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Gothic-Cowboy writes...

Mr. Weisman, I previously asked a question about why Barbara Gordon is noticably younger than her traditional comic book incarnation. You answered that it had never made sense to you for her to be older than Robin, since Robin debuted decades before her. I don't really understand your objection. After all, Dick Grayson also debuted decades before Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, John Stewart, Nathaniel Adam, Augustus Freeman, and a lot of other characters that are older than him. Why is it only strange when it's Barbara?
I get that you feel like Dick and Babs should be contemporaries, but that just doesn't feel natural to me. I especially don't get the way that some writers just started forcing them together in the mid-90's, despite the fact that 1)there was a 7-8 year age difference, 2) they had no previous development as a couple, and 3) they were both engaged to marry other people. I just couldn't stand the way that their own relationships were horribly de-railed (to say nothing of what was done and is still being done to Starfire's character) to make way for forcing two characters I saw as surrogate siblings/cousins together. I especially hated the way that the writers felt obliged to "prove" that they were always in love, even when they were actively courting other people, by churning out a seemingly endless series of retcons showing them together in the past, thus creating the "Dick is dog with the ladies" trope that I despise.
An example would be from Nightwing's solo series were, by retcon, we see Dick and Babs "spend the night together," only to have him give her an invitation to his and Kory's wedding the next morning. Did they even care how this was making him look? Then much better (in my opinion, at least) ideas come along, like Oracle's cyber-romance with Ted Kord from Birds of Prey, only to get trashed because it's not Dick and Babs.
I get that there are a lot of fans of pairing off Dick and Babs, even if I can't understand why. I also realize I've kind of exceeded the scope of my inital inquiry, but this is just a subject that kind of bothers me. Thank you for your time.

Greg responds...

Oh, come on. Because the other characters you mentioned aren't Bat-family characters and were introduced as adults as opposed to sidekicks, proteges, Bruce Wayne's ward or Commissioner Gordon's daughter (i.e. generationally, Dick and Barbara are on the same level from the get go).

Besides, in almost EVERY interpretation of Batgirl I've ever seen, she's usually a contemporary of Dick's, so what exactly are we arguing about? It doesn't feel natural to you to interpret the characters the way they've ALWAYS been interpreted?

You claim it was new to the 90s, but I've been reading comics since the 60s, and that's how I've always seen it interpreted. ALWAYS. And now you're throwing in arguments regarding Starfire and other characters and scenarios that aren't even in or on our series? How is any of that relevant to YJ's interpretation of these two characters?

Look, I'm not denying that here and there it's been interpreted differently, but the vast majority of Dick and Barbara's appearances have them either as contemporaries, near-contemporaries or as Dick being slightly OLDER.

But, okay, fine. If it's not working for you, it's not working for you. Still, what do you expect me to say?

Or maybe I'm over-reacting. You just felt like ranting about Nightwing, so you did. That's cool too, I guess. But by phrasing it as a question to me, you've got me ranting back because it makes me feel like you're trying to get me to admit that we made a mistake, and I just don't feel that way.

I'm very happy with our interpretation of both Dick and Barbara in the show and in it's companion comic. I wasn't even reading comics in the late nineties and have never read the stories you reference above, so you can rest assured that I didn't base our interpretation on those stories, which you don't care for. Rather I based it on how I feel about the two characters myself. We can leave it at that.

Response recorded on March 14, 2013