#wheelchair batgirl rates 9/10

[wheelchairbatgirl]

Someone found this for me at a comic shop, purely for "There's a wheelchair on the cover," reasons. I told my friends that I’m starting this project and now people alert me any time they see a wheelchair (and, honestly, I love it). So, let's skip ahead about 9 years from our last Birds post, and check out Birds of Prey 124 from 2009.

Cover chair is decent looking. Push handles, but we can't win them all. It's got all the major parts like wheels and arm rests and a back, and they're all about the size and proportions you'd expect from a folding manual wheelchair. Someone please get her a cushion, though. People with paralysis or reduced sensation in their legs and hips can't safely sit just on the sling of the chair. Pressure sores can become very dangerous when you can't feel them, so wheel hair cushions can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to reduce the risk of forming them. People without paralysis or loss of sensation should also have a cushion, because it’s safer and more comfortable. Just draw everyone with a cushion, please.

The seat itself is a little bit large for her. In general, you want the seat to be as narrow as you can be without crowding. This gives you better access to your wheels, and an overall narrower footprint when navigating the world. When you’re ordering your custom wheelchair, you can customize seat width down to the inch, so wheelchair users will pretty precisely fit into their seat. But this isn’t a seat that’s so large that it looks like she’s just completely in someone else’s chair.

You can see that the axles of the wheels attach in the middle of the seat, instead of all the way at the back. We love a good forward center of gravity.

Cover wheelchair is fine! 9/10.

This issue gives us an excellent and very enjoyable fight with the Joker. Her in-comic chair is generally pretty consistent between the different panels. The center of gravity is reeeally far back, in line with the back canes. This isn't great for propelling yourself around the world, because it’s bad for your shoulders and you don’t get to use the strongest part of your push in the wheel stroke . Her front leg angle is like 60 degrees, with her feet sticking out in front of her quite a bit. Usually, people who don’t have leg injuries want to have a steeper front angle, because you get the most maneuverability when your feet are tucked in close. When your feet are in front of your casters, it’s really easy to hit things with your feet. When you can’t feel your feet, accidentally hurting them takes a much longer time to heal, and you can’t use your pane level to monitor how severely you’re injured or how you’re healing. For both of these reasons, I don’t really love this design of wheelchair for this character.

Also those fixed front foot plates disappear when the chair is thrown around. Magical appearing-disappearing foot plates. (Actually, anyone who buys wheelchairs on eBay is familiar with the fact that people do lose detachable foot plates ALL the time. Magical disappearing foot plates are a real world problem).

They did do a little close up on a push rim. That was nice. One point for having push rims.

And this is our final shot. Couple of notes: it's super annoying to have someone lean on your chair like that. This one has that really far back center of gravity, so it's not a tip hazard, but a lot of wheelchairs are set where leaning on someone's chair can make it flip backwards (especially if you're me and keep your anti-tips deactivated all the time).

The second thing is that moving a manual wheelchair really takes two arms. There are specific types of manual chairs that have a one-arm drive system, but it's a whole thing that needs to be built into the chair. Anyone who has tried to take a cup of water across a room while using a wheelchair knows how multi-armed it needs to be. So being a wheelchair user in an arm sling is a lot of being a wheelchair user where you need people to push you everywhere. I don’t believe that the artist who drew this really realized exactly how disabling losing one arm is to a manual wheelchair user, so I feel like this particular injury hits different if you’ve got a certain kind of personal experience.

Anyway, I was hoping that if we jumped forward in time that we'd see a wheelchair that doesn't look like a living room recliner chair with big wheels on the back edge, but here we are.

6/10, it's got some of the right parts but I hate how they’re connected.

[wheelchairbatgirl]

More Birds of Prey from late 2000/early 01.

I personally just really like this art. The style, the colors, just the way it looks. Just saying. It’s dynamic but also very soft. Dynamic without being aggressive.

Wheelchair here is fine, switching back to the split flip up footplate and some rigid side guards, but it’s fine. It’s also very wide here, and that looks like it’s going to cause some shoulder problems if she has to wheel with her arms at that angle.

I also love seeing Babs in something cute even though she’s not going out to do anything. She gets stuck in sweats a whole lot, and disabled people do like to still get dressed up and feel good about how they look.

I personally wouldn’t pick a tight, low cut, short skirted dress, only because that’s a dress that is summery and fun and totally acceptable when you stand. However, once you’re wheelchairing, short skirts get shorter and low cut tops get lower. I see this dress and my brain had to stop and contemplate the stress of keeping both the up and the down covered all at once.

Nothing is technically wrong; it’s just something that I don’t think a wheelchair user would have picked for themself. It’s just a little thing.

