As the sage once said, “Go big or go home.” DC’s new rebranded Graphic Novels for Young Readers line has definitely gone big with their winter and early spring offerings. February saw the release of Sarah Kuhn and Nicole Goux’s Shadow of the Batgirl, starring Cassandra Cain; March sees Marieke Nijkamp and Manuel Preitano’s The Oracle Code with a reimagined vision of Barbara Gordon solving the puzzle of herself; and on April 7th, Melissa de la Cruz and Thomas Pitilli introduce an all-new, very-different Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle, and Jack Napier in Gotham High. 

Sarah, Marieke, and Melissa were kind enough to sit down with us and talk about their chosen characters, the opportunity of playing in established sandboxes while being able to let their creativity run wild, and the importance of honesty in writing for kids and teens.

The Roarbots: I’m really excited to be doing this interview because I get to talk to a whole panel of women and non-binary authors writing about Bat Family members, which has traditionally been a world of men (with a few notable exceptions). How does that feel for all of you?

Marieke Nijkamp: It’s exactly how it should be.

Sarah Kuhn: Awesome.

(interviewer note: Melissa joined us a few minutes later.)

RB: Did you get to pick which characters you got to write about, or did DC approach you with specific characters in mind?

Kuhn: A mix. I was approached through my agent about pitching for the DC Young Readers line when they were getting started, and they sent her a list of characters they were especially interested in. Those characters were the characters everyone thinks of like Supergirl and Wonder Woman. Some of them were in, or were going to be in, big DC properties, like Mera.

Batgirl was on the list. My agent was the one who asked, “Is this Barbara Gordon or could it be any Batgirl?” because she knew I was a big fan of Cassandra Cain. They were super open to me pitching Cassandra. I sent them two pitches, one for Cassandra and one for Starfire. I was really surprised that Cassandra was the one they wanted to hear more about. I really expected them to reject it at any moment. That was the one I always wanted, and I’m still really excited for the Cassandra Cane graphic novel.

RB: Marieke, you did write Barbara Gordon but not as Batgirl.

Nijkamp: I got approached through my agent as well. Like Sarah, I had the opportunity to look at different characters,  but I did get specifically asked, “Are you interested in writing about Barbara Gordon as Oracle?” I think everyone who knows me knows I’m super passionate about disability representation and writing disabled characters, so that was a very easy “Yes, I want to take this and pitch it and see if I can find the right story for it.”

For me, Barbara is a character who is disabled and doesn’t have any special abilities but finds her strength in what she does and what she’s passionate about. It’s pretty unique not just in comics but in general. It’s a once in a life time “I’m definitely going to try this.”

RB: Melissa, you wrote about three characters, one who’s a hero, one who’s a villain, and one who’s ultimately chaotic neutral before any of those alignments take place. Tell us a little about that.

Melissa de la Cruz: It’s funny, when I was talking to DC, it was kind of interesting. People wanted to talk about the heroes we hadn’t heard as much about. When I asked what else was available they said, “Well, Batman is available, no one has taken that,” and I said, “Well, I’m taking Batman!”

I like what Marieke was saying about representation, and I think just seeing people of color as the hero, the normal hero… Batman as Asian, being from Hong Kong. It was fun to put him in that context and have Selina be his neighbor. To make it obvious Selina was Latinx. My pitch was Gossip Girl meets Batman.

RB: Each of these books is essentially an Elseworlds story, but they take some things from canon, if you still want to call it that. How did you each decide what to borrow and what to build from scratch?

Kuhn: That was initially one of the biggest challenges for me since I have been a big fan of Cassandra Cain ever since she debuted. I wanted to be very respectful and honor what had been done before but not repeat it too much. They kept telling me, “You can actually do whatever you want with it, as long as it’s true to the character.”

What we ultimately settled on was retelling her origin with the same starting point, where she’s the daughter of supervillains and her father has raised her to be a living weapon. She goes out on one of her assassinations and it goes horribly wrong, and she ends up running away from him and deciding to become a hero instead of a villain. That was always one of the most powerful parts of her story. This person doesn’t know anything besides being an assassin, being a bad guy, has all the tools for that, it seems to be her fate and then instead makes this very powerful choice to be a hero, to pursue what she feels in her heart.

We diverged in having her hide out in the library because I thought, “Where would she meet Barbara Gordon?” And it was kind of based on a fantasy of mine when I was a kid that I would get locked in a library overnight and then I could read all the books and no one would bother me.

Two things we touched on a lot that I think we brought to her story: having it be so intensely her POV – in the main DC line, a lot of her story was told through other characters reacting to her. I wanted to tell her story in her voice, which is a little different since she grew up without language. The other thing that was important to me personally was that she have an Asian American lady mentor.

