Bluebird from DC Comics: Origin

Script written by Craig Butler

Superhero Origins: Bluebird

 
Not every bird in the Batman family is a robin. Welcome to WatchMojo.com and today we will explore the comic book origin of Bluebird.
 
Bluebird’s origin took place across several issues and wasn’t always told in a time-linear fashion. We have chosen primarily to follow the storyline which unfolded in 2012’s Batman #7 and 12, 2013’s Batman #18, 2014’s Batman #28
 and 2015’s Batman Eternal #41-42.
 
Like Batman’s other sidekicks, Bluebird doesn’t possess any superpowers. However, she is enormously skilled in knowledge concerning electricity and electronics and makes use of that knowledge in her work. Unlike most Robin’s however, Bluebird carries a gun.
 
In her everyday identity, Bluebird was a teen-ager with a nack for electronics named Harper Row who lived with her brother, Cullen in the Gotham slum known as the Narrows.  Her story began when, in exchange for an electrical problem she fixed, she was given a ticket to a party given by the Wayne Foundation.  She was reluctant to go and leave Cullen, who was frequently bullied for being gay by neighborhood toughs.
 
While Harper was at the Gala, Cullen was attacked and a homophobic slur was cut into his hair. Harper showed her solidarity by cutting her hair in the same way – and in using a homemade taser on the punks that beat Cullen up.  Unfortunately, they outnumbered her and things looked grim – until Batman intervened.
 
Obsessed now with Batman, Harper figured out that he had a special private electrical grid that bypassed the official Gotham City one. She also saw that one of his electrical hubs had just gone offline, which she took as a bad sign. Racing into the sewer where the hub was located, she found Batman fighting the villain Tiger Shark on a boat. She fixed the electric hub then diverted water away to help Batman. Later, though, she learned that fixing the hub had spoiled part of Batman’s plan and he warned her to stop interfering.
 
Harper couldn’t do that. She kept following Batman’s whereabouts, popping up to shock him back to life after he had been killed, for example. Later, she could tell that Batman was behaving erratically and dangerously. Unknown to her, this was because of the death of his son, Damian. He was pushing himself too hard and running the risk of getting himself killed. She confronted him about this, but he didn’t listen.
 
Harper then went to Bruce Wayne, to convince him to help. Touched by her persistence, Batman came around to seeing that he did have to take care of himself or else Gotham would lose his protection.

Sometime later, after meeting Batman’s sidekick Red Robin, Harper accompanied him, Batgirl and Red Hood on a dangerous mission to stop the Mad Hatter. The Hatter was taking over the minds of all the children and teen-agers in Gotham via nanotechnology. Donning her Bluebird costume for the first time and protected by a special anti-nano shield she had developed, she succeeded in stopping the Mad Hatter.
 
Having proven herself, Bluebird eventually became an official partner of Batman. On her first mission, she helped infiltrate Catwoman’s lair then assisted Batman in breaking through Catwoman’s goons to find the villainess herself.
 
Bluebird holds the distinction of being the first new addition to the Batman family of crime fighters since DC relaunched its entire universe in 2011’s New 52. As such, there’s a lot that we don’t know about Bluebird. But Harper row has demonstrated that she has more than enough of what it takes to be a fascinating super-hero.
 
Are you a fan of the seriously self-confident Bluebird? For more comic book origins, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.