That said, I’m currently reading this same line in 2002 and we’re not getting any fun girly outfits like this. Wheelchair gets 9/10, outfit gets a 10/10 for cute and a 2/10 for practicality

[wheelchairbatgirl]

Birds of Prey: Batgirl #1

This one at least resembles a real wheelchair. Tip for artists, camber is only supposed to slant inward on the top, not backwards. But the casters attach in the right spot. Casters are a reasonable size. There appears to be a real cushion. Push rims exist. Spellbinder gets hit in the face with a plank. All good.

Not 100% sure why they always give her a 60 degree front angle, but maybe that was the style in active wheelchairs at the time. Anyway, 9.5 out of 10. Definitely a wheelchair I’d take for a ride.

[wheelchairbatgirl]

Birds of Prey, 2001. Back height has gone back down. Largest foot plates that I’ve seen in a long time. We get camber, but the center of gravity is farther back.

Honestly, this is the best-looking wheelchair we’ve had for quite a while. We’ve ditched the children’s swing bucket seat in favor of some low, very square arm rests.

9/10. Wheelchairs look like this.

We also get this hand in this issue.

Ai isn’t the only thing with awful hands.

[wheelchairbatgirl]

Okay, Dinah, you kick him in the face, and I will sit sadly with my sticks and be disabled. Comparing this to the one a couple of days ago with the nunchucks, I’m just not too impressed with this cover.

Anyway, that’s a rigid chair with a split, folding foot plate. That’d be really good for those of us who have foot movement and self-propel, or people who do a lot of stand-up transfers, but it’s not what I’d normally expect someone with a low complete SCI to use.

Barbara goes to the tech convention.

It is unfortunately kind of difficult to run over someone’s foot like that with your back tire. Tires are round so the part of the tire that touches the ground is the center of the tire, so unless they’re really sticking their foot out, you’re going to ram into them with the chair before you can actually hit the foot. What you want to do is either go at them with the front caster. The real way to hurt people with your wheelchair is to back into them with your push handles, which hurts so badly, but Babs does not have them. I guess she’s got to go for the tire.

I like that she’s switched to a folding chair here.I don’t remember how much travel she had to do to get to the nerd convention, but a chair with a more narrow wheel base than the other one she’s been drawn with is probably a big perk. And it still looks like an active, personal chair, not a hospital chair.

If you’re flying on a plane with over 100 people as its capacity, and your wheelchair folds 13x36x48 or smaller, and the plane will take off or land in the United States of America, the law says you can keep it in the cabin and do not need to risk planeside checking it. The people who run the airplane don’t like when you know this and insist on it, but it’s the law, and has been since 1998. We can trust that if Barb was going to fly with her wheelchair, she knows the law and can advocate for herself about that very well, so obviously she switched to a folding frame to take advantage of wheelchair priority cabinets and to not risk damage to her main, rigid wheelchair.

So yeah, hell, very accurate, maybe accidentally accurate, but still.

9/10, she even uses the push rims.

[wheelchairbatgirl]

A friend sent these to me. Batman and Robin #9 from April 2010

Makes a lot of sense for a pretty soon post-injury wheelchair. It's consistent. We get push rims. 7/10. Maybe even 8.

But since it's my first reader submission, Wheelchair Batgirl rates 9/10

[wheelchairbatgirl]

We have another reader submission, here's Jack Drake.

Hey look! Push rims!

I like this chair. It looks like your standard hospital chair, and in the story my understanding is that this is a sort of temporary thing. But if you look at where the axle of the rear wheels is, it's pretty far forward. As y'all know, I love me a good forward CG. This one is so far forward that I feel like your chair salesperson would really want you to buy anti-tippers, too, but it's fine, honestly.

Wheelchair makes sense and looks like a reasonable rendering of an item that is likely to exist. 9/10 because I can see in-universe reasons why someone might not like that chair for this application.

[wheelchairbatgirl]

First canon mention (that I can find) of Barb's Wheelchair Has No Handles. This is Birds of Prey, somewhere in the pre-2000. I wasn't taking notes at the time.

Fun personal story, my wheelchair also doesn't have handles on the back. Before I had that one, I had one where the handles folded down, and they were very low, and every single person who I ever had to ask push me bitched about how low they were. Not that Babs would have that problem because everyone draws her with a really tall back.

Anyway her wheelchair looks a LOT like it's just a Quickie GP. I know the GP is the old-style box frame and I was like in early elementary school when this issue was written, so I was probably not too experienced with wheelchair construction. Maybe this is pretty accurate.

Anyway, looks to me like an older-style active wheelchair. Pretty wide for her, but not as wide as y'all'll see. I love the angle of looking straight down on her because that what I feel like i'm always doing every time I try to advocate for myself.

I learned my lesson about saying, "when I try to stand up for myself." Everyone's a joker when someone in a wheelchair says that.

