A beautful piece by Phil Noto who shares his thoughts on Oracle:

Oracle 1989-2011 - My first job in comics was creating covers for DC’s Birds of Prey and and over the the course of 24 issues I drew this lovely lady a lot. And then I did some brief interior work on the Cassandra Cain Batgirl and finally did the first run of covers for the Stephanie Brown incarnation. They’ve all been great Batgirls much like Steed’s partners in the Avengers. I’ve done numerous pieces of Babs as Batgirl more so for the retro iconography and the aesthetic look of the black, yellow and red then her actual persona as Batgirl. Honestly in terms of fictional characters, I always just considered her to be Oracle. I, like many others, am very sad her to see her go, but if there’s anyone to keep her spirit alive as Batgirl once again, Gail Simone is the one to do it.

Like I’ve said, I was excited to see Barbara return to her role as Batgirl, until we learned relatively all of the males in the Bat-family were being untouched (and Cass and Steph are still MIA). I just assumed (wrongfully I might add) that since Barbara was Batgirl, we’d be going back to a time when Batman was younger and Robin was Dick. Atleast then there’d be the hope for stories that would re-introduce Jason, Tim, Steph, Cass, and Damian. However, it seems like now we’re in a weird continuity jig saw puzzle where apparently most Batman continuity is still in tact… except one big piece.