I am reading through "The Return of Bruce Wayne: Oracle" and in there ***SPOILERS*** Oracle comments how Bruce Wayne is dead and cannot come back, yet Superman, Flash and Green Arrow have all come back from the dead. In the same issue there is a flashback as to when Barbara got shot by the Joker and Bruce arrives to comfort her. So in context, entire people can rise up from the dead and/or get reincarnated/reborn/whatever, but in the same DC Universe they don't have tech to give Barbara her legs back?? I mean one of her closest friends, Zatana, can literally reconstitute matter through her backwards-talking-spells but she cannot fix Barbara's spine? Or Superman cannot come up with some advanced Kryptonian cure? Or Batman/Bruce Wayne with all his money cannot entice Cadmus Labs to do something about it? I don't get that.
They could hand-wave it away in a panel but the reason they don't is that the current version is more interesting than the original - we have plenty of people running around in gimpsuits, one more makes no difference.
It's the same reason nobody in the Marvel Universe could cure Aunt May of a simple gunshot wound despite having cosmic power or superscience at their disposal. It's because the story says so. Really, though, if Babs did walk again, does it necessarily mean she's go back to being Batgirl? I mean, being Oracle puts her in a position to do far more good on a global scale than she ever could just patrolling the streets in spandex. She's accumulated a wealth of technology and resources and skills and allies as Oracle -- it makes no sense to suggest that the only reason she'd keep all that is because she can't walk. She could regain the use of her legs and decide it didn't change anything as far as her role in the hero community was concerned. (Heck, in Smallville for the past couple of seasons, Chloe Sullivan was Oracle in all but name, and she didn't need to be in a wheelchair to do it.)
They had to address this issue in John Ostrander's Suicide Squad, where Oracle was introduced. Another character, Ravan, suffered a broken back and was later able to walk again through technological means. It was explained that part of Babs' spine is missing and that the doctors had to build a bridge between two sections of her spine just to let her sit upright. That, plus extensive neurological damage, kept the Ravan technology from working with her. It doesn't explain away everything else, including the fact that Bruce was crippled at least twice since then and recovered. But at least someone thought to address it. I'd like to see what Babs thinks of Bruce, Ravan, and all the other crippled folks getting up and walking while she's stuck there. Even Ostrander didn't do that.
Barbara will never walk again because The Holy Alan Moore wrote the story that crippled her and fanboys would lose their shit if DC dared undo His Works. Even though Moore never really thought she would stay crippled forever.
The DC and Marvel Universes will never extrapolate all their discoveries and inventions in a Science Fiction-like way. Their premise is for the setting to remain as close to the real world as possible, with the fantastic elements super-imposed. In fact, if only a small fraction of what has been written about existed, the world would be changed beyond belief.
Well, I dunno. If you pretend, you can imagine that Reed Richards or Lex Luthor (select as appropriate to your universe) invented some kind of youth serum that no one ever bothers to mention. Richards tested it, of course, on Franklin.
i think Babs will walk again and that Bruce has a different role intended for her in the upcoming "Death of Oracle" storyline. For some reason got that impression after reading the Road Home one shot.
Well, Marvel doesn't really cure extreme body injuries like that all that much. It's a LITTLE better than DC. Xavier only got cured once really (with alien cloning tech). Bruce was going to use the cure for his back on Barbara, but the metahuman doctor lost her mind after she cured him.
I think the point is, we have been shown so much magic and magic like technology that there should be no problem curing Xavier (except I thought it was physiological at one time?)
What if it has been Bab's own choice to not have her legs repaired? It's clear that she could if she wanted to and has the means and resources available to her, I think it's a matter of desire and maybe protecting their identities? How many people in Gotham are aware of Barbara Gordon's friendship with Bruce Wayne?
^Well, Wayne is noted for his philanthropic activities, so if he had access to a cure for paraplegia and offered it to the daughter of Gotham's police commissioner, it wouldn't necessarily be seen as evidence of a personal connection between them. Indeed, it could easily be spun as an attempt on Bruce's part to garner publicity by sharing the cure with a prominent figure, or maybe to ingratiate himself with the police in hopes that they'd be kinder to him the next time he throws a wild party that disrupts an entire city block. And heck, since this is Bruce Wayne we're talking about, if anyone did speculate about a connection between him and Barbara Gordon, the type of shared nocturnal activities they'd be imagining wouldn't involve fighting crime.
Marvel did do a series based around this idea, it was called Fantastic Four: Big Town and was written by Steve Englehart. I believe it was meant to be six issues but was cut down to four issue mini. http://www.mania.com/fantastic-four-big-town_article_25689.html
Also Roy comes to mind recently concerning the restoration of limbs. Also I was thinking along the lines of maybe Babs herself hadn't sought out that road because she herself was concerned about protecting their secrets and considering the recent problem with Vicky Vale it wouldn't be too far fetched that she is that dedicated. Also there is no reason that Babs couldn't privately seek out help. No I'm guessing that this has been for story reasons that they've kept her paralyzed for so long. It is interesting that since DiDio and DC have been attempting to restore the Silver Age that Babs hasn't been addressed yet, this is another reason why I think she won't be dying physically. Babs is too popular a character and important resource for the DCU at large for them to kill just for shock value or sell some books.
His injuries right now are semi-psychological. The second time he lost the ability to walk it was because he fought the Shadow King on the Astral Plane and his legs there were broken to the point they'd never heal properly. His psychic injuries meant that as long as he had his mental powers his body would believe that his legs have been broken irreparably. So it's not that his spine is damaged it's just that his legs were broken and won't heal right (although physically they're still fine).
So Professor X is such a powerful telepath that he's actually psychically convinced his own body that it's incurably crippled? That's kind of awesome, in a weird way.
Oh, I just remembered that this is the principal plot-thread in Planetary too--Warren Ellis pretty brilliantly assumed that any world left unchanged by science of Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four would necessarily require for Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four to be evil.