
Um okay.
No I did not skip a page.
Dick I think you're being a little bit more than paranoid.
>>94054337
Bad pacing bump
Bye Dick!Dick's dickness continued onto the final arc of Batman & the Outsiders that had Cassandra in it.
That's a BIG Bat plane.
> Tim who originally was the dick throughout her villain turn.
> Now is the voice of reason.
To be fair this was the beginning of them getting close. Not that close! She's like his stepsister!
Okay I laughed at that one joke in the first panel. You got me comic.
Oh yeah. I already forgot about HER.
Well that was quick.
And we'll never see her again.
I'm having a serious case of Deja vu here.
This all seems familiar.
Well, at least Adam read her first issue this time too.
Like I said. This mini was destined to fail and the seeds of Babs coming back were already in place.
I bet you all are literally happy that we've reached the finale aren't you?
All that character progression of David Cain in Cass's ongoing goes bye bye.
> For what it's worth, _____, I did my best to make the story come from character. In coming up with the justification for turning Cass "evil," my angle on it was that here was a girl who hadn't known parental love in the conventional sense. The closest she had to it (prior to meeting Bruce, Barbara, etc.) was her relationship with Cain. I figured he was a guy she had to feel incredibly, darkly conflicted about. On the one hand, he was terrible to her, denied her so many things, taught her so many other awful things. But on the other, he paid attention to her, and abused kids can confuse love with attention, even if they know better, feelings that can linger long after childhood. So in my mind, she had, for many years, based any sense of self-worth, however warped, on the fact that she was of importance to SOMEONE, even if that person was a turd like David Cain. She wasn't washed clean of that when she joined the Bat-Family -- no one's washed clean of stuff that happens in childhood, it gets properly healed, tamped down or continues to fester and cause problems, waiting for a trigger to set it off. For Cass, the trigger was learning Cain gave the same attention and training to other girls -- in her mind, that removed a big part of her identity, made her un-special, and made he feel like a tool (literally, a utensil) instead of a person...and made her see parallels to Robin, whom she tried to recruit to her side in a very warped way, and blah blah blah.
1/2
> It's entirely possible I didn't articulate that well in the story I told. It's also entirely possible that my thought process didn't create a strong enough impetus for her character change. I take responsibility on both counts. But in my mind, it did come from a place of character.
> The drugging of Cassandra was introduced in another book after her initial Robin storyline and before her reappearance later in the same book killing a shady pharmaceutical officer. As a bandage to explain the radical character change, revealing a character had been drugged is fine, but I wasn't very happy with the choice -- I wanted the change to have come from character. Unfortunately, the story with her murder of the pharm exec appeared after she was supposedly purged of the drug, so we had to do a LOT of tap-dancing in the Batgirl miniseries to explain it. Fudging the timeline WOULD have been an option, but it also would have felt like a cheat to me.
> There were a lot of other mitigating circumstances that affected the storytelling as well (requiring us to dash over such items as how she learned to read and write -- there are ways to read the story that she didn't have to have learned those things to do the things she did, but that's immaterial. And in a side note, it always struck me as horribly irresponsible that the FIRST thing Bruce should have done on bringing Cass under his wing was to make sure she learned to read and write through whatever means possible BEFORE having her do anything else, and he didn't do it -- nor did he seem in any particular hurry to get it done. In any case, had I stayed on the book, we would have come back to an explanation of that, but I left of my own volition), but they're not interesting, and they don't change the fact that, as the writer, it's my job to get the story out, clearly and satisfactorily, regardless of the constraints. In this case, a lot of Cassandra's fans felt that didn't happen, and I totally understand and regret that.
2/2.
> But I did try to make the story come from character, just so you know!
> Thanks for your comments,
> Adam B
> Thanks, ____.
> I'm not sure we're so different in our opinions about the Cain/Cassandra relationship. What I was talking about was Cassandra's perception of that relationship, and the mini was from her point of view. I remember the issue you're talking about with Cain and the films -- it was indeed excellent. I was just trying to focus on Cass' perception of the whole thing (or what I perceived that to be). Cain absolutely is a complex character, but I think in the situation we showed him, he was desperate and would say anything to help him accomplish his goal, up to and including manipulating his daughter, whether he believed what he was saying or not. Especially if he had trained many other girls the same way as Cassandra (and maybe he feels just as strongly for them as he does Cass), because I think he's more mercenary than father, and mercenary concerns come first. But that's nuance, and sometimes that doesn't come across in comics (or maybe just in my writing of them :-)).
The reading/writing thing...It seemed to me that, in the year Bruce, Dick and Tim were away, Alfred (and Barbara, to some extent) would have the opportunity to pay much more attention to Cass (and being compassionate souls, I figured they'd wanted to for some time), and so would throw himself into making sure she learned how to read and write. I freely admit I didn't understand how big an aspect of her character that was to the fans...To me, it never rang true that, in all the time she'd been with the Bat-Family (and it had been awhile), they hadn't really made it a priority to see to her "education," as it were.