I always loved that Barbara was her mentor, and I wanted to preserve that, but for me, having Asian American women in my life who have been mentors and who have shown me I can do everything I’ve been aspiring to, that I can be an author, I can be a comic book writer, I can be whatever it is. Seeing someone who looks like you actually doing that thing is very powerful and very important. So we gave her her own Asian Lady Mentor, Jackie, who is a classic auntie. She owns a noodle shop, she dresses in very loud prints, she doesn’t have any “effs” left to give, and she gives her advice and mentoring that seems a little stern but is very loving underneath. And she’s always trying to feed her.

There was a lot of stuff I wanted to add to her story that felt very Asian, and one of the reasons I loved Cassandra is that she was the Asian Bargirl. There were things that existed in the character already that were very powerful that we wanted to honor so it was finding the right mix of those things.

Nijkamp: I think The Oracle Code kept a lot. Barbara is still Jim Gordon’s daughter (that’s the way it usually is in comics continuity), and she’s still a hacker. I definitely didn’t want to change that. One of the first things I did change was that I realized I had the opportunity to change the circumstances in which she gets shot; I think the original version is very complicated for many reasons, but I didn’t want, in this version, for her to get shot just to further a man’s story because I feel like we’re kind of over that.

I wanted her to be in a position where she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the reasons she’s there are choices she’s made. I tried to give her as much agency in that situation as possible. At the end, it’s still the person on the other end of the gun that pulls the trigger, but it doesn’t have anything to do with anyone but Babs trying to be who she is, trying to protect her father, trying to figure out what’s going on in Gotham, and trying to be curious about the world around her, which I felt was such a fantastic part of her original character as well. Her insatiable curiosity about the world around her – about the motivations of the people around her – that was something I wanted to keep. In this story, it leads to her getting shot and ending up in a wheelchair.

I think from there, it sort of became its own story in the sense that, looking at Oracle in the comics, we don’t really see her go from Barbara who gets shot to Barbara who becomes Oracle. She shows up on the other side of the computer screen and she’s this mysterious Oracle for a bit, but that in-between time, that whole journey of her figuring out who she is and who she is now and how the situation has changed for her, we didn’t get to see any of that in continuity.

I really wanted to have the space to explore that. To let her be this struggling teen who thought she knew what the world was going to be like, what she thought her life was going to be like, and then from one moment to the next, that changes and it feels like she’s lost everything she held dear. She’s using a wheelchair, she lost her best friends, she’s angry at everything. She at one point turns to her father and says, “I always solved puzzles but I’m the puzzle now and I don’t know how to solve this.”

I wanted to have the opportunity to explore the emotions and the slow journey from anger and grief to finding herself again and figuring out there are still many mysteries around her, trying to solve those, trying to be open to the people around her.

One of the things I loved doing in this book, it’s not just that all the kids and teens in this book are disabled with one exception, it’s that Barbara’s friends become disabled mentors to her. They’ve been in the rehabilitation center that she gets sent to so they know the ropes, they can help her get through those first couple of weeks that are the hardest. In doing so, she slowly starts to trust them and herself again. I wanted to have that journey more than any sort of superheroism, though there is some superheroism in figuring out who you are.

RB: And that being smart is a superpower too.

Nijkamp: Oh, of course!

RB: Melissa, how about you?

de la Cruz: I think I wanted to take even more from the iconic story. I see these stories as fairy tales. I like taking the things people conceive from them. I like the little Easter eggs. Two Face getting one side of his face damaged in a fight, Alfred is still there. The little things that people will recognize. In their bones, they have to be the characters we’ve grown up with and know really well.

Kuhn: I have one more thing! One of the biggest changes in our book is that there is no Batman.

de la Cruz: Sarah!

Kuhn: I know, I know. Sometimes I’m afraid to even say it out loud. It was interesting going through the book because there’s Cassandra and Barbara and all this crime. We need some heroes and Batgirl hasn’t been seen in a while. Of course, the question comes up: There’s all this crime happening, so where’s Batman? Why isn’t he doing his job? Why isn’t he protecting Gotham City? Eventually, we were talking about Barbara – she’s Oracle in Shadow of the Batgirl also and we did change her origin a little – and I thought, “What if there was no Batman? What if the first bat persona, the first and only, was Batgirl? What if that’s one of the reasons she’s so iconic? What if that’s one of the reasons Cassandra latches on to her legend? What if that’s one of the reasons all the kids in the library who Barbara is teaching know who Batgirl is?”

And so we started adding… Nicole Goux, the artist, started putting little things in like a flashback of Barbara working on gadgets with her mom, and one of them is an old-school batarang. We were building the idea that Barbara got the idea to be this Bat Person from herself, her mom’s love of bats, making bat-shaped things instead of from Bruce or Batman.

