“Decision Day”
Cover Price: $1.50
Bargain Price: $0.50
Cover Date: March 1994
The Batman Adventures may be the most underrated comic of the nineties, featuring excellent Batman stories, usually written with an unparalleled cleverness and brevity by Kelley Puckett and drawn by Mike Parobeck whose style, much like Puckett’s writing, perfectly evokes the feel of the weekday afternoon cartoon show, while still being distinctly original. While the series is always an enjoyable read and an easy pick-up from the quarter bins, this issue, which shines the spotlight on Batgirl and Robin is even better than most. Batgirl, in her civilian identity of Barbara Gordon has just witnessed a would-be bombing of police headquarters. Rather than sit back under witness protection while the GCPD prosecutes the case, she dons her cowl to investigate on her own, which is when she runs into Robin, who is working the same case. The plot then quickly takes a backseat to a charming flirtation that underscores how much fun each has in their masked identities and how their crime fighting styles differ; Robin is more the more experienced, better trained fighter and crime solver, while Batgirl depends more on instinct and intuition. Best of all, though, is the one page exchange between the two when they bump into each other in their secret identities the next day. Expertly combining the tropes of a standard Batman adventure with a post modern romance comic, it’s a delightful forgotten treasure of an issue and one that makes me long for a similar dynamic in the DCU proper.
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