ANYWAY, nine out of 10.

Four for wheelchair realism, because I have to critique that TINY TINY CASTER. You're going to go flying the second you run into an ant. Five for "I can see an active person using this as their primary wheelchair."

NINE.

[wheelchairbatgirl]

Every wheelchair in the 2002 event Bruce Wayne, Murderer, reviewed by me.

There are 13 issues in Bruce Wayne: Fugitive, many of which include pictures of wheelchairs.

The event starts out with a one-shot, and then Detective Comics #766, which had no wheelchair.

So here we start with Batgirl #23. Jumping right in with Barbara grabbing the entire tire instead of using her push rim. We don’t have enough wheelchair to rate and yet our rule of ���no push rim = -1 point” has already come into effect.

I’ll talk about it later, but this series of Batgirl often goes to very odd camera angles to avoid drawing Babs’ wheelchair.

Nightwing #65. We only have three rules here on Wheelchair Batgirl, which is that we deduct one point from any time that someone is using the tire instead of the push rim, without a good reason. The other rule is that we deduct a point every time Barbara Gordon’s wheelchair specifically has push handles on the back. I know I’ve never talked about that rule before, because I just made it up right now, but it’s a rule.

I get that Barb appears to like her wheelchair backs up super high. That’s her right, so I won’t complain about it anymore, even though it’d drive me insane. But all we can see here is high-back with push handles. So we’re at -2 points and we haven’t even had anything worth rating.

Quick note for people who don’t have to worry about wheelchair parts in their daily life: push rims are the extra bars on the wheels of the chairs. You push your wheels with the push rims so tha tyou’re not grabbing a dirty tire all the time. Push handles are the handles on the back of a wheelchair to make it easier for someone to push you and to steer. A good Barbara Gordon wheelchair should have yes to push rims and no to push handles, because she doesn’t like to be pushed around. This is a canon fact and not my sole opinion.

Batman: Gotham Knights #65.

Finally, we get a chair that clearly has no push handles. Good job. It does seem like she’s grabbing the tire instead one of the panels, but I’m not going to count that because it could be just for simplicity of drawing.

This wheelchair gets 9/10 based on what we can see.

Birds of Prey #39

Finally, a clear few wheelchair shots. We have push rims. We have camber. It looks relatively consistent from panel-to-panel. It’s not a hospital looking wheelchair. It sort of looks like what I’d expect a good Barbara Wheelchair from this time to look like.

I do have a quick question about the mechanism under this chair. Not sure how that works or what it does. Looks cool, thought.

8/10 because good dog why are there push handles on this chair, you all know better than to do that.

Robin #98 actually had no wheelchairs.

Robin #99 has, uh. This lovely little cartoon of a wheelchair, which I find very endearing. No push handles. Full points.

Also it’s got Babs telling my favorite joke of “I brought my own chair,” so I had to screencap that. I think a lot of authors are afraid to have wheelchair users make jokes or even make reference to the fact that they use a wheelchair. Most wheelchair users that I’ve met don’t mind telling jokes or referencing it. Me making a joke and me being a joke are different things.

The next wheelchairs we get are in Nightwing #66, and boy do we get wheelchairs. I love this wheelchair. It looks like a good custom chair for an active user. It’s consistent. It makes sense. It’s got a good camber and a good front angle and no push handles. She grabs her push rims instead of her tires. This is my favorite depiction of her chair in my reading thus far. Side guards and no arm rests.

These get 10/10, best wheelchair so far.

We also have the one non-Barbara wheelchair, which is for someone I can’t remember. Clearly a high level of injury because of the Sip n Puff (which is a tool to let someone with no arm movement operate a device of some kind). It’s clear that the artist understood that wheelchairs aren’t universal, and need to be customized for the user.

And we close down the event with Birds of Prey #40.

The push handles. They’re back. Well, handle, because apparently she’s got a single stroller handle. I will say that i love the picture of her leaning her arm on the push handle. I did that a lot back when I had push handles. It’s a comfy position. Pretty okay wheelchair, too. 7/10.*——

So our score so far is 42/50, or 8.4/10. We truncate, to 8/10 for Bruce Wayne: Murderer?

Final summary on the event: The fact that everyone’s superhero costume is clearly defined and looks consistent from every angle even across multiple authors can’t be ignored. The fact that no one decided to say, “Hi, this is what her wheelchair looks like from every angle,” is probably because it was/is policy to keep the heroes consistent and the rest of the world up to the artist, but I think it really would have helped everyone who hasn’t had time to research how wheelchairs are selected for a user.

I bought some physical Birds of Prey comics at a junk shop near my work, and they date to about 2008, and just by looking inside of them I can tell that our wheelchair quality is going to go down in the future. So here’s me being optimistic and nice.