> Maybe it goes to my view of Batman. I was fine with the dark Dark Knight until I started writing Robin and thinking about Tim's (and Dick's) relationship to Bruce, then my opinion really changed. I mean, here's a guy who (at the time I started on the book) had essentially adopted three children. Surely, he had some sense of love for them, some paternal feelings, in addition to just seeing them as crime fighting partners. That was something we never really got to see much in the books. So, in Robin, I tried to show more of that side of Bruce -- the loving, understanding, teaching Dad. Then I started thinking how that jibed with Batgirl-Why had he never adopted her? And would Cass have asked herself the same question? And with no viable answer, would she be hurt? I think so. And then, when presented with evidence that her relationship with her actual father had been, to some extent, a lie, could those things dovetail? Seemed reasonable (and still does) to me.
> Anyway, good conversation, and you bring up some really good points. Thanks for making me think even harder about the characters. And I hope having some insight from the "horse's mouth" is helpful and interesting for readers like yourself.
> Best,
> Adam B.
> Hi Anonymous:
> To my knowledge, Bryan's excellent Batgirl series is not a response to the Cassandra Batgirl in tone or anything else...but my knowledge about the editorial decision-making process is pretty limited. I think they just thought there was an opportunity for some good tales to tell...and I think Bryan's doing a great job of it.
> Glad you like the "insider baseball" thing. I would always love it when the Comics Journal (back when they covered mainstream comics) would occasionally really dig in with a writer about their thought process and how they regarded characters. Amazing Heroes rarely went that deep, and Comics Interview only did so a little more often. To me, those are the kinds of questions I'd want answered. Hmm...Maybe I should start a blog called "4-Color Baseball." :-)
> ____, I think maybe what we need is a new book called "Cassandra Cain," eh? :-) (Don't worry, I'm not hinting at anything, and certainly not dropping a rumor I'm writing anything to do with Cassandra -- just empathizing) BTW, I was as shocked as anyone at Cassandra's abrupt abandonment of the role -- I had no idea that was coming at all. Even the Batman RIP storyline was a complete surprise to me...I was told about it while in the middle of writing the last issue of the Batgirl mini... and it changed our ending from what I hoped was going to be a genuinely happy one to a much more melancholy and foreboding one (the gravestone shadow was Mike Marts' and my last-second idea-- concocted as I paced in the hallway outside the offices of The Pink Panther animated series I was working on at the time -- to acknowledge what was coming). Maybe more in keeping with the character, but in all honesty, I was hoping to give her a happy ending for once.
> Best,
> Adam B.
How did she not know there was that much of a drop?!
Well, that's not ominous at all.
http://collectededitions.blogspot.com/2011/04/review-batgirl-redemption-trade.html
For those wondering where those quotes came from. Hmm.. should I go into Batman & the Outsiders which continued this?!
Do you want more PAIN?!
damn it, I know i'll never find it but now I wish I still had that page where a social worker comes to the manor for Cass and it really looks like to him they're sleeping together
>>94055655
>>94055785
How lewd.
>>94055785
>>94051730
I mean, this was bad. But I like the adoption. :) (I happen to own it because it was bundled with one of Steph's Batgirl books.)
In the immortal words of someone currently famous, "i"M NOT FINISHED WITH YOU YET!!"
So this came out at the same time as the mini above and basically ties up the loose ends of this mini and Cassandra basically.
Basically, the previous issue was Chuck Dixon's last and has absolutely no continuity to this one as Frank Tieri came on as fill-in writer.
GAH! Grace what happened to your face?!
So another reason why I'm going right to this. When Dixon did Part 1? The last time we see Batman physically in this series was riding one of the aliens who were in that 90s crossover that gave Hitman powers.
R.I.P. ReMac.
>>94057838
Fascinating.
I read all of this, the character was destroyed on one year later by Winnick this was a lame attempt to reconstruct her.
Needless to say it wasn't enough, same with the justice league elite, but that's a good comic.
She's all alone.
It's weird that this and later during Battle for the Cowl built up Kirk a lot. Then nobody used him after the event and he just disappeared. Pity.
More Tim/Cass bonding.
This also has leftover plot threads from Tieri's Gotham Underground as well which has Intergang takeover Gotham's Underworld.
How ice to see you.
What the hell?!
What? Is Predator back in Gotham?
Oh it's just Stephanie.
> This is the first time Cassandra and Stephanie have been together since War Games.
> No feels at all.
ONE JOB TIERI! ONE JOB!
> Cass began the prototype version of Batman Inc
Clever girl....
Dicks ahoy!
The finale.
Oh and this finale features a special guest star that goes NOWHERE during Battle for the Cowl until after the event.
I've almost had enough of this art.
Based Nygma.
Take him away toys!
> suddenly hearing Cassandra being voiced by the Undertaker and Eddie as Stephanie.
Why am I thinking this in my head?
Based Alfred.
FINALLY Dick stops being a dick.
So yeah this was the new Azrael and this subplot is NEVER brought up again.
And that's it.
compared to rise of arsenal or cry for justice this is just not that painful
>>94054278
why did they make her so god damn ugly
>>94052230
>>94052249
TOO MUCH EXPOSITION!!!!