Geek of Oz

When I first moved to Australia, I was not – as Dave Chappelle would say – having a great go at it. An ethnically ambiguous kid with a weird accent, in a weird city, with just one friend who was also all of those things and from the same country I’d just left, I felt pretty alone. I didn’t have anyone to hang out with, so my granddad would pick me after school on his bike and dink me to the local library. For a suburban Gold Coast joint, it had an impressively dense comic book section with a row of multicoloured beanbags guarding it like a protective fence from the other texts. The first thing I saw on the shelf of that hallowed ground was two collected volumes positioned side-by-side. The first was Batgirl: A Knight Alone , which featured the defining image of Cassandra Cain’s Batgirl: arms flexed gripping a Batarang and poised on a Gotham rooftop as the Bat signal was illuminated in the night sky behind her. The cover by Damian Scott was mostly all black - with the exception of a...