

The crutches her friend uses are made for permanent use. Most importantly though, Barbara feels like she is grounded in reality because her wheelchair is the type of chair you would live in.

Barbara’s emotions are expertly captured through her body language and facial expressions. The script’s heavy themes are beautifully coupled by Preitano’s illustrations.
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She isn’t flawless and she is learning every day about herself and how to adapt to her new normal. Nijkamp writes Barbara as compassionate, frustrated, determined, and stubborn. This choice helps create the eerie environment of the Arkham Center for Independence. Most of the frame is grey except for a few key pieces and the main characters shown on the page. So often in horror, disability is framed as evil or scary. The horror elements and spookier aspects of the comic are accentuated by Bellaire and Preitano’s coloring. It is also refreshing to see horror elements featured in a book about disability that is not based on harmful stereotypes. While not outright terrifying, the stories Jena tells Barbara are unnerving and a reminder of how people use horror as a way to process trauma. In addition to delving into Barbara’s complicated emotions, The Oracle Code also contains elements of horror. Luckily, The Oracle Code is a fantastic portrayal of Barbara Gordon and being disabled. Needless to say, my concern about this book was justified. However, there have been a lot of times where the way Oracle has been portrayed was harmful and even triggering for me. Seeing a powerful woman take her new reality as a disabled woman and become something even more powerful is refreshing and incredibly empowering. Barbara Gordon’s path to becoming Oracle is a journey many disabled people, including myself, find inspiring. Oracle means more to me than any other character in comics. When it was first announced DC Comics was publishing a YA graphic novel about Oracle I was both excited and incredibly skeptical. To say that Barbara Gordon is a character that means a lot to me would be an understatement. As Babs begins to investigate the strange happenings, she uncovers a dangerous mystery. At the same time, she begins to realize something isn’t quite right at the Arkham Center for Independence. Now using a wheelchair, Barbara must adapt to her new normal. From there, she enters the Arkham Center for Independence, in hopes of undergoing physical and mental rehabilitation.

The book follows Barbara Gordon on a journey of finding herself and becoming the powerful hacker Oracle.įollowing a gunshot injury, Barbara Gordon is left paralyzed.
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"I'm just trying to find the most conical parsnips".The Oracle Code is YA graphic novel published by DC Comics, written by Marieke Nijkamp, with illustrations by Manuel Preitano, colors by Jordie Bellaire with Preitano, and letters from Clayton Cowles. All very logical and reasonable, you might say however, that view didn't appear to be shared by the young woman in a Tesco uniform who noticed me perusing the parsnips. Parsnips are the most conical vegetable in my supermarket and are easily sliced and so I have been using them for several years to illustrate conic sections in my lectures. What are conic sections? Well, if you take a solid cone and slice it in four different ways the edges of the different cuts form a circle, an ellipse, a parabola and a hyperbola respectively and these curves are precisely the orbits of celestial bodies - planets, comets and others - as they move through the heavens. As the final topic on my lecture course, I talk about Newton's conic sections as these link the mundane with the cosmic and serve beautifully to illustrate the simplicity that often underpins the apparent complexity of the universe.

It all began in the fruit and vegetable section of the supermarket where I was closely examining the parsnips as I always do at this time of the year, just before my final lecture to first-year Physics undergraduates on classical mechanics. I decided to make a New Year's resolution this year: to stop being weird.
