#but i will always talk about nml given the opportunity lol

[broke-bruce-wayne]

That post about fanon corrections reminded me that I like your opinions and I've been meaning to ask you: what should a new DC fan read to like, have a decent understanding of Babs, Steph, and Cass? Like are they in the main Batman series or did they get their own series' or what?

So I ended up writing a lot more about this that I initially planned to, so I'm putting it all under the cut.

One of my personal rules is I must mention No Man's Land at every possible opportunity, but I would highly recommend reading that, even as a new reader. Not sure how you read your comics, but DC Universe has the whole arc in proper reading order (which is how I read it). But you can also find reading orders online if you want to just read it from different sites. Its a lot, but it gives you a good introduction to basically every Bat character who was around at the time. It's also where Cass is introduced, and is my personal favorite big Bat event, as well as my favorite era of Bat books. But Babs and later Cass are both big players in the event.

I would follow that up with reading Cass's solo run, Batgirl (2000), at least up to issue 37. One of the best comic runs ever, in my opinion. It's very hit or miss after 37, as most comics are, but after finishing the initial run you'll probably want to keep reading Cass stories. Cass is the star of this run obviously, but Babs and Steph both play major roles as well.

For Babs, I'm mainly familiar with Post-Crisis Babs, so Oracle, not Batgirl (though I have read her N52 and part of her Rebirth runs out of curiosity). She makes guest appearances in the first Suicide Squad run, starting with issue 23. Then she has a leading role in the Birds of Prey series written by Dixon and then Simone. This is probably her most popular full series as a lead. There is a lot of good in this series, and a lot of not so good (I personally like Simone's half more than Dixon's, but there are definite pros and cons to both). Despite being the first Batgirl, Babs was the last one to get a solo Batgirl run, which started in 2011 only after she was magically "cured" because they wanted to reset the universe (which is a whole another thing, and smarter people than me have made more detailed posts about how bad this was, for Babs as well as for everyone, but for our purposes here what you need to know is this was extremely unpopular, for numerous reasons).

As for Steph, she was introduced in an arc in Detective Comics (647-649), before Cass, so I guess you should read this first if you want. But after that she was mainly used as a side character, in Robin (1993) and other places. She has her brief run as Robin in the early 2000s. She only has about 10 issues or so as Robin across multiple runs, before unceremoniously "dying" in War Games (don't read War Games, it's terrible, but maybe search the panels of Bruce talking to her in the hospital). These Robin issues are good for the most part, but were basically written as a last hurrah for her before editorial stepped in. Then, after she comes back to life from overseas, she finally has her own solo run as Batgirl (2009). This is a fun run where she's balancing being a college student with being Batgirl.