A tribute to Oracle: The story of the first Oracle standalone story
This week, in Batman Inc. #8, we saw what it is likely, after twenty two years, the final appearance of Barbara Gordon as Oracle in DC Comics for the foreseeable future.
In the New 52, Barbara Gordon will be a young woman just out of college who is once again Batgirl. She will, according to what DC has told us, still have been Oracle. She is, of course, still Barbara Gordon and she may still do some of the things that Oracle did. But she won’t be the same character she’s been. This post and the others in this series are not to debate Barbara Gordon’s becoming Batgirl again. These posts are to pay tribute to her persona of Oracle and give the character a send-off into the next phase of her existence.
Oracle has been written
by many of DC’s writers over the past two decades. I asked a few of her creators and editors to share some thoughts about the character. The first piece is by former DC editor and writer Scott Peterson who wrote the very first standalone Oracle story 17 years ago in Showcase ‘94. (Scott recently wrote about how Cass Cain became Batgirl) The team he worked with would later help develop Birds of Prey, Oracle’s primary title over the last decade and a half. Scott tells the story of how he came to write that first Oracle story and, shares for the first time, some of the thumbnails for the story drawn by artist Brian Stelfreeze. Scott’s story begins below.