RB: I has having this conversation with some friends about Birds of Prey because someone wrote an article asking where Batman was and we all thought, “Who cares?” I love Batman, but he doesn’t have to be in every story about Gotham. That wasn’t his story. It doesn’t always matter where Batman is. I love that, Sarah.

Marieke, you mentioned anger. I think anger, a lot of the time, is an emotion adults tell children they shouldn’t feel. Being someone who was told not to get angry, I don’t tell my kids not to get angry. We discuss appropriate ways to be angry. But in society at large, girls especially aren’t supposed to feel anger, let alone express it. In all three of these books, Cass, Barbara, and Selina are encouraged not only to feel but also to express anger. Talk a little bit about why that was so important and what you would like to see kids learn from the exploration of anger that’s in each of the books.

Nijkamp: I wanted to write a disabled character who had a full range of emotions. Anger is part of a full range of emotions, and a full range of emotions is a very human thing to have. First of all, Babs is grieving. She’s angry at herself, she’s angry at the world around her, she’s angry at the situation she’s in, and she isn’t necessarily dealing well with it. I don’t think anyone wants to be in that situation. I think it would be very unhealthy to just smile and go on.

I also think especially when it comes to marginalized characters and, speaking from my own experience, disabled characters, portrayals in media have always been as perfect as possible – perfect in this context being smiling, joyful, inspiring angels. For some reason, we don’t see anger, which is a valid human emotion, or grief or sadness or anything like that as perfect emotions.

It’s far more important to talk about how to handle those emotions than to suppress all of them. When I started writing this book, when I started thinking about the story I wanted to tell, I knew I wanted Babs to have the space to be angry and to fight against everything that bothered her. To take that time to figure out – a lot of Babs’s anger comes from not knowing who she is anymore and not knowing how to accept herself and seeing to some extent that the world around her isn’t very accepting either, and I think it’s perfectly valid to feel upset about that.

I also wanted her to have that space to figure out, “If this is what it’s going to be like, how do I get back to being me?” That’s a messy journey. I think it’s important to readers to show that, to normalize all of those emotions because that’s the only way people will be able to deal with them.

When it comes to being disabled, the world isn’t accessible and we still have to fight for the smallest point of access. Babs, in this book, is very much in a situation where disability is the norm. She deals with all of those ableist notions, but they’re filtered through a very accepting norm. If she were to go back to her own high school, for example, or back home, there would be quite a lot of anger too because those are very visceral reminders that the world doesn’t see you as equal, and I don’t think there’s any other appropriate response than a sense of anger.

RB: How about Cass? She has every right to be angry too.

Kuhn: I relate very much to what Marieke is saying, that marginalized characters need to be perfect. I certainly struggled with that in my own writing. I know what it’s like to be a reader and to really want these characters to be out there, and then sometimes when there aren’t as many, you feel more attached to the ones that exist and so you feel like you have to relate to them exactly. There’s a lot of pressure on marginalized characters in general. I struggle with that because I almost never write characters people would consider good role models. They have a lot of feelings and they struggle with that and they don’t deal well with it a lot of times.

One thing with Cass is she’s trying to learn how to be human. She’s learning how to exist in a society beyond her father training her how to be a weapon. She’s learning to process trauma and realize that the way she’s been brought up is actually not okay. One thing that was important for me to show, and I think a lot of readers have picked up on this, is it being okay to take space to feel those feelings. To process your own trauma.

One of the things Jackie says to her at one point is, “It’s okay to not be okay.” It’s okay to take that space and have those feelings – and they’re messy, complicated, uncomfortable feelings – but that’s part of the human experience and we shouldn’t try to shove them down, to repress them, to get over them because that’s not how things work. It’s part of life and for Cassandra, it’s a very reasonable reaction to everything she’s gone through.

Also, I think a lot of time, women of color, Asian American women, aren’t really given space to have those feelings or to show those feelings or to sit with them for a while, so it was important for me to show that as well. You can take that space, you should take that space, and if the people around you care about you, they’ll let you take that space and help you in that process.

Nijkamp: We would all do so much better if we were more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

RB: Melissa, each of your characters is dealing with something different that’s really tough: one with the death of his parents, one with a parent who has a chronic illness, and the third with extreme poverty. Everyone’s angry. How did you parse all of that?

de la Cruz: I think it’s part of being a teenager. They’re so angry. I remember being so angry. My kid is 13 now and seeing that switch from 11 to 12 to 13. It’s like they kind of open their eyes and are like, “The world sucks!” They’re angry they’ve been lied to, and the film is coming off their eyes. You soften the edges for your kids and when they see it, they’re monsters. They either get depressed or they’re angry because there’s nothing they can do to change it. They’re kind of trapped in their lives and there’s nothing they can do to change it because they’re not adults yet. They can’t go out and do something about it. They still have to go to school, they still have to live with their parents, deal with whatever family baggage they have.

