Batgirl is getting a comic rebrand and moving to Williamsburg (well, ‘Burnside’)

DC Comics is updating Batgirl to make her a tech-savvy, young Williamsburgite. They are calling the Gotham neighborhood “Burnside,” but it’s easy to see what the geography’s source material is, according to PRI.

Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, is arguably one of the most tech-relevant superheroes in history. Seriously.

When she was left paralyzed from the waist down in 1999’s Batman: The Killing Joke, she reinvented herself a year later as the electronic eyes and ears of Batman and many other superheroes, as the ubiquitous “Oracle.” Oracle was, arguably, one of the few truly new ideas under the sun in comics: an entirely virtual superhero.

Her injury was erased when DC Comics rebooted itself with “The New 52.” (If you don’t know about it, don’t worry about it.)

Then, in 2006, Batgirl took over the real-world internet. An artist named Andi Watson posted some alternate designs for the character which led to another artist doing his own redesign. All the sudden, everyone wanted to “Draw Batgirl.” It went sort of crazy, especially on LiveJournal (which was still a thing then). The site Project:Rooftop looks back on the phenomenon here. Jamie Dee Galey attempted to collect all the entries in a blog post. It goes on and on and on, though it doesn’t seem like many of the images are up anymore.

Which is all to say that Gordon has always been one of us. It makes sense that she’s our neighbor now.