Spoiler Alert II : The Expositioning

Are you here looking for this page from Spoiler's comic book backstory? Of course you are because I just got a boatload of hits for it because for some reason I'm on the front page of Google now. And I just spent valuable internet time re-searching for it and re-posting it so that you can see it. So don't say glockblob never did nothing for the peoples.


Ok this weekend is kind of an off time for this so I haven't finished any actual illustration but I thought I should put something up anyway just to keep in the habit. So who is Stephanie Brown? One of the most interesting phemomena in the history of comics, which are in my opinion the clearest Western example of a collective cultural consciousness. It's difficult to explain Stephanie Brown as a character without discussing her storylines from an outside, publishing, reading standpoint as well. But here goes.


Stephanie Brown is the daughter of a third-rate Gotham criminal named The Cluemaster because he had a compulsion to leave clues at his crimes. In prison, he attended therapy that cured him of this compulsion; once out of prison, he went back to his life of crime and had much success. He never paid much attention to his daughter, Stephanie, who grew up largely while he was in prison. She assumed that he had kept it clean after prison; after discovering that he had gone back to crime, she determined to ruin all of his criminal plans, and created her first superheroic identity: Spoiler. Using skills gained as an exceptional gymnast and martial artist, she puts together her own costume and goes to work.
Stephanie listens around to her father's plans and then shows up to thwart them as Spoiler. This works well until she has a run-in with Batman and Robin, who are also after the gang. Robin tracks her down and unmasks her, and she bashes him with a brick. This is the beginning of a long and stormy romance. (Note: Robin in this case is the third Robin, Tim Drake.) During the climactic showdown: Cluemaster grabs Spoiler and threatens to pour acid on her face if Batman comes closer. Batman reveals that she is his daughter. Cluemaster is stunned; Stephanie uses his distraction to get an edge on him and is about to choke him to death when Batman persuades her to let him arrest him instead.
Meanwhile, it's revealed that Stephanie experienced sexual trauma as a child (and if there was ever a shortcut to giving a character meaningful depth, that is it), which she feels guilt about reporting because the guy died shortly after she told her father about it; also, as she begins dating Robin, she finds out she's pregnant by a former loser boyfriend. Tim's a good guy. She has the baby and gives it up for adoption with his support. Batman tells her to stop being Spoiler.
Clearly, Spoiler has father issues; with the possible exception of Oedipus, I can't think of anyone who has more at this point. But just wait!
Robin is furious when Batman tells Stephanie his secret identity and leaves town to clear his head. To fill the void, Batman agrees to train Stephanie. And here's where things really turn south for Stephanie Brown.
After training with Batman for a long time, she shows up one day and is locked out of the cave. Pressing for answers, she is told she doesn't have the skills or the talent and she shouldn't bother coming back. After being protested, Batman gives her a "mission" that he's already completed, and, when she doesn't realize it, he fires her.
Then, Steph finds out that her father is dead; he died in the service of the country in the Suicide Squad, a group of former villains working for the greater good in impossible missions in exchange for an absolved record. Steph files this away in her catalogue of father issues.
Tim comes back as Robin, and Stephanie goes to work briefly with the Birds of Prey and Batgirl. Then, Tim's father finds out he's Robin, and he has to quit. Stephanie sees him kissing another girl and, furious, makes herself a Robin costume and busts into the Batcave. Batman takes her on as Robin, though it's implied that he's only doing it to goad Tim into coming back. She disobeys orders and tries to save Batman from an assassin, is captured in the process, and afterwards is fired by Batman and forbidden from even being Spoiler. (Batman is a liiiiiiittle full of himself.) But this is only the beginning of things going badly for Stephanie Brown!
In an attempt to prove herself to Batman again, she pulls a plan from the Batcave and decides to complete it herself. Unfortunately, the plan depends on one of Batman's alter egos that he never saw fit to tell her about, and she ignites a gang war. Then she is captured by Black Mask, who tortures her with a power drill. (Black Mask is later killed by Catwoman...twice...but as the Stephanie Brown wiki points out, She fights him off but refuses to shoot him... that whole trained-by-Batman thing... so he shoots her. She makes it to the roof, where Batman takes her to the hospital where she dies of her injuries.

Oh wait... what's that you say? The horrible isn't over yet? NO! IT'S NOT! Because Batman finds out that Dr. Leslie Thompkins, his own surrogate mother and tireless provider of healthcare to the impoverished, whose clinic is respected as a zone of peace even by the Rogue's Gallery, withheld crucial treatment from Stephanie in order to teach him a lesson about employing children. Oh, and suddenly started being drawn like an old hag. Needless to say, Batman teaches this old woman a lesson and leaves her in a desert in Africa, never to practice medicine again.
Oh, and he never puts up a memorial for Stephanie in the Batcave like he did for the other dead Robin. And when Robin asks he gets shot down.


Ok. Let's leave the Comicverse for a moment, please. So Batman: War Games, where the Spoiler starts a war/Spoiler gets tortured to death story occurs is clearly one of the stupider, definitely one of the worst Batman stories ever written. There's been plenty of stupid written, but most of it doesn't do this bad of a job: this is like a terrible fanfic. Popular characters are killed, good characters are suddenly evil, a whole team of heroes is suddenly incompetent. But this is where stuff starts getting interesting in the real world.
With the advent of the Internet, girl comics fans finally found each other, and it became apparent just how popular Stephanie Brown had been. Girl-Wonder.org was launched, with Project Girl Wonder, a letter-writing campaign to demand that Stephanie's death be acknowledged with the rest of the Batmorials. Probably it is the simplicity of this obvious unfairness, and the simplicity of the group's demands, that led to Stephanie being regarded as the foremost symbol of the mistreatment of female characters and the movement to eliminate WIR syndrome.
As the campaign went on, some interesting things started happening in the Comicverse.
Batgirl, nearly dead, encounters what appears to be Spoiler's ghost. Then, Robin starts thinking about Stephanie again; there's a masked thief named Violet who looks kind of like Spoiler, and a blond girl at school that walked like Stephanie, but whom he couldn't catch in the hallway. And after he goes to bed:

Yes! Now it turns out that Dr. Leslie Thompkins spirited Stephanie away to Africa in an effort to save her from the consequences of her lost secret identity, and Batman always suspected that she was alive, so never put up a memorial! What a great detective! While she was there, she saved an African village under siege by a lunatic:
and she recovered to pull herself back into the hero game. Spoiler is officially back and alive, and Dr. Leslie Thompkins is officially back to "spectacularly good" status. All it took was a whole lot of interest from the Internet and some splendid retconning. And now, like Barbara Gordon/Batgirl I/Oracle, she has a chance to become a really awesome character. But I would be pretty happy if next time around, they manage to pull off the good character without the intermediate "horrendous decision" step.
In the meantime, I guess I will start checking out Robin comics.