[1][2] The character debuted in Detective Comics #359 (January 1967) by writer Gardner Fox and artist Carmine Infantino, introduced as the niece/adoptive daughter of police commissioner James Gordon.

Although she is reimagined as the computer expert and information broker Oracle by editor Kim Yale and writer John Ostrander the following year, her paralysis sparked debate about the portrayal of women in comics, particularly violence depicted toward female characters.

In the 1999 storyline "No Man's Land", the character Helena Bertinelli, known as Huntress, briefly assumes the role of Batgirl until she is stripped of the identity by Batman for violating his stringent codes.

[9] When Dozier and producer Howie Horowitz saw rough concept artwork of the new Batgirl by artist Carmine Infantino during a visit to DC offices, they optioned the character in a bid to help sell a third season to the ABC television network.

Within the storyline, Gordon recounts the series of events that led to her career as Batgirl, including her first encounter with Batman as a child, studying martial arts under the tutelage of a sensei, memorizing maps and blueprints of the city, excelling in academics to skip grades, and pushing herself to become a star athlete.

: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed (2009) noted that DC had hired Barbara Kesel to write the Batgirl Special specifically to retire the character and set her in place for The Killing Joke.

[31] Eleven years after the editorial retirement of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, a new version of the character was introduced in Batman: Shadow of the Bat #83 during the multi-title story arc "No Man's Land" (1999).

[35] Depicted as a martial arts child prodigy, Cassandra Cain is written as a young woman of partly Asian descent who succeeds Helena Bertinelli as Batgirl, with the approval of both Batman and the Oracle.

[36] During "Silent Running", the first arc of the Batgirl comic book series, Cassandra Cain encounters a psychic who "reprograms" her brain, enabling her to comprehend verbal language, while simultaneously losing the ability to predict movements.

[39] When DC Comics continuity skipped forward one year after the events of the limited series Infinite Crisis, Cassandra Cain is revived as the leader of the League of Assassins, having abandoned her previous characterization as an altruist.

It's a bit of a shock, to be sure, but we’re doing everything we can to be respectful to this character's amazing legacy, while presenting something thrilling that a generation of comics readers will be experiencing for the first time ...Barbara Gordon leaping, fighting, and swinging over Gotham.

"[47] In the new, revised continuity, the events of The Killing Joke took place three years before the current storyline, and while it is established she was paraplegic during that time, Barbara Gordon is written as having regained her mobility after undergoing experimental surgery at a South African clinic.

[49][50] Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly states in a review of the first issue: "The artwork is okay though conventional, while Simone's script tries to tie up of the end of the previous Barbara Gordon/Oracle storyline and setup up the new Batgirl.

Her formula: murderous villains, blood splattering violence and high flying superheroics mixed with single-white-female bonding ...plus a cliffhanger ending to the first issue that offers a nifty [segue] into the new world of Barbara Gordon and Batgirl.

"[51] The New York Times critic George Gene Gustines wrote: "Unlike some of the other DC comics I read this week, Batgirl achieves a deft hat trick: a well-shaped reintroduction to a character, an elegant acknowledgement of fundamental history and the establishment of a new status quo.

"[52] Earning a B+ rating in a review from Entertainment Weekly, Ken Tucker writes that Simone "[takes] her Birds of Prey storytelling powers and focuses them on the newly revived Barbara Gordon as Batgirl.

While seemingly light and engaging compared to Gail Simone's darker preceding run, the new arc ultimately dealt with Babs' inability to fully escape her earlier trauma and the villain was revealed as her own brain scans, an algorithm similar to the Pre-New 52 Oracle.

[64] While the reboot was highly praised for its fun, energy, innovative use of social media, and particularly for Tarr's art,[65] issue #37 caused controversy with its depiction of a villain named Dagger Type, which some critics saw as a transphobic caricature.

In 1964, however, editor Julius Schwartz asserted that Bat-Girl and other characters in the Bat-Family should be removed considering the decline in sales and restored the Batman mythology to its original conception of heroic vigilantism.

As her original characterization was retconned out of existence during the Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline, a discrepancy arose where her Bat-Girl character had joined the West Coast version of the Teen Titans, but simply disappeared.

Since her debut in DC Comics publication, and fueled by her adaptation into the Batman television series in 1967, Barbara Gordon's Batgirl has been listed among fictional characters that are regarded as cultural icons.

: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed (2009) notes that following her 1967 debut, "Batgirl was soon popular enough to appear regularly over the next two decades and Yvonne Craig certainly made an impression on many viewers with her one season portraying young Ms.

[30] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the feminist revolution, Schwartz's leading ladies included a reporter (Iris West in The Flash), a lawyer (Jean Loring in The Atom), and even the head of an aircraft company (Carol Ferris in Green Lantern).

In The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines (2009), author Mike Madrid states that what set Barbara Gordon as Batgirl apart from other female characters was her motivation for crime-fighting.

"[28] In Superheroes and Superegos: Analyzing the Minds Behind the Masks (2010), author Sharon Packer wrote that "[a]nyone who feels that feminist critics overreacted to [Gordon's] accident is advised to consult the source material", calling the work "sadistic to the core".

Brown, author of Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture (2011) noted The Killing Joke as an example of the "inherent misogyny of the male-dominated comic book industry" in light of the "relatively unequal violence [female characters] are subjected to.

"[91] Despite views that present the character's Batgirl persona as a symbol of female empowerment, a long-held criticism is that she was originally conceived as an uninspired variation of Batman "rather than standing alone as leader, such as Wonder Woman" who had no pre-existing male counterpart.

That Cassandra's turn to villainy is linked with her mother, the sexy and deadly modern Dragon Lady, implicitly aligns her ethnic heritage and her gender with the most negative connotations of Orientalism.

[99] In 2012, Batgirl starred alongside Supergirl and Wonder Girl in Super Best Friends Forever, a series of shorts developed by Lauren Faust for the DC Nation block on Cartoon Network.

Set before the events of the series' first installment, the DLC's plot revolves around Batgirl and Robin attempting to save the former's father, along with other police officers, from the Joker at an abandoned amusement park located on an oil rig.