Selina feels like she can’t do anything. She wants something, but she doesn’t know how to get it. Bruce is both the saddest and the most privileged. He has everything but not his parents. Jack is poor in the sense that nobody loves him, the saddest thing of all. That’s extreme poverty.

RB: These are books for kids and teens and they each deal with some really heavy issues. You want to be honest and open and start conversations but also remember you’re writing for kids and teens. How do you balance those two aspects of a book? 

Nijkamp: Do we balance them? Maybe to some extent. My philosophy is, if it happens, it will have happened to teens. There are certain things I don’t write about for personal reasons, but there isn’t a lot I haven’t touched on in books and quite a lot that parents will ask, “Are you sure this is appropriate for our kids?” I say, “Well, this is the world they live in, so if you’re uncomfortable about it, then you read it with them and talk about it. But ignoring that bad things happen doesn’t make them go away.”

My balance is usually that I try to avoid writing gratuitous violence, and I say that having written a school shooting book [This Is Where it Ends] so that still feels a little bit hypocritical. There are things I’ll avoid in how I talk about or describe things, like with The Oracle Code, the gunshot doesn’t really appear on the page, but in general, I’d rather teens were given ways to talk about it and address it and remind them, “Hey, you’re not alone” instead of “Hey, these are things they can’t handle.”

RB: I totally agree. I’m just always curious about the answers writers give. My parents never censored my reading, though maybe sometimes they should have. One of my kids picked up my copy of Under the Red Hood and asked if they could read it and I said, “Nope.” But beyond that very extreme stuff, we don’t really put a cap on what they read. But even when you’re being very honest, I think the way you do it is important.

Nijkamp: I think too, when it comes to teens – it’s harder for younger kids – in my experience, teens who don’t feel like they’re ready to read something or engage with something will stop reading. I generally feel like teens are pretty okay at figuring out where their comforts and discomforts lie.

Kuhn: I’ve been asked this question before, and I always pause but I think the one thing young readers won’t accept is inauthenticity. I do think it’s important to show things as they are, as they would happen and certainly, with our story, she’s a teenage assassin. There’s a lot of darkness to the story already. It was quite a bit darker of a story than I’ve taken on before; this was a bit of a change. My editor, Sara Miller, really pushed me to go there, to make it more real.

Our concern was making sure we didn’t do anything exploitative, milking the violence or her childhood. That goes back to having empathy for your characters, which is number one of being a good writer, even if you’ve never gone through what they’re going through, in my case, never been a teen assassin.

de la Cruz: I kind of write for myself, and I think my taste in reading is the same as 11-years-olds. I don’t even think about writing for kids; I’m just amusing myself. I’m lucky I like the things kids like.

I wanted to write a fun, decadent book. When I wrote it, the kids were vaping and then we found out vaping was really, really bad for you. I would have liked to take it out, but kids are still doing it. In trying to represent something authentic, I do think we have responsibilities. One of the things we talked about was that Bruce couldn’t do it.

RB: This has all been very serious, so I’m going to make the last question fun. You get to pick a three-member vigilante team, including yourself. Who would you pick?

de la Cruz: Batman, Gandalf, and Catwoman.

Kuhn: Cassandra, she has all the training. And she’s also surprisingly organized. I’ll do a little tribute to Melissa and say Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl. She has the brainpower and the scheming energy, the ability to execute these epic master plans in high school. She and Cassandra would have an interesting Odd Couple dynamic. Doctor Aphra. She also has major stealth. She’s a rogue archaeologist with a somewhat gray moral compass. She’d bridge the gap between Cassandra and Blair, and she’s always doing something you don’t quite expect, which would be a good counter to Blair and Cassandra’s careful planning of everything. And hopefully they would all balance each other out and make for an amazing vengeance team.

RB: And she stared down Vader. Who’s going to intimidate her? No one.

Kuhn: Exactly! She’s stood up to the Dark Side many times and could do it again.

RB: Plus she has the murderbots.

Kuhn: If the muderbots came along as a package deal, I feel like that team would be pretty unstoppable.

Nijkamp: I would definitely take Oracle for all the hacking; that would be helpful. I would add another spy to the team because personally, I’m super interested in collecting information. A lot of me when into Barbara: knowing your enemy is helpful. I’ll take Ali from Tamora Pierce’s Trickster books and Seven of Nine.

Intrigued? You should be. I highly recommend Shadow of the Batgirl, The Oracle Code, and Gotham High. I’ve read a big chunk of Sarah’s back catalog already and plan on jumping into Marieke and Melissa’s as well. (I used to joke about dying under a TBR avalanche but that becomes more and more of a real possibility every day.) More to come as the DC Graphic Novels for Young Readers Line continues to expand.