Batgirl #19 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

One of the problems with "Death of the Family" when it comes to this title is that it hijacked the much more interesting story that Simone was telling about James, Jr.  Although Simone and Fawkes did a decent job showing James using the arrival of Joker to his advantage (trading Barbara for his mother), it really distorted the momentum of the story.  When we pick up the trail here, it's hard to remember where we were exactly.

I'm really not all that shocked that Barbara (allegedly) killed James, Jr.  After all, she seemed to have decided to kill Joker in issue #16; she never gets the chance in that issue because James, Jr. chloroformed her before she could.  I actually believe that Barbara would have a more nuanced version of killing than Bruce would.  One of the problems of the heroic prohibition against murder is that it relies almost entirely on the slippery-slope argument; in other words, Bruce can't kill Joker since, if he did, he'd suddenly be unable to control himself from murdering your run-of-the-mill mugger.  Barbara, on the other hand, somewhat understandably views James, Jr. and Joker as special cases.  She takes out James, Jr. here because, like her mother, she realizes that he won't stop until they're all dead.  Although it seems likely that Barbara won't be wanted for murder for long, given that James, Jr. is likely to reappear soon, Simone completely upends Barbara's relationship with her father, something that we've never really seen happen.  It should make for good reading.

My real problem with this issue is that Simone really sullies James, Jr. here by giving him such a remarkably jejune motivation.  Jealousy?  Really?  James, Jr. himself is brilliant, so it's hard to believe that he would've been jealous of Barbara for her accomplishments, as he claims here.  James, Jr. was better when he had no clear motivation, no real rage:  he was a psychopath with a vision of the world very different from everyone else.  By making him essentially an angry little brother, Simone strips him of the characteristics that made him almost unique in the DCU and DCnU.  When James, Jr. first appeared, he was easy to compare to Joker because he had such grandiose goals, like poisoning Gotham's water supply so that its children would grow into psychopaths just like him.  Now, suddenly, Simone has narrowed his focus to simply seeking revenge against his family, something that, honestly, seems beneath him.  Honestly, it's a revelation that I hope is forgotten when he next appears, so that we can resume pretending that he's the unpredictable psychopath that we've all come to know and fear.