Currently Reading: The Oracle Code

I read Marieke Nijkamp's YA graphic novel The Oracle Code last night, in which Barbara 'Babs' Gordon, daughter of Gotham City's Police Commissioner Gordon, goes through rehab after being shot and paralysed.

OMG, it's so good. The opening is a little unexpected, Moore's The Killing Joke is retconned out existence, Babs Gordon isn't Batgirl, shot at her front door by the Joker, she's a juvenile hacker, shot during an armed robbery. And for a #CripLit take on Oracle's origin that is as it should be, there are huge problems with The Killing Joke.

One thing I loved about this was that the intersectionality of disability was up front from the first moments we see the corridors of the Arkham Center for Independence (which absolutely has nothing in common with Arkham Asylum, oh no - not even if it is a creepy old gothic mansion, full of strange noises). There are disabled kids of multiple ethnicities wandering the corridors (though gender identity and sexuality don't seem to crop up - I'm not sure how 'conservative' DC's take on YA is)

.Babs is quickly adopted by Issy, an Afro-American wheelchair user, and Jeong, an Asian-American who uses crutches ('This is Jeong. Meningitis' 'And she's Issy. Spinal Cord Injury') . One detaiI I particularly loved was that it's Jeong who loves playing wheelchair basketball, not Issy. Why yes, we do change our adaptive devices to suit the situation.

One step removed is blonde-haired and fire-scarred Jena, who haunts the nighttime corridors of ACI with her ghost stories, and provides one arm of the mystery Babs must solve. There are questions as to how much of Jena's story is true, questions used by the strait-laced Dr Maxwell, director of ACI and Babs' new shrink, to either enlighten Babs to the full extent of Jena's problems, or gaslight Jena to Babs. And the beauty of the set-up is we don't know which it is, and ultimately the answer is genuinely surprising.

The other arm of the mystery arrives with Babs, because the Oracle Code that Babs must puzzle out is Babs herself. And I think it's here the story nails it. Yes, Babs is angry, but the real puzzle she needs to figure out is how to marry her dreams and her new reality. Not dealing with becoming a wheelchair user isn't really an option, life keeps happening, whatever you do. So the question for Babs is whether dreams amd self-identity remain valid, until she realises that nothing has changed, that things are still normal, just different, and she's still a puzzle-solver.

I particularly liked that one of the major opponents in the denouement was that arch enemy of wheelchair users everywhere - an unadapted staircase (though personally I would have shown Babs going down it, not just Issy). And I can personally attest to the efficacy of hitting someone with a crutch.

In some ways I would almost have preferred this to be a novel rather than a graphic novel, because there are limits to the depth of storytelling you can show in an image, and I'd have liked to dig even deeper into Babs' brain. But equally the graphic novel brings strengths that the novel form doesn't allow and we have to give due credit to Manuel Preitano's imagery, from the smallest of details - Gibson's Neuromancer on Bab's shelf, to double page spreads where the numbers of wheelchair users hit double figures.

And OMG, a comic artist who doesn't just understand how wheelchairs are put together, but that they come in multiple types and models, and who recognises how we move with them or with crutches. Unprecedented!

I hoped for a lot from The Oracle Code, and it delivered. Recommended.

Full disclosure: Marieke and I know each other.