These days, I can't really think of Barbara Gordon as anything other than Oracle. John Ostrander and Chuck Dixon, along with a handful of others, have done such a great job of making her role as dispatcher/information central for the super-heroes that she seems far more interesting in that role than as yet another costumed chickie on the streets. There was a time, however, when Barbara Gordon was a very active physical presence in the war against crime, and though many of those stories are actually somewhat excruciating Silver Age tales, Beatty, Dixon, Martin and the rest have taken the basic framework, along with the additions made to her backstory in Birds of Prey, and crafted a pretty interesting origin story. It's not without its flaws in this trade edition, notably a feeling that it was always meant to work more as single issues than as one whole story, but it's a good solid super-hero tale featuring a likable female protagonist and doing more than just servicing the backstory, which a Year One tale easily could have been.
Batgirl Year One is a book of influences. The most obvious influence on it is Birds of Prey, which is fitting given how much work Year One co-writer Chuck Dixon put in developing Barbara Gordon in those pages. Thus we get a team-up between Batgirl and Black Canary with cutesy ironic narration about how they'd never make a good ongoing partnership (wink, wink... get it? get it?), a slow burn subplot about Jason Bard, a Gotham cop who we first met as Babs's ex-husband in the pages of early Birds of Prey stories and more than a few clunky Oracle references in Barbara's narration. Sometimes Dixon and Beatty push too hard on the foreshadowing, given that those of us who get it pick up on it in a more subtle manner and those who don't get it really don't need to to enjoy this story, but it's also kind of fun to see the retroactive continuity woven so smoothly into an origin story.
The framework of the story, of course, comes from the earliest Batgirl stories, and Dixon and Beatty do a nice job of modernizing without losing touch with the essential core of her character. She became Batgirl partly to spite her father, a perfectly good rationale in the Silver Age but somewhat hollow and shallow these days, and partly to be a heroine, which is a more noble and heroic goal that we can all get behind, even in these cynical modern times. Beatty and Dixon have chosen to go continuity-lite here, which means placing the stories in a sort of timeless era when computers and hacking are around, but so is a pretty heightened level of institutionalized sexism and the Golden Age crimefighters of the JSA. It works, largely because the use of JSA and JLA members is kept to a minimum, and serves more as window dressing for a story that is all about Gotham and its smaller criminals.
In particular, the two criminals that dog Batgirl throughout this book are Killer Moth and Firefly. Neither are particularly well-respected adversaries, and Beatty and Dixon get a fair amount of mileage out of making Moth a clear wannabe, more a nuisance than a threat, until he hooks up with the psychotic Firefly, whose predilection for fire and pain makes him terrifying on a somewhat primal level, especially when Martin, Lopez and Rodriguez do such a fantastic job with the overwhelming flame effects. Still, the villains are almost a side plot, because the real antagonists that Batgirl faces are her father's over-protective instincts and the "Gotham is my town" style of Batman and Robin. The strong message of the series is that too many times, men underestimate young girls for a variety of reasons, some benevolent and some less-so, and that girls don't always need their approval or their understanding to do what they do. It's very much a "girls kick ass" sort of message, which is another link that the series has with Birds of Prey.
I've talked a lot about the writing and not as much about the art, but the work of Marcos Martin and Alvara Lopez is absolutely crucial to the success of the story. They portray Batgirl as a lithe, diminutive figure, but they never diminish her power and grace. Some of the best scenes in this book see her pulling out an extended leg kick or performing impressive gymnastics, and while the emphasis in the writing is on Babs's brain, there's never any doubt that she's physically capable of keeping up with the Bat-family. The art team also gets the sort of timeless, 1940's noir by way of modern technology look to Gotham that was perfected in the Batman Animated series and which has become a defining aspect of most of the early years stories of the various crime-fighters of Gotham.
