DCEU: 10 Comics It Must Adapt To Beat Marvel

5. Batgirl: Year One

Batgirl Year One
DC Comics

Barbara Gordon may not feature in the upcoming Birds of Prey, but she's bound to play a part in the DCEU at some point.

A Batgirl film featuring Babs was announced a few years ago with Joss Whedon originally at the helm. However, Whedon soon exited the project and a new writer was brought onboard - Christina Hodson, who penned Bumblebee for Paramount as well as the script for Cathy Yan's aforementioned film.

Hodson only has about three films under her belt, but she's on the rise and her work on Bumblebee was sublime. With that in mind, and with WB potentially encouraged by what they've seen of Birds of Prey so far, her involvement in Batgirl is very exciting.

Given the last time audiences saw Barbara Gordon onscreen came in 1997's Batman & Robin though, it's perhaps inevitable that the upcoming film will be an origin story. Fortunately for readers and Hodson, there've been loads of brilliant stories that have chronicled Gordon's burgeoning years as a crimefighter, including the aptly titled Batgirl: Year One.

Recent forays into the character's time as Batgirl worth mentioning include pretty much everything Gail Simone has done with Barbara, as well as the Batgirl of Burnside books helmed by Brendan Fletcher, Cameron Stewart and Babs Tarr.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.