“She called herself Bat-Girl! Gosh, I wonder who she is?”

- Robin, Batman #139, April 1961

Swooshing through an open window, Bat-Girl crashed the DC Comics clique in 1961. Resembling 1930s Norwegian, Olympic ice-skater Sonia Henie, she was more Madame Alexander doll than superhero. The first Bat-Girl, a.k.a. Betty Kane, was little more than a pretty, teenage nuisance and, according to Robin, “an inexperienced girl bound to get hurt pursuing crooks”.

On her Fiftieth, Batgirl, and we, might reflect on her personal transformations. Along her journey, she has refashioned not only her hair colour, costumes and careers, but her secret identities. Batgirl's personalities number so many, a PhD candidate might deconstruct her mythology as a dissertation on “Dissociative Identity Disorder in Pop-Culture”. However deconstructed, Batgirl's only constant is her utility belt.

In the 237 summers which have come and gone since July 4th, 1776, the date has increasingly become a juncture for white sales and auto dealer blowouts. In fact, lost amidst the mall madness and car lot carnivals is a simultaneously fascinating and pedantic period of committee meetings, assignations, rewrites, copies, messengers, vote-taking and gallons of coffee, ale and wine. As I currently scribe the fourth novel in my six-part, historical-fiction series of books, Savannah of Williamsburg, Independence Day takes on a more front-and-center appearance than usual as research takes me through the 1750s, well into the meaty burgeoning of colonial